Bloom Comes Off the Huckabee Rose

For a conservative, he seemed like a nice guy. A conservative without horns, they used to call him.

But that was before Mike Huckabee became the front-runner in Iowa. Now that he stands a better chance of becoming the Republican nominee, we’ve learned a lot more about Huckabee — and his horns are becoming all too apparent.

First, there’s that messy matter of an Arkansas state pardon for a rapist — who went on to rape and murder another woman, maybe two. Everybody makes mistakes, but Huckabee still can’t explain why he became such a public advocate for the convicted rapist — going so far as to write him a personal letter and lobbying the state parole board to release him. Clearly, in that case, Huckabee showed bad judgment.

He also showed appalling ignorance in 1992 when he suggested quarantining all HIV-positive persons, cutting off funding for AIDS research, and declaring that homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.” This a dozen years after the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.

And now we hear Gov. Huckabee, as recently as 1998, saying that we couldn’t count on government to solve our problems because “the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

Forget what public policies Huckabee might try to force down our throats as an ordained Southern Baptist minister. He’s already proven that he’s scary enough, just based on the things he’s done and said as an elected public official.

Visit Mr. Press’s website at billpressshow.com.