Poor Judgement

I'm seeing, on left wing blogs, continued attacking of Mike Huckabee for giving clemency to a convicted rapist who then went on to kill 2 people. Americablog has several postings about this issue, including a list of "criminals let off the hook".

I think we need to be careful with this.. and I've written a bit about it before.

The blanket condemnation of Huckabee could have the unfortunate consequence of deterring what clemency and commutations are intended to address. It will push politicians into ever more getting "tough on crime" and remove a rational approach.

In other words.. It's obviously bad judgement to give excessive leniency to a violent criminal, but I think lefties need to drop the whole thing because it's a bad idea to scare politicians into having zero compassion all together out of fear of it coming back to haunt them later.

It just strikes me as bizarre that lefties would attack somebody for showing compassion. We all know that human nature is unpredictable, and some people will not put that compassion to good use and do the right thing. To be clear, Huckabee was probably showing incredibly bad judgement to help a convicted rapist (I say probably because I'm not aware what his rationale was), and if there is going to be an attack on Huckabee's judgement, it's got to be narrowly focused right there.