I've been dithering on whether I liked Mitt Romney. On one hand, he espouses traditional Republican values. On the other, he's a raging socialist who never met a big government program he didn't like. It was his own ad, though, that convinced me that he's a jerk.
His most recent ad against Mike Huckabee (who I also don't really like) compares the number of pardons each issued as governor. Mike pardoned 1,033 convicts; Mitt pardoned none. Now, I don't have a lot of sympathy for criminals, but is Romney asking us to believe that not one single convict had a legitimate, worthy request? Apparently that's not the case. An Iraq war veteran asked for a pardon for shooting his friend with a BB gun when he was 13 years old. He needed the pardon so that he could get a job as a police officer, but Romney denied the request. That's not being tough on crime - that's being an ass.
I don't know the details of Huckabee's pardons but somewhat doubt that all 1,033 of them were for innocent men. Then again, neither do I know how many requests he actually received. Was that 1,033 out of 1,033 or 1,000,000? I'm certain, though, that Romney denied at least one person their final chance for justice and that is simply unacceptable.
William Blackstone said "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." Apparently Mitt disagrees, and I will not be supporting him.
