Miscellaneous Columns

The Washington state murder case wherein four cops were killed marked the end of Mike Huckabee's future political aspirations, just as the Willie Horton case torpedoed Mike Dukakis's presidential run.

Another week, another grotesque mass shooting, in Washington state this time, leaving four police officers dead, four families destroyed and nine children’s lives shattered.

As it’s politically unfashionable to wonder if Americans shouldn’t do more to keep semi-automatic handguns away from crazy people, attention soon focused on why mass murderer Maurice Clemmons wasn’t locked away, where he belonged.

Once again, Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, struggled to explain his catastrophically poor judgment. Once again, a violent felon turned loose on his say-so had run amok. Once again, according to Huckabee, currently a FOX News channel talk show host, the disaster was everybody’s fault but his own. He issued a buck-passing statement blaming “a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington.”

Assisted by an absurdly deferential Bill O’Reilly on FOX, Huckabee attempted to shift blame to Washington judges who’d freed Clemmons on $150,000 bail pending trial on a charge of child rape. Why, had he known that Clemmons would go berserk, he claimed, he’d never have commuted the man’s sentence in 2000.

The Washington tragedy almost surely marks the end of Huckabee’s political career. Ironically, for once his alibi is more right than wrong. For his own protection and everybody else’s, Clemmons ought to have been inside a locked-down psychiatric unit. The system failed from top to bottom.