The Huck and clemency

This anti-Huck YouTube video is one I'm posting here (below the fold) even though there is a part of it I really don't like. It comes from a conservative blog, ArkJournal.com in a post of 01/12/08, Clemency. And it engages in the kind of criminals-are-coming-to-get-you fear-mongering that has become a standard part of Republican campaigns for the last four decades. There's even a line that seems to encourage vigilantism, though by today's degraded standards it's pretty mild.

But it also does something that Democrats need to learn how to do, which is to strip the Huck's kind of Christian dominionism of its sentimental public face. The makers of this video may be dominionists who think Huck isn't severe enough a Christianist for all I know. They apparently support Fred Thompson, if you can imagine that. But the Huck's genuinely poor judgment in his clemency programs was part of his theocratic bent, basing many of his clemency decisions on the recommendations of a good-ole-boy network of Baptist preachers.

And the most notorious case, that of Wayne Dumond (who was paroled under pressure from the Huck), also occurred because the nutso anti-Clinton rightwingers in Arkansas was convinced Dumond was the victim of some dark Clinton plot. The Christian Right isn't just a bunch of fuddie-duddies who disapprove of sex, though that's clearly part of their schtick. As the late Steve Gilliard often reminded us, they are best understood as a bunch of neosegregationists, today's version of what Strom Thurmond and his Dixiecrats were in 1948.




Tags: authoritarianism, christian dominionism, christian right, christianism, mike huckabee, neosegregation

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