Does Evidence Matter to People Like Bush and Huckabee

There are two great entries up at Huffington Post about Mike Huckabee's pressuring the Arkansas Parole Board to release a convicted rapist named Wayne Dumond. The first one is here and the second one is here.

Wayne Dumond was released by the Arkansas Board in 1999 and proceeded to rape two other women and murder both of them while living in Missouri in 2001. He later died in prison for the first rape and murder while the State of Arkansas was putting together charges for the second rape and murder.

In the first story linked to above, Murray Waas outlines how Dumond was convicted of raping a distant cousin of Clinton's and a daughter of a Clinton financial supporter. The Christian right in Arkansas argued that Dumond was innocent and that basically he had been railroaded by the Clinton political machine. A right-wing columnist at the New York Post wrote that Clinton had let an innocent man stay in jail for 14 years.

The second story linked to above is by Sam Stein who outlines how anti-Clinton zealots pressured Huckabee to get him to pressure the Parole Board to release this man. The second story contains the following sentence:

"The whole deal about the Dumond case, and it can be overanalyzed, was that this was a bad guy with a proven record of sexual misconduct and violence. This is the last guy you want to set free," Max Brantly, executive editor of the Arkansas Times and one of the chief chroniclers of the Dumond case, told the Huffington Post. "And Huckabee formed the judgment to do this not after consulting anyone but after being sold a story and buying it. It's kind of like Bush and weapons and mass destruction."

Now here's the thing: There was a lot of evidence around that Dumond was guilty of the first rape, the one of the distant Clinton cousin. Other women who had been raped by Dumond, or had relatives who had been raped, wrote letters to Huckabee telling him about these crimes. According to reporters who covered the trial in Arkansas, the evidence about Dumond's guilt was overwhelming. Yet, Huckabee, convinced by political allies that Clinton was corrupt and convinced by his faith that people who capable of profound change, got involved, pressured the Board, and two other women died.

This sounds a lot like Bush and Iraq, which is the point of the quote above. Bush relied on his political allies, the neo-cons, to give him evidence about Iraq. He ignored the evidence of others. He was convinced that Iraq would easily transform itself once Hussein was removed from power. In short, just like Huckabee's actions regarding Dumond were faith-based, so were Bush's regarding Iraq.

Given the diaster that Iraq has turned out to be, can America afford another faith-based presidency that ignores evidence that it doesn't agree with?