I don’t care for unctuous preacher men. Never have. Sad thing is, they all come across that way to me. Like used care salesmen trying to smile and insinuate their way into your confidence so you’ll buy what they’re selling.
Mike Huckabee is one of these types. At least, that’s how he’s come across since I first heard of him during last year’s presidential campaign. And I found it unnerving that someone like that was dancing so close to the leadership of the entire country.
Huckabee’s past as Arkansas governor has come back to haunt him and terrorize the residents of Tacoma, Washington. Nine years ago he commuted the 100-year sentence of an Arkansas convict and that man, Maurice Clemmons, is suspected of having murdered four Tacoma police officers yesterday as they sat in a coffee shop writing reports.
Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist preacher with a strong belief in forgiveness and redemption, bought this story from Clemmons: “I succumbed to the peer pressure and the need I had to be accepted by other youth in my new environment and fell in with the wrong crowd and thus began a seven month crime spree which led me to prison.” He wrote he came from “a very good Christian family” and “was raised much better than my actions speak … .”
It was the perfect pitch to a governor known to have been a preacher man and Clemmons didn’t miss a beat. He even worked in his dead mother, who had died without seeing him turn his life around.
Huckabee fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Any man that gullible, that willing to put his own personal religious beliefs above our entire legal system — more than 1,000 times — should not be entrusted with upholding and defending the law of the land as an elected official. I’m kinda funny about things like that; I like my church and state kept separate.
Huckabee has issued a statement about the murders, but at no point did he apologize or say he was in any way personally responsible for Clemmons being on the streets. Preacher men, you see, aren’t responsible to anyone but God.
Oh, yeah. Huckabee is a right-wing nut. And I can say with quite a bit of anecdotal evidence and a whole lot of eye-rolling that they ALL “find God” behind bars.
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Yep, they’re all innocent, they all just fell in with the wrong crowd, and they all find God — especially when the governor who can commute their sentences is a former preacher. Why, it’s practically his duty to forgive them and let them out!
Huckabee is one in a long line of right-wing nuts IMHO. He’s apparently been or going to be on an episode of “Shatner’s Raw Nerve,” a 30-minute talk show, and one of the things Shatner asks is, in effect, what makes you so sure you’re right? Good point. Sorry, but pushing the God and Bible angles just doesn’t do it for anyone who cares to think about it. I’m really rather tired of religion and politics mixed together – it’s giving religions a bad name (or worse name, depending on your point of view). I’m to the point where I, baptized Catholic, received into the Episcopal Church (which still has some sense), and now somewhere in between the Episcopals, Unitarians, and Buddhists, no longer wish to be buried in a so-called Christian cemetery when I die because I don’t wish to be associated, even in death, with a bunch of nutters!
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I would love to hear Huckabee answer Shatner’s question; I hope Shatner nails him to the wall. I have had it up to HERE with religious people inflicting, or trying to inflict, their religious certitude on the entire population at large. Their religious rights end where my civil rights begin — period.