AFF's Doublethink

So, apparently the dude who killed four cops this weekend was granted clemency by Mike Huckabee for a crime he had committed when he was 17 despite the fact that he had a long rap sheet and a history of violence. This prompts Matt Yglesias to write “based on the few facts I have available, this looks like a reasonable use of clemency authority … 60 years for burglary and theft for an eighteen year-old seems incredibly excessive. In this case, of course, you can’t help but wish he were in fact still in prison. But it’s hard to see what about a record of involvement in burglaries would make you think this was a guy at risk of doing something like this.”

Let’s leave aside all the stuff* that Matt ignores from the story that he links to. The level of cognitive dissonance it takes to read a story about a violent thug who is released from prison early and goes on to commit further acts of violence and still say “But hey, it’s a reasonably understandable thing for them to let him go because he was a poor little baby when he was locked up” kind of blows my mind. When conservatives say that liberals aren’t serious about crime, this is what they’re talking about. And if Huckabee doesn’t think this drives the final nail into his already-moribund presidential hopes, then he’s a crazy person.

*Seriously, go read the story and tell me there’s not a reasonable basis for locking that guy up for a long time