Tom’s Big Picture

Mike Huckabee is a particular interest of mine.  He’s a man who encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with contemporary churches, politicians and the voters who elect them that it defies the imagination.  He’s a guy who’s just smart enough to be literate, but blessed with a charisma that makes him think he’s special and knows better than smarter people with their boring statistics, facts and logical arguments.  He goes with his heart, his gut, on everything (and thinks himself superior to others for doing so!) and his watered-down evangelical religion tells him his every first impression and instinct is actually one of the persons of God, the Holy Spirit.  It’s a black hole of pure unreflective ego.

One of Huckabee’s manifestations of this egoism was his massive pardoning of criminals in Arkansas whenever one of his Southern Baptist minister buddies told him that someone convicted of a crime deserved a second chance.  The thug who just killed four police officers in Seattle was one of them.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/20 … newsletter

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state’s draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. “I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” he explained in his clemency application in 2000. “I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”

You have to hand it to George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas.  When Pat Robertson was begging him to pardon a photogenic, born-again female murderer on death row, he resisted and allowed justice to run its course.  He understood, perhaps because he was a less emotionally-driven Methodist, that God’s forgiveness must be independent of man’s justice (or maybe he just wanted to have a political future, which itself is more rational than Huckabee’s actions).  Otherwise you create feedback loops (like in the Arkansas prison system) where people start faking religious conversions to get out of jail.  You want honest, no-strings-attached conversions in prisons, not those linked to hopes of release.  Given the depravity of the human soul, you are more likely to send people to hell by pardoning them, because they may believe they have a genuine conversion when it’s really just motivated to save their skin.

Huckabee is basically self-righteous white trash.  This little anecdote conveys the essence of the man:

Saline County Circuit Judge Robert Herzfeld, who as a prosecutor successfully sued Huckabee over clemency practices, said Huckabee’s decision to give Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards a pardon for a 1975 traffic offense after meeting him at a concert showed how lightly the ex-governor approached the practice.

“That just said volumes about how he considered this serious ultimate power over freedom as a joke,” Herzfeld said.

Click here to see my full past coverage of Huckabee.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:42 am and is filed under Christianity & the Church, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.