Confidential to the Reverend Huckabee: Aren't you beginning to get the message that you should have quit while you were only a little bit behind?

We made a big deal Wednesday of Murray Waas's thorough, exhaustively documented Tuesday HuffPost flaying of the Rev. Mike Huckabee's involvement, as governor of Arkansas, in the freeing of convicted rapist and future murderer Wayne Dumond (right) and the years of lies the governor and his people invested, first, in that original involvement and, then, in the furious cover-up that persists to this day.

Naturally the Huckster (come on, how can we not?) responded to the original HuffPost piece the way he does best: with more lies. In response, Murray Waas provided a HuffPost follow-up presenting substantive corroboration from former top Huckabee aide Butch Reeves.

And naturally the Huckster escalated the lies and threw around some wild accusations, which brought forth a HuffPost reply from Arianna Huffington herself, "Huckabee Tries to Shoot the Messenger, but Winds Up Wounding His Campaign Instead."

Arianna comes out with guns blazing:

The way that Mike Huckabee has handled the furor caused by the Huffington Post's coverage of his role in the release of Wayne Dumond, a serial rapist who went on to rape and kill at least one other woman, has been very revealing. And troubling.

It has exposed the dissembling reality behind the charming, articulate, more-preacher-than-politician facade - and has called into question both his judgment and his integrity.

Huckabee's response has been to fudge the truth, point the finger at everyone in sight, and -- that old standby -- blame the messenger.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning, Huckabee said of our story: "there are factual errors in what they have printed, some of it is outrageously incorrect." As an example of our factual errors, he cited... well, nothing. Not one.

He also claimed "the Huffington Post just doesn't want to give the whole story of what was going on." Really? Our original story on the Dumond case was over 4,000 words long and offered what even the American Spectator deemed a "detailed, convincingly irrefutable" presentation of the evidence in which HuffPost "backs up every single word." What's more, we included links to a number of never before published documents from the governor's own files.

Huckabee also claimed that in a follow up story "the Huffington Post totally misrepresented and just utterly distorted" the statements of Butch Reeves, his former top aide, who told us that, contrary to his former boss's claims, Huckabee had indeed influenced the parole board to reverse its previous rejection of Dumond's release. Huckabee described Reeves as "outraged," and promised that a statement from Reeves to that effect would be posted on mikehuckabee.com today. It just went up, ten hours later.

In the statement, Huckabee's campaign acknowledges the accuracy of the quotes attributed to Reeves in our story, but splits hairs over whether Huckabee's claims that Dumond's conviction was "outlandish" and "way out of bounds for his crime" (brutally raping a 17 year old cheerleader) were in the context of a discussion about "paroling" the rapist or in the context of a discussion about granting him "clemency" or "a pardon."

She goes on to note the apparently careful selectivity of the Huckster's mudslinging:

Tellingly, the Huckabee campaign chose to attack only the Huffington Post for our interpretation of Reeves' comments, even though our reporter was joined on the phone call with Reeves by Brian Ross [right], ABC News' Chief Investigative Correspondent, who filed a report offering the same interpretation. Yet there is no mention of ABC or Ross in the Huckabee campaign's press release. Why? Is it harder to dismiss ABC as "left-wing," and the charges as part of a partisan agenda?

But none of Huckabee's finger pointing (he mentioned Bill Clinton 12 times while discussing the Dumond case in his press conference on Tuesday) addresses the key questions raised by this tragic story: why Huckabee continued to favor the rapist's release, even after being sent police reports and wrenching letters from several of his victims detailing his horrific crimes (which included raping a woman while her 3 year old daughter lay beside her in bed); and why Huckabee, to this day, continues to insist "No one could have predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out" when we can read for ourselves the words of his victims predicting that the man would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

"Dear Wayne," Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond, after having read the victims' letters. "My desire is that you be released from prison." And no amount of spinning can change that, or the conclusion that Huckabee allowed his judgment to be swayed by the bleating of a collection of right-wing zealots who put their hatred of Bill Clinton over the well being of the public (Dumond's victim was a distant relative of Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton donor).

In interviews, Huckabee claims that his stand on Dumond was clouded by a surfeit of compassion. In reality, it was clouded by a surfeit of cynical pandering to a group whose support he felt he needed.

And no amount of denials and mudslinging by Huckabee can make the devastating evidence -- and what that evidence reveals about him -- go away.

Um, er, Mikey, we might point out, in your own best interests, that you're not in Arkansas anymore.

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Oh sure, there are lots and lots of reasons why Mike Huckabee should never be president. But this one by itself is quite good enough for me

"The files had to be disappeared because there just wasn't a plausible explanation for the governor's stance," the former [Huckabee] staffer said. "I mean, what could the governor say? That he believes these women made up their stories? That women lie when they say they are raped?"
--from Murray Waas's "Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release" on HuffPost

Not that anybody you or I know is likely to be considering supporting Mike Huckabee for president, but in case you should encounter someone who might be contemplating doing so, make sure they read this HuffPost piece of Murray Waas's, a grimly thorough documentation of the preacherly scumbag's sordid involvement in the 1999 freeing of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, who proceeded to rape and murder two women.

Since the New Right apparently lives on an unvarying diet of all lies all the time, it's not surprising that the story consists of a more or less unbroken chain of lies spewed by the Right-Wing Filth Machine, with then-Gov. Mike Huckabee at the center.

First there was the batch of lies spread like a nasty virus by a bunch of the usual suspects (including the New York Post's Steve Dunleavy, who may never in his life have knowingly written a word of truth), indulging in one of their ritual orgies of Clinton-hating. The thugs claimed that there was no rape, that it was all a put-up job because the victim had ties to the Clintons. (And no, we don't have to refer to her as the "alleged" victim. Her rapist was, after all, tried and convicted.)

Later, after the released Dumond moved to Missouri and was arrested for rape and murder (he died in 2005 while serving a life sentence in prison, as Missouri authorities were preparing a capital case against him for the murder of another woman, this one pregnant, the day before his arrest for the murder for which he was convicted), there was the batch of cover-up lies spewed by Governor Huckabee and his people, working frantically to conceal the extent of the governor's involvement in the case.

At the time that Huckabee interceded on Dumond's behalf--which he now pretends he never did, though the record makes clear that he did quite a lot--there was abundant evidence that the convict had already committed not one but a series of rapes. Among the documents were letters from several of his victims, which Waas (with their consent) has now released publicly for the first time. There was every reason to believe that Dumond, if released from prison, would go right on raping--and possibly worse.

In one of the letters, which Waas establishes conclusively Governor Huckabee's office had received at the time (naturally they lied about this as long as they could get away with it) they were busy freeing a rapist, the victim wrote, "I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to testify against him the next time."

Inevitably mention of the Wayne Dumond matter calls to mind the Massachusetts case of Willie Horton. In 1988 the late Lee Atwater, mentor to Karl Rove, used Willie Horton to make sure that Gov. Michael Dukakis would never become president. But the cases really aren't similar. The Horton case was tragic, of course; the Dumond case is inexcusable.

Even now former Governor Huckabee, who I'm sure would have been the first in line to advocate lynching Mike Dukakis for allowing the parole of Willie Horton, makes believe that the post-release history of Wayne Dumond was, gosh, just one of those horrible cases of bad luck you just have to live with--horrible, of course, but there's nothing to be done.

More lies, of course. It's only in the demented minds of delusional right-wingers that there was ever the slightest question about who and what Wayne Dumond was. Governor Huckabee had all the information and evidence at his disposal. Instead he cast his lot with the mob of Clinton-hating psychos. And he's spent a portion of every day since then lying about the whole thing.

At the very least, Waas's exhaustive HuffPost piece should protect Americans from ever having to extend the respect of an elective office to the Rev. Mike Huckabee.

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