Huck

Pay attention. I'm about to do something I rarely do. I'm going to defend a Republican.
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Poor Mike Huckabee is taking it on the chin for his grant of clemency, while governor of Arkansas, to Maurice Clemmons, who killed four police officers in Washington state. Don't get me wrong, if this sends Huck's political career to the elephant's graveyard, I'll be quite happy. But, it is my opinion that we send too many people to prison; we send them to prison at too young an age; we keep them behind bars far too long. Huck was right to try and give offenders a second chance.
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While it appears that Huckabee was making clemency decisions based more on references to Jesus, than appeals to reason, it should be noted that the impulse to not throw people away, like so much garbage, is a right one. I just went out to the desert for a few days of hiking and while headed home, I made a couple of stops at convenience stores and fast food joints. I saw so many young people, some working the counters, and some customers, and I noticed how ill educated they seemed. As I noted in my last post, we once had one of the finest education systems in the world, but, then we made the decision to cut taxes and defund education, destroying the foundation of our society.
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It's been so many years since Ronald Reagan chose tax cuts over everything else, that these poor kids don't even realize that tax cuts for the wealthy few, has taken any future that they might have had, from them. We've now gone through several generations of young people that are fit for little more than menial jobs, drug abuse, and crime.
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Huckabee's mistake was not an impulse to grant clemency, but rather membership in a political party that has created the under lying problem. In supporting conservative economic policies that have wiped out several generations of the young, he and his Repug cohorts, have guaranteed that crime will rise, and that granting clemency will be an issue.