More Thoughts on Hillyer on Huck

Quin Hillyer, formerly of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, had an excellent article in the American Spectator earlier this week chronicling Huckabee's missteps and foibles, such as his run-ins with the state Ethics Commission and use of taxpayer money to buy food for personal use. Being reminded of that gem brings a smile to my face. At one point one of his sons, John Mark or David, obviously, was asked by a reporter about a receipt from Taco Bell for $7 (I think) that had been listed as a Governor's Mansion expense, to which he responded, "there's not a Huckabee alive who could eat at Taco Bell for $7.

Here's Hillyer's original article, again.

Here's a typical Huckabee apologist response, which, I note, much like Roebuck's, cries foul about inaccuracies and then proceeds to change the subject rather than address the inaccuracies. The response is from Huckabee's campaign manager, Chip Saltsman.

Some of the best stuff includes his contention that Huckabee turned down "2/3" of all pardon requests, which means that he approved 1/3! 1/3, can you believe that? Talk about a lack of faith in Arkansas' criminal justice system. If he had said something like Huckabee turned down 1/20 of all pardon requests, and it had been true, that would have been something, but I wouldn't have even brought it up if he approved 1/3.

Saltsman also complains that Huckabee couldn't cut spending except in the 10% area that wasn't important. Well...why didn't he? As for the notion that he couldn't cut other spending, that's a joke. I've seen how our state government functions and it's worse than a sausage factory. It's just like any other bureaucracy. Profits are not a good thing, because that means you're going to get your budget cut. So, naturally, department heads spent everything they had and then asked for a budget increase. All except for one, Bruce Campbell, who was head of Rural Services. Campbell, somehow, was able to turn in budget requests less than previous years and spend less money. How could that be? Because he ran his department like a business and was more interested in doing the right thing than getting a budget increase. Campbell, you might have guessed, was not a Clinton holdover and wasn't asked to stay on by our new democrat governor.

As for gifts...I don't know if he ever accepted any "illegal" gifts, but it's a fact that he tried to keep furniture donated to the Governor's Mansion, that they opened a "wedding registry" decades after they were married to stock their new house, and that he received thousands and thousands of dollars in gifts from various people, most notably Little Rock's own Jennings Osborne, who kept Huckabee in high style for years. Whether any of those publicly known gifts were illegal doesn't really matter. There's no difference between that and handing him piles of unmarked, non-sequential bills. Just because Arkansas's ethics requirements aren't higher doesn't mean that it isn't wrong.

Here's the link to the Saltsman response and, even better, Hillyer's response to the response. There's lots of fun stuff to dig through.