In 1985, Wayne DuMond, a Vietnam War vet with three previous arrests for sexual assault, was tried and convicted of the rape of Ashley Stephens the previous year. Stephens, who was a 17-year-old cheerleader when she was assaulted, was a distant cousin of then-governor Bill Clinton. Her father was a prominent businessman who had given campaign contributions to Clinton.
D.N.A. evidence was then in its infancy and conclusions were sketchy; the “evidence“ failed to positively link DuMond to the rape. However, Ashley Stephens positively identified DuMond as her attacker. DuMond was convicted by a jury of his peers and was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years.
DuMond’s sentence was reduced to 39 years by Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas in 1992, and he eventually was pardoned by Huckabee in 1999. DuMond subsequently moved out of the state and relocated to Missouri, where in in January 2004, he was convicted of murdering a woman, 39-year-old Carol Sue Shields. DuMond was convicted of the 2000 slaying of Shields, who was found bound and suffocated in the apartment of a man with whom she was having an affair. Implicated by D.N.A. evidence found under Shields’ fingernails, DuMond was sentenced to life in prison for the second time in his life. DuMond. DuMond later died in prison.
Though some are speculating that DuMond might become Mike Huckabee’s “Willie Horton”, it is unlikely to occur as Mike Dukakis was a liberal who backed liberal policies while Huckabee is a paleolithic conservative whose unabashed Clinton-hating, which was at the heart of his decision to parole the rapist who went on to commit murder, will not detract from the faithful reactionaries he is making his presidential pitch to. America remains a hooligan nation whose thirst for blood, be it in rape, murder or lynching, remains in check by the law, a law which the Huckabees feel free to bend to their own ends more than any liberal.
It is this hooliganism which is the essence of the post-Nixon/Ford Republican Party.
During the St. Petersburg debate, Huckabee quoted scripture to denigrate the idea that every word in the Bible should be taken literally. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” In the relatavist world of Mike Huckabee, that of Christian, evangelical relativism in which Pat Robertson can apologize for abotion in China lest it bitch a sweet financial deal he had struck with the Reds, “If the conviction of a rapist offends thee, then pluck him out from behind bars.” That he went on to murder is irrelevant, to this relativists: The women he killed was a jezebel.
Even before the Clinton Presidency, when the forces of reaction were arrayed against him, DuMond became a symbol of the Clinton-haters in Arkansas, who convinced themselves that the convicted rapist had gotten a raw deal, likely due to then-governor Clinton’s intervention, a charge never proven. The DuMond sympathizers forgave a convicted rapist in order to score points against a hated political adversary. Their sympathy also was rooted in the fact that he had been castrated by hooligans while out on bail prior to his rape trial. (The media eventually linked the castration not to vigilantes, but to muscle employed by Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who allegedly was afraid that DuMond might expose his car-theft operation. Conlee, who later was convicted of narcotics trafficking, extortion and racketeering , later was successfully sued by DuMond, who won a $110,000 judgment against Conlee for displaying his severed testicles in a formaldehyde-filled jar in his office.)
Governor Mike Huckabee used the sympathy for DuMond to ignore the outrage of Stephens and her family and supporters to secure a pardon for the rapist. DuMond’s original life sentence + 20 years had been commuted to 39 years by Joe Guy Tucker, who had succeeded Clinton as governor of the "Wonder State." The reduction in sentence had made DuMond eligible for parole and gave Huckabee his chance to right what he saw as a wrong.
However, it took three years for Mike Huckabee to exercise his idea of Christian compassion and secure the pardon for DuMond.
Huckabee’s initial attempt to pardon DuMond after becoming governor of Arkansas in 1996 was abandoned due to a public outcry. Finally, in 1999, with the Lewisnky scandal raging, Huckabee saw his opening. The governor energetically intervened with the state parole board to secure DuMond’s release. Huckabee’s reasoning was that DuMond had been convicted with flawed D.N.A. evidence: The testimony of the girl he raped was discounted, apparently as her father was a Democrat and “Friend of Bill” and likely as she was only a woman, a lower order of “Man” in the fundamentalist mind-set. An evangelical, Huckabee is an ordained Pentecostal minister who eschews Jesus for the Old Testament god(s) represented as Yahweh, who has no qualms about taking vengeance.
It is important to remember how Republican Party as a whole, not just its hardcore reactionary elements, exploited the public’s unease with Bill Clinton during the 1990s for political gain. One must also not forget the sexual roots of this affliction, both in the sense of Clinton’s philandering, the nerves touched in the psyches and subconscious of his inquisitors (Chief Inquisitor Newt Gingrich also was having an affair at the time he was attempting to manufacture political coin from President Clinton’s adultery). One also must be cognizant of the gender issue as encapsulated in President Clinton’s relationship with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, which reportedly was of a “European” cast, i.e., the two had long since ceased co-habitating as husband and wife in a love match and were in a corporate relationship, a partnership, that permitted Clinton, and possibly his wife, to take lovers on the side. These are the political and psycho-sexual roots under-girding the Passion of Bill Clinton, as played out in the House of Representatives during the 1999 impeachment trial.
A generation after most of the Anglo-Saxon democracies and much of the industrialized world, including Pakistan, has had a woman “on top” politically, America remains a deeply sexist nation. Polls indicate that Hillary Clinton’s high negative ratings among half the electorate is rooted in traditional American misogyny. Americans associate competence and success in a woman with negative stereotypes. Never one to miss exploiting a wedge issue, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running a sexist pitch in New Hampshire to tap into this sentiment.
Mitt’s ad goes even farther in stripping Clinton of any humanity whatsoever, as a woman in Romney’s Mormon religion is little more than a maid and broodmare, a sexual organ, fore sure, but one that needs to be disciplined and exercised by the social equivalent of a hot-walk boy at a stable. In Romney’s ken, Hillary Clinton is an abomination who threatens to revisit the Oval Office with the sexual debasement of her husband’s administration, except in Mitt’s fervid scenario, it is Hillary who will play the “intern” and be sodomized by men: Congressmen, lobbyists, foreign “dignitaries”, etc. It is the lot, the fate, of a striving woman to be thus compromised, as it is in her nature to fail and, part and parcel of the universal dynamics, for such a woman to be sorely chastised. Hillary as President would lead to the rape of the country.
This is not far-fetched when one realizes that before the advent of the electronic media’s primary, the allegory of the “Rape of the States” was currency in the U.S. up through the 1950s, when F.D.R.’s New Deal State and the Warren Court had eroded state’s rights, i.e., segregation and the economic exploitation of the underclass.
Looking a little less backward in time, we can see a Clinton-hater such as Huckabee ignoring justice for the assailed girl on at least two fronts: her relationship with Bill Clinton and her gender. As the victim was Clinton kin, she is seen as a debased or “Scarlet woman” by association, akin to Hillary Clinton, and therefore deserved her chastisement at the hands of an ordinary Joe Six-Pack like the blue-collar Wayne DuMond, a handyman and father of six, the likes of whom make up the backbone of Ronald Reagan’s heritage G.O.P. Ronald Regan never made it in Hollywood as did Bogie, the man he allegedly lost the role of Rick in Casablanca too, but he was firmly of the school whose creed was “I never met a dame who didn’t know a sock to the mouth or a .45 slug to the belly.” As an ordinary rape victim, the girl got her just desserts as in the fundamentalist and reactionary’s mindset, a girl invites her own rape, such as we see in the meting out of “justice” in another fundamentalist country, Saudi Arabia. (The hatred of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian, as well as Mormon, for reactionary Islam must be the hatred of one for its “other” or doppelganger.)
This attitude, the rape victim “asked for it”, that she engendered her rape due to her gender (Eve being a wicked woman and a foul temptress in the Christian world since at least St. Jerome) was the standard “Point of View” of Americans up until at least the 1970s, when reforms were implemented to take the onus off of rape victims at trial. Reforms implemented by lawyers such as the hated “Lesbian witch” Hillary Clinton, as leading fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell claimed her and her ilk to be.) Huckabee and his ideological kin seek to set back the clock to the pre-Warren Court time where blacks and other people of color were kept in peonage and women were enthralled to men.
The mass media, enslaved to advertisers and owing a fiduciary responsibility to their conglomerate parent’s stockholders which obviates any type of criticism that might roil Wall St., refuse to question a candidate’s religion on the basis of a “political correctness” such as that would be mocked by Romney and other reactionaries if they weren’t so keen on adapting it to their own ends to obviate criticism of their outrageous world views.
D.N.A. evidence was then in its infancy and conclusions were sketchy; the “evidence“ failed to positively link DuMond to the rape. However, Ashley Stephens positively identified DuMond as her attacker. DuMond was convicted by a jury of his peers and was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years.
DuMond’s sentence was reduced to 39 years by Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas in 1992, and he eventually was pardoned by Huckabee in 1999. DuMond subsequently moved out of the state and relocated to Missouri, where in in January 2004, he was convicted of murdering a woman, 39-year-old Carol Sue Shields. DuMond was convicted of the 2000 slaying of Shields, who was found bound and suffocated in the apartment of a man with whom she was having an affair. Implicated by D.N.A. evidence found under Shields’ fingernails, DuMond was sentenced to life in prison for the second time in his life. DuMond. DuMond later died in prison.
Though some are speculating that DuMond might become Mike Huckabee’s “Willie Horton”, it is unlikely to occur as Mike Dukakis was a liberal who backed liberal policies while Huckabee is a paleolithic conservative whose unabashed Clinton-hating, which was at the heart of his decision to parole the rapist who went on to commit murder, will not detract from the faithful reactionaries he is making his presidential pitch to. America remains a hooligan nation whose thirst for blood, be it in rape, murder or lynching, remains in check by the law, a law which the Huckabees feel free to bend to their own ends more than any liberal.
It is this hooliganism which is the essence of the post-Nixon/Ford Republican Party.
During the St. Petersburg debate, Huckabee quoted scripture to denigrate the idea that every word in the Bible should be taken literally. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” In the relatavist world of Mike Huckabee, that of Christian, evangelical relativism in which Pat Robertson can apologize for abotion in China lest it bitch a sweet financial deal he had struck with the Reds, “If the conviction of a rapist offends thee, then pluck him out from behind bars.” That he went on to murder is irrelevant, to this relativists: The women he killed was a jezebel.
Even before the Clinton Presidency, when the forces of reaction were arrayed against him, DuMond became a symbol of the Clinton-haters in Arkansas, who convinced themselves that the convicted rapist had gotten a raw deal, likely due to then-governor Clinton’s intervention, a charge never proven. The DuMond sympathizers forgave a convicted rapist in order to score points against a hated political adversary. Their sympathy also was rooted in the fact that he had been castrated by hooligans while out on bail prior to his rape trial. (The media eventually linked the castration not to vigilantes, but to muscle employed by Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who allegedly was afraid that DuMond might expose his car-theft operation. Conlee, who later was convicted of narcotics trafficking, extortion and racketeering , later was successfully sued by DuMond, who won a $110,000 judgment against Conlee for displaying his severed testicles in a formaldehyde-filled jar in his office.)
Governor Mike Huckabee used the sympathy for DuMond to ignore the outrage of Stephens and her family and supporters to secure a pardon for the rapist. DuMond’s original life sentence + 20 years had been commuted to 39 years by Joe Guy Tucker, who had succeeded Clinton as governor of the "Wonder State." The reduction in sentence had made DuMond eligible for parole and gave Huckabee his chance to right what he saw as a wrong.
However, it took three years for Mike Huckabee to exercise his idea of Christian compassion and secure the pardon for DuMond.
Huckabee’s initial attempt to pardon DuMond after becoming governor of Arkansas in 1996 was abandoned due to a public outcry. Finally, in 1999, with the Lewisnky scandal raging, Huckabee saw his opening. The governor energetically intervened with the state parole board to secure DuMond’s release. Huckabee’s reasoning was that DuMond had been convicted with flawed D.N.A. evidence: The testimony of the girl he raped was discounted, apparently as her father was a Democrat and “Friend of Bill” and likely as she was only a woman, a lower order of “Man” in the fundamentalist mind-set. An evangelical, Huckabee is an ordained Pentecostal minister who eschews Jesus for the Old Testament god(s) represented as Yahweh, who has no qualms about taking vengeance.
It is important to remember how Republican Party as a whole, not just its hardcore reactionary elements, exploited the public’s unease with Bill Clinton during the 1990s for political gain. One must also not forget the sexual roots of this affliction, both in the sense of Clinton’s philandering, the nerves touched in the psyches and subconscious of his inquisitors (Chief Inquisitor Newt Gingrich also was having an affair at the time he was attempting to manufacture political coin from President Clinton’s adultery). One also must be cognizant of the gender issue as encapsulated in President Clinton’s relationship with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, which reportedly was of a “European” cast, i.e., the two had long since ceased co-habitating as husband and wife in a love match and were in a corporate relationship, a partnership, that permitted Clinton, and possibly his wife, to take lovers on the side. These are the political and psycho-sexual roots under-girding the Passion of Bill Clinton, as played out in the House of Representatives during the 1999 impeachment trial.
A generation after most of the Anglo-Saxon democracies and much of the industrialized world, including Pakistan, has had a woman “on top” politically, America remains a deeply sexist nation. Polls indicate that Hillary Clinton’s high negative ratings among half the electorate is rooted in traditional American misogyny. Americans associate competence and success in a woman with negative stereotypes. Never one to miss exploiting a wedge issue, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running a sexist pitch in New Hampshire to tap into this sentiment.
Mitt’s ad goes even farther in stripping Clinton of any humanity whatsoever, as a woman in Romney’s Mormon religion is little more than a maid and broodmare, a sexual organ, fore sure, but one that needs to be disciplined and exercised by the social equivalent of a hot-walk boy at a stable. In Romney’s ken, Hillary Clinton is an abomination who threatens to revisit the Oval Office with the sexual debasement of her husband’s administration, except in Mitt’s fervid scenario, it is Hillary who will play the “intern” and be sodomized by men: Congressmen, lobbyists, foreign “dignitaries”, etc. It is the lot, the fate, of a striving woman to be thus compromised, as it is in her nature to fail and, part and parcel of the universal dynamics, for such a woman to be sorely chastised. Hillary as President would lead to the rape of the country.
This is not far-fetched when one realizes that before the advent of the electronic media’s primary, the allegory of the “Rape of the States” was currency in the U.S. up through the 1950s, when F.D.R.’s New Deal State and the Warren Court had eroded state’s rights, i.e., segregation and the economic exploitation of the underclass.
Looking a little less backward in time, we can see a Clinton-hater such as Huckabee ignoring justice for the assailed girl on at least two fronts: her relationship with Bill Clinton and her gender. As the victim was Clinton kin, she is seen as a debased or “Scarlet woman” by association, akin to Hillary Clinton, and therefore deserved her chastisement at the hands of an ordinary Joe Six-Pack like the blue-collar Wayne DuMond, a handyman and father of six, the likes of whom make up the backbone of Ronald Reagan’s heritage G.O.P. Ronald Regan never made it in Hollywood as did Bogie, the man he allegedly lost the role of Rick in Casablanca too, but he was firmly of the school whose creed was “I never met a dame who didn’t know a sock to the mouth or a .45 slug to the belly.” As an ordinary rape victim, the girl got her just desserts as in the fundamentalist and reactionary’s mindset, a girl invites her own rape, such as we see in the meting out of “justice” in another fundamentalist country, Saudi Arabia. (The hatred of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian, as well as Mormon, for reactionary Islam must be the hatred of one for its “other” or doppelganger.)
This attitude, the rape victim “asked for it”, that she engendered her rape due to her gender (Eve being a wicked woman and a foul temptress in the Christian world since at least St. Jerome) was the standard “Point of View” of Americans up until at least the 1970s, when reforms were implemented to take the onus off of rape victims at trial. Reforms implemented by lawyers such as the hated “Lesbian witch” Hillary Clinton, as leading fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell claimed her and her ilk to be.) Huckabee and his ideological kin seek to set back the clock to the pre-Warren Court time where blacks and other people of color were kept in peonage and women were enthralled to men.
The mass media, enslaved to advertisers and owing a fiduciary responsibility to their conglomerate parent’s stockholders which obviates any type of criticism that might roil Wall St., refuse to question a candidate’s religion on the basis of a “political correctness” such as that would be mocked by Romney and other reactionaries if they weren’t so keen on adapting it to their own ends to obviate criticism of their outrageous world views.
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See full article, written by yours truly, at Associated Content
