Clemmons And "The Clinton Regime"

Joe Carter, who worked on Huckabee's campaign as Director of Rapid Response, weighs in on Huckabee's latest clemency scandal:

After reviewing hundreds of cases and interviewing numerous people involved in the process, I concluded to my own satisfaction that the governor’s actions and judgment were generally defensible. Yet there remained about a half-dozen situations in which even after reviewing all of the information I was unpersuaded that justice had been served. Although I was sympathetic with some of the justifications offered for making the decisions, I found them inadequate for a number of reasons.

For example, in a number of the casesand almost always in the most controversial requests for commutationthere was sense that the petitioners were attempting to redress injustices committed by the “Clinton machine.”The disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates that peaked among conservatives in the early 1990s remains palpable among Republicans in Arkansas. Many of the petitioners and supporters of the commutations and pardons were truly convinced that they were simply rectifying injustices committed by the former Democratic governor and his cronies. (This was especially true in the infamous Wayne DuMond case where the victim was a second cousin of Bill Clinton.)