Update: It’s been pointed out that it wasn’t exactly a pardon. Fair enough. He just arranged to have someone let go, despite the fact that the victim of the prior rape begged him not to, and that man killed and raped another woman. The specific legal method he used is minor, in my opinion.
Okay, I’ve been eagerly waiting days to write about this atrocity, because I can link it to my column up today at RH Reality Check. The story is that Gail Collins wrote up a profile of Mike Huckabee where she gave a complete whitewash to his tenth level wingnuttery and irrational hatred towards Bill Clinton. She writes:
Lately, anti-Huckabee conservatives have been suggesting he’s soft on crime. The story involves an Arkansas man, Wayne DuMond, who was accused of kidnapping and raping a high school cheerleader in 1985. While he was free awaiting trial, masked men broke into his home, beat and castrated him. His testicles wound up in a jar of formaldehyde, on display on the desk of the local sheriff. At the trial, he was sentenced to life plus 20 years. When Huckabee became governor, DuMond was still in an apparently hopeless situation, though theoretically eligible for parole. Huckabee championed his cause, and wrote him a congratulatory letter when he was finally released in 1999. Then in 2000 DuMond moved to Kansas City, where he sexually assaulted and murdered a woman who lived near his home.
“There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens,” the clearly tortured Huckabee recently told The National Review. “And it did.” If by some miracle he became the presidential nominee, there would obviously be many opportunities to point out that Michael Dukakis never sent a letter to Willie Horton celebrating his furlough.
Why do the leaders of the religious right keep sidling away from a Baptist minister whose greatest political sin seems to have been showing compassion to a prisoner who appeared to deserve it?
And she fails to note what actually happened. Huckabee didn’t set this guy loose because he had some deep compassion for a brutal rapist,* but because the victim of the rape and kidnapping was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton’s. I shit you not. Right wing conspiracy theorists were eager to hold up this vile racist as a victim of the supposed web of evil the Clintons weave, and so crazy right wing conspiracy nut Huckabee let him go. He has blood on his hands, all over his paranoid fantasies about the Clintons.
When I first read the sad story of how the vast right wing conspiracy managed to get a woman raped and killed with the insanity, I was a little confused as to why they found a story about the Clintons framing some innocent man for rape (and having him castrated**) so damn compelling. Now that I’ve been deep into feminist blogging for a few years, it makes much more sense to me—the anxious masculinity that feeds the right wing would naturally be drawn to an opportunity to imply that feminist-minded people like the Clintons are not only part of the notorious (and imaginary) conspiracy to use rape charges to get men, but also that the Clintons (and probably Hillary especially) love any opportunity to bust out the castrating knife.
What’s interesting to me about this is the whole story hints at the popularity of rape denialism on the right, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories about how feminists made rape up to wield our enormous power over men. And why I’m linking that to my column today is this: Huckabee was engaging in a subtle form of rape denial when he pardoned this guy, and in a similar sense, he’s not above engaging in a subtle form of Holocaust denial.
“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
In the column, I talk about the work done by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in linking the non-stop comparisons of abortion to the Holocaust with a larger attraction to Holocaust denialism. Rape denialism and Holocaust denialism have a lot in common, if you really look at it. In both cases, the overwhelming evidence in favor of reality has led the denialists to retreat a bit and admit that something happened/happens, but that it’s been blown way out of proportion. In both cases, the denialists view the mantle of victimhood as a power they feel those who hold it shouldn’t have. And in both cases, they’re trying to defend an unjust world order (Christian or Muslim supremacy/male dominance) by denying outright the atrocities caused by these power imbalances, hatred, and oppression.
So, Collins’ column disturbs me on a number of levels. We have here a man that has a long history of flirting with or directly engaging right wing conspiracy theories and some of the ugliest kinds of denialism out there. Journalists’ job should be exposing these assholes, not kissing their asses. White-washing Huckabee’s history as a favor to him because he’s a big, important man is a blatant betrayal of the people and a violation of basic journalistic ethics.
*Well, we hope not.
**The commenters at LGM suggest that DuMond castrated himself. It’s not completely unknown for rapists to try to evade taking moral responsibility for themselves by blaming their testicles and trying to pluck off the offending organs—the entire movement to use castration against rapists seems to have started when some jailed rapists asked for this. Auguste linked to a recent example. Castrating rapists is another form of rape denial, in that it reinforces the idea that rape is a product of male biology, and not a product of male dominance.
38 Responses to “Reality frays the edges of paranoid fantasies”
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I used to so look forward to reading Collins’ Column in the NYT. I was saddened by her promotion to editor because she wouldn’t be writing anymore. I’m shocked by this article. Maybe the editorship has changed her.
“Holocaust” until the aftermath of WW II meant a relgious sacrifice by fire. “The Holocaust,” meaning the Shoah, has come over the last 60 or so years to be a proper noun raather than merely a metaphor. That history does not lead me to conclude that the word “holocaust” is off limits in any context other than “The Holocaust”: “The Carthaginians offered a holocaust up to Baal” is not a sentence revealing latent antisemtism.
What’s wrong with Huckleberry Hound speaking of the “the holocaust of liberal abortion” is not Holocaust denial–what’s wrong is that abortion is not murder.
It would be perfectly appropriate to speak of a holocaust of victims among women if abortion is made illegal . . .
A somewhat different story occurred in Wisconsin within the past couple years that made me nervous. A man named Steve Avery was in prison for rape, and the Innocence Project was able to prove him innocent of the crime. He was released, but ended up convicted for murder later (this time, there was little, if any doubt that Avery did commit the crime). Now, some of the local right-wingers had a fit and were convinced that the Innocence Project was to blame (why they didn’t shift the blame towards the actual killer speaks volumes about them). I say that’s wrong; if we know that a person is imprisoned for crime they are not responsible for, they must be freed even if they are shady.
This of course is different in that the politics seem to be switched around, and also in that there’s more indication that Dumond did do the first crime(there is a book titled Unequal Justice that claims that Dumond was railroaded, although even it has factual errors with regard to DNA testing… but the only one claiming those errors is an anonymous poster on Amazon.com… basically, this whole case makes me uneasy.)
The one thing I am certain of, though, is that Huckabee is a coward. He first wanted Dumond freed in the mid 90s, then backed down due to public pressure, then advocated his parole, and then, after Dumond was convicted of murder, Huckabee tried to wash his hands of the leniency (if he was that convinced that Dumond wasn’t guilty, he should stand by that opinion).
And of course, the fact that Huckabee would like to see abortion banned would make him that much more of a worse President as well.
Oh now wait a minute. Huckabee let a rapist out of jail because his 16-year-old victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton?
I just want SO BAD not to believe that. This is America. Arkansas is part of America, right?
Tristero has more. Believe it, Bitter. Huckabee is full-blown wingnut.
Bitter Scribe, I know. My head exploded too when I heard about this.
“I just want SO BAD not to believe that. This is America. Arkansas is part of America, right?”
It’s not whether Arkansas is part of America or not - the question is what happened to America?
When the nominee for head of the Justice Department can’t definitively say that water-boarding is torture (when we prosecuted people in WWII for doing it), when the administration orders phone companies to break the law and then
456-years later demands that Congress to retroactively grant them immunity (which would also cover up the administration’s crimes in this episode), when the CIA agent of a man who said something the administration didn’t like is exposed, along with all the agents and the work they did for decades - what do you expect?Politics has become a no-holds-barred sport. There is no line that can’t be crossed. There is no behavior toward a figure that crosses your political desires that cannot be condoned. Everything is fair game.
House arrest, public execution for “crimes against the state”, and martial law can’t be too far off…
We citizens are merely the passive audience for these outrages…
Huckabee, Frist, Santorum and to a lesser extent Delay.
All ‘good christians’ and total bottom of the septic tank sucking losers and frauds. It’s an illness…
On a lefty blog that I frequented there was a question: Is religion a sign of mental illness. I kept wondering if mental illness was a sign of religion.
With such stellar examples of the ‘good christian’ in those men I have but to say ‘yes’.
“…when the CIA agent WIFE of a man…”
Blog commenting while under the influence…
What’s wrong with Huckleberry Hound speaking of the “the holocaust of liberal abortion” is not Holocaust denial–what’s wrong is that abortion is not murder.
Oh, come on. You really think he’s using the word in the sense of “sacrifice by fire” (which I doubt most non-Jews even know is the original meaning) and not trying to compare it to the Holocaust?
I’m no fan of Mike Huckabee’s, but I have to ask- how did the information about Bill Clinton’s relative come to light? I’m just wondering, because when names of rape victims are (supposedly) kept private and she was only a “distant” relative, it seems like a strange connection to make. I mean, I’m not saying it’s not true, I’m just wondering how anyone knows that it is.
Actually, never mind, I just found the link that explains it. Carry on.
rea, we’re all very impressed that you know the original meaning of the term ‘holocaust’; not so impressed that you feel the need to pretend anti-abortion activists are using the term to mean that fetuses are sacrificed and consumed as an offering to pagan gods.
It is an aside, but there IS still a non-nazi use of the Holocaust in modern english:
Nuclear Holocaust is a relatively common phrase, and in no way refers to genocide (mundocide, yes, but not genocide)
“not so impressed that you feel the need to pretend anti-abortion activists are using the term to mean that fetuses are sacrificed and consumed as an offering to pagan gods. ”
if they think only the godless abort, then it makes sense. these religious (non-Jewish) nuts are well-versed in ‘fire-and-brimstone’ terminology –theyve been using this exact language for long before the Holocaust.
Extraordinarily stupid, short-sighted, shallow-minded and vicious politics can lead to the death of innocent people — a point worth remembering.
I wrote about what Taliban Huckabee said not once, but twice on CNN on my blog. I linked it on a post from one of Pamela’s threads, i believe.
I also wrote about how the anti-choice’s Holocaust has caused the deaths of 250 million women during pregnancy and childbirth in this country since it was founded on 07/04/1776.
Right wingers who refer to abortion as a “holocaust” usually use subtle and unsubtle comparisons to the Holocaust-with-a-capital-H. They drop the 45 million number to imply that women who control their fertility are 7.5 times as bad as Nazis. Sometimes they say it out loud. If Huckabee had been the only right winger ever to employ this trick, I would cautiously sign onto the distant possibility that he was using the word without hope that it would remind people of—and therefore minimize—the actual Holocaust, but his reference is part of a long tradition of minimizing Nazi atrocities.
not so impressed that you feel the need to pretend anti-abortion activists are using the term to mean that fetuses are sacrificed and consumed as an offering to pagan gods.
I hate to break it to you, Mythago, but that’s how a lot of wingnuts see it. The pagan god we all worship is liberalism/secularism, and we’re sacrificing babies in the form of abortion. Feminists, Democrats, etc — we’re all committing human sacrifices.
Trust me, I have a wingnut neighbor — shockingly ordinary in every other way — who honestly sees abortion as updated pagan sacrifice to Ba’al or Molech.
It’s a common FReeper contention, as well.
Right wingers who refer to abortion as a “holocaust” usually use subtle and unsubtle comparisons to the Holocaust-with-a-capital-H. They drop the 45 million number to imply that women who control their fertility are 7.5 times as bad as Nazis. Sometimes they say it out loud.
In the early 80s, there was nothing subtle or implied about it: I was explicily taught at least three separate times (twice in Catholic schools) that abortion was worse–way, way worse–than the Nazi Holocaust.
The anti-choice group I belonged to years ago had posters, bumper stickers, and slide shows comparing abortion to slavery (hence the Dred Scott Decision dog whistle) and the Nazi Holocaust. They placed pictures of the stacked bodies from Auschwitz alongside pictures of the “abortion mill dumpsters” to emphasize the “human garbage” attitude of “abortionists”. They used the “First they came for the Jews, and I said nothing” speech as part of their “why we have to have to fight this” training.
I have a feeling that the reason they use the implied references these days is that the metaphor has become so ingrained that they don’t have to be explicit about it. (Like, for instance, the symbolism of a noose in a black neighborhood doesn’t have to be explained as “Oh, see, that a reference to the time when racist bastards lynched black people on a whim….”: we all “get it” now.)
I am not a fan of Huckabee. However, lets get some facts straight.
DuMond was not pardoned. He was on PAROLE. He was only eligible for parole because the LT. Gov. at the time (Jim Guy Tucker) reduced his sentence to only 39 years, from life +20. Huckabee had thought about clemency but didn’t follow through with it because of the huge out cry. (As there should have been) This Tucker guy should have thought twice as well. It would have saved a woman’s life. Interesting to note though, the whole testicle in a jar thing, not exactly found to be factual, but DuMond won a civil law suit against the sheriff for having his testicles in a jar on his desk!!!
And finding out that the victim was a relative to Bill Clinton, in 1985, rape laws weren’t what they are today. (Which they still aren’t that great).
Granted, DuMond being paroled was a bit suspicious……
Ugh. This is a painful reminder of the heights of insanity among the wingnuts. It was a lot easier to dismiss the crazy conspiracy theories and accusations of bodies buried across Arkansas and D.C. before those same people were lying us into wars. I think what is really troubling is not just the actions of Huckabee in this case but the completely irresponsible journalism that influenced the decision to parole this psychopath–the New York Daily News and damn Village Voice wrote pieces about the supposed miscarriage of justice that convicted an innocent man (and completely ignored his three previous run-ins with the law involving rape. Oh, and that pesky murder he participated in). And now the New York Times is engaging in the same crap journalism retelling the story with new villains and victims. CNN did a segment with Huckabee this week talking about how he might be too liberal for the Rethugs.
And on another note, I once had an anti-choice individual explain to me that abortion was WORSE than the Holocaust because “at least they had the chance to be born.” Self-castration is not uncommon and apparently neither are do-it-yourself lobotomies.
I’m still back at the incredible wording in the column. Dumond was “accused” of a rape. Then at the trial he was “sentenced”. He became “hopeless”. Nowhere in this version is the fact that he was effing convicted.
Which is just plain dishonest.
Please don’t take this as trolling me as I’m a leftist, truly just looking for additional research on this.
Can someone point me to evidence that Huckabee championed Dumond’s cause because of the Clinton connection?
Thanks
APS
This is probably the most comprehensive explanation. But the two names to keep in mind are Jay Cole, Clinton conspiracy theorist and Huckabee’s close friend, and Steve Dunleavy, world’s least ethical journalist.
There’s no doubt that Huckabee released Dumond because he thought Dumond was a victim of Clinton — it’s extremely well-documented. And a woman paid for Huckabee’s bad judgment with her life.
http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=154e1aad-fd18-4efd-8d80-b5dab8559419
This is a really good article about the entire case!
The RAC’s article is interesting, but it doesn’t claim that comparisons of abortion to the Holocaust amount to Holocaust denial.
Claims like “abortion is just like the Holocaust!” actually depend on affirming the historicity of the Holocaust. If you deny the Holocaust, then the argument amounts to “abortion is like a Sunday drive along quaint country roads.”
Claims like “abortion is just like the Holocaust!” actually depend on affirming the historicity of the Holocaust. If you deny the Holocaust, then the argument amounts to “abortion is like a Sunday drive along quaint country roads.”
Actually, as mentioned by Amanda in her follow-up comment, the argument is that abortion is worse than the Holocaust.” As in, You think the Holocaust was bad? Well, murdering embryos is even worse! Which kinda works to diminish what happened during the actual Holocaust, don’t you think?
OK, let’s start from the beginning: Amanda wrote:
Emphasis mine.
Except that Governor Huckabee didn’t pardon Mr DuMond. Mr DuMond was paroled by the state parole board — a board which was, at the time, dominated by the appointees of the two previous governors, Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker. Governor Huckabee did speak to the board in favor of Mr DuMond’s release, but he did not have the authority to instruct the board to grant parole.
Governor Huckabee explained the situation:
He might be spinning a bit, but unless he was outright lying about Mr DuMond being paroled vis a vis being pardoned (and the linked source is CBS News; if he lied, it’ll be discovered very quickly), Amanda’s entire article falls apart, because he was paroled by the appointees of Governors Clinton and Tucker. (It was Governor Tucker who reduced Mr DuMond’s original sentence to 39½ years, which made him eligible for parole in the first place.)
It was an exercise in mind-reading on the part of Amanda and the sources she linked to claim that either Mr Huckabee or anyone else wanted to release Wayne DuMond because his victim was a relative of President Clinton. And it was wild-eyed speculation to suggest that Mr DuMond castrated himself. Finally, it seems that she got the very basic fact of who released Mr DuMond in the first place wrong.
If you buy dualism and the existence of souls, then equating the two isn’t bad. Fortunately this doesn’t appeal to very many people anymore.
I think we’re really close to that final nail in the coffin, where it becomes supremely embarrassing to equate embryos and people. All you need are words like “nervous system” and “neurons” and “experience” and “desires” and critics shut up really fast.
According to polls, 70% are already on the right side, and Bush’s first veto is going to go down in history as one of the stupidest (in the social-pandering realm) political moves ever.
He might be spinning a bit …
A bit? That’s like saying a merry-go-round spins “a bit.”
Though it’s interesting to see you once again fall for “he said/she said” journalism: if that’s what Huckabee says happened, well, then that must be what happened! Never mind what the members of the parole board say happened — if Huckabee says differently, he must be telling the truth. After all, it’s not like he has any incentive to lie, now does it?
And, yes, Amanda did get it wrong: Dumond was paroled, not pardoned. Slap on the hand for that one.
“Though it’s interesting to see you once again fall for “he said/she said” journalism: if that’s what Huckabee says happened, well, then that must be what happened! Never mind what the members of the parole board say happened — if Huckabee says differently, he must be telling the truth.”
Well, Huckabee IS a Republican. And Republicans are KNOWN for truth, honesty, morality, etc. Plus they protect us from terrorists, and hippies, and gay people, and single mothers, and abortions. And since there’s some weird connect to The Clenis, that’s all any “right” thinking person needs to see the truth.
‘Cause the alternative, that Huckabee is yet another in a very long line of sick, twisted Reichwing political hacks who have all the moral grounding of a great white shark, without the cuddly exterior - well that would just be unbearable…(to Dana…)
Mnemosyne, as Kyle said, for those intellectual lightweights who believe in souls, the argument does make sense. It’s a sign of gullibility, but not of Holocaust denial.
Also, Huckabee said “more than a million people”, which is not at all like the “7.5 times as bad as Nazis” claim. Huckabee’s claim relies completely upon the historicity of the holocaust and upon taking it seriously. A million dead people is significantly like the Holocaust. You still have to be stupid to think that embryos are people, but it’s just stupidity, not Holocaust denial.
I have to say it strains credulity to say that the “7.5 times as bad as Nazis” people are taking the Holocaust seriously. Considering the actual suffering in concentration camps, it’s bullshit to think that even simple murder is anything like that. But here, where they are denigrating the experiences of those who lived through and died in the Holocaust, they are still not questioning historicity at all. This is not Holocaust denial.
“Claims like “abortion is just like the Holocaust!” actually depend on affirming the historicity of the Holocaust.”
The thing is that most people who are out there denying that the Holocaust happened don’t seem to actually believe it didn’t happen. It’s really weird. They’ll get on this big roll about how Jews are liars and they’ve suckered the whole planet into giving them a pass on all the evil shit they do because of something that never occurred and then turn around and say something like “If only Hitler had finished the job, we wouldn’t have to worry about them.” Trying to extrapolate based on expected internal consistency in these sorts of arguments is pretty useless.
preying mantis, I have noticed that at times too. But those are the actions of people who are Holocaust deniers (people who do at some point claim that the Holocaust never happened or was exaggerated, even if they don’t make the same claim at other times).
Some of those people probably overlap with the pro-life groups who make abortion/Holocaust comparisons. There’s overlap, sure.
But people who are just saying “abortion is like the Holocaust”? They aren’t Holocaust deniers. No one is a Holocaust denier unless they are saying that the Holocaust never happened or was exaggerated. Continue this analogy: if we start diluting the meaning of “Holocaust denier”…
Only outlaws will deny the Holocaust?
Lol. Good show.