Mike Huckabee's 'Willie Horton problem'

"If [Mike] Huckabee were a liberal and a Democrat, he would be a punching bag for right wing blowhards an example of clueless, soft-on-crime politicians at their worst. Fox News would be stalking him, as they have others responsible for letting criminals out early." -New York Times blogger Timothy Egan
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What's that flushing sound?

That's the sound of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's chances of being elected president in 2012 going down the toilet.

We're learning today that Huckabee, while governor of Arkansas in 2000, commuted the 95-year sentence of Maurice Clemmons, the man suspected of shooting and killing four police officers near Seattle on Sunday.

But in typical Republican fashion, Huckabee is blaming everyone but himself.

In a statement posted on his website, he says that "Should [Clemmons] be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State."

Huckabee never mentions that is he who helped Clemmons go free.

And while governor of Arkansas, Huckabee sprang more than one violent felon from jail.

Here he is in 2007 trying to obfuscate the issue regarding his involvement in the release from prison in 1999 of a rapist.

So I'm guessing right now Huckabee might be starting to get a sense of how Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis felt in 1988 when the Republicans smeared Dukakis after they dug up info on the weekend furlough of a Massachusetts felon named Willie Horton.

The Republican attack on Dukakis was engineered in part by a media consultant named Roger Ailes who now runs the Fox News Channel, and where - irony of all ironies - Huckabee now has a weekend program!