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I posted my entry before seeing Jennifer's. Jennifer, you make a good point in that Huckabee is very convincing at expressing regret. That's why he is doing so well in the polls: Because he is so good at sounding good, no matter whether what he says holds water or not. You miss the most relevant point, though, Jennifer: What he says is an outright lie. Here is the big whopper in what you quote from him: "Nobody, not me, not Jim Guy Tucker, not Bill Clinton, not that parole board, could ever imagine what might have transpired.. " This is, to put it kindly, a crock of manure. The whole point of the Murray Waas story out today is that Huckabee was warned repeatedly and convincingly EXACTLY what was likely to transpire if DuMond were to be released, and he ignored all those warnings. Meanwhile, the evidence presented is absolutely overwhelming that he strongly intervened with the parole board to secure DuMond's release -- and he seems to have lied about that too. Just like he lied about whether or not he was "ordered" by his state's courts to impose a particular tax hike, and just like several other now-documented misrepresentations he has made about the circumstances of his tax hikes. (To be fair, I think that at the state and local level there can indeed be reasonable times, although not many of them, to raise certain taxes for particular purposes. That said, Huck's record is in every way that of a fairly profligate taxer and spender.)

But back to DuMond: We can believe Huckabee's denials, or we can believe the overwhelmingly documented evidence. There was a time when Republicans were empiricists, meaning that we actually pay attention to evidence, to facts. The evidence here is clear. Huckabee has no good answer for it, no matter how sincerely he regrets the ultimate, deadly result of his horrendous decision -- a decision whose horrendous results were eminently predictable.

topics:
Taxes, Bill Clinton