AP finally picks up on the Huckabee/Dumond story. They advance it by looking at all the pardons and commutations he granted, which were twice as many as the three previous governors combined.

But on the Dumond case, they stick with the he said/she said crap, believing his lie that he didn't push for his release. Why didn't they just quote the letter:

“Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

If that's not pushing for parole, what is?

Could the be a another case of the cover-up being the part that trips him up?

One could say the Huckabee Express has derailed. The candidate has now been caught in a series of lies about his supporting parole for convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, the man who then went on to rape and murder two more women.

The Huckabee campaign trotted out a former senior aide to Huckabee to vouch for his actions back in 1997. But that aide promptly threw his old boss under the bus:

Directly contradicting Mike Huckabee's claims, his former senior aide tells the Huffington Post that, as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee indeed told the state's parole board that he supported the release of a convicted rapist.

The senior aide, Olan W. "Butch" Reeves, personally attended a controversial parole board meeting with Huckabee in Oct. 1996.

"The clear impression that I came away with from the meeting was that he favored Dumond's release," Reeves said, referring to convicted rapist Wayne Dumond. "And I can understand why board members would believe that to be the case."

This stands in stark contrast to Huckabee's assertion, repeated at a press conference today that he "did not ask [the board] to do anything." When asked directly about trying to influence the board, Huckabee responded: "No. I did not. Let me categorically say that I did not."

But, according to Reeves, Huckabee actually told the parole board members that the prison sentence meted out to Dumond for his rape conviction was "outlandish" and "way out of bounds for his crime." Huckabee believed there "was something nefarious" about the how the state's criminal justice system had treated Dumond, Reeves said.

By "nefarious," Huckabee is alluding to the right wing smear of the time that alleged that Bill Clinton had something to do with the sentence because his distant cousin was the victim.

Then there is the "Dear Wayne" letter:

“Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

It's one thing for Huckabee to try and spin this story into "I didn't really support his release," and then have written evidence to the contrary. And you have to love the fact that he was on a first-name basis with a convicted rapist with a long history of violence, including the admitted role of helping beat a man to death with a hammer.

Republicans are desperately in search of a big dog Clinton hater to be their president. But now we see that blind hate can get people killed, and destroy campaigns.

Arkansas does have some very interesting political characters, doesn't it? Especially that little town of Hope, home to Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee.

There is a fascinating story about Huckabee now just circulating that is threatening to derail his presidential campaign.

The story goes like this. A man named Wayne Dumond raped a 17-year-old cheerleader and distant cousin of Bill Clinton and was given a life sentence. The right wing noise machine jumped on this issue claiming that Dumond was an innocent victim of the Clinton political machine.

The Clinton haters managed to convince then newly elected Arkansas Gov. Huckabee, who formally stated his intention to commute Dumond's sentence in 1996. Public outcry ensued from Dumond's victims. So Huckabee got the parole board to release Dumond just days before the law required Huckabee to make his decision on commutation, thus deflecting some of the heat.

This "innocent man" Dumond went on to rape and murder a Missouri woman, and was about to be charged with raping and murdering another woman when he died in prison in 2005.

Huckabee is desperately trying to spin this off, and rewriting documented history to do so. He's trying to claim that he didn't put any pressure on the parole board, and that he didn't lobby on behalf of Dumond.

There are more crooked twists in this story than an Ozark mountain road. Read it for yourself. Here is a great piece by Murray Waas about all the recent revelations, and his original reporting for the Arkansas Times.