Politico has this article out on how Conservatives unleashed heck on Mike Huckabee for granting clemency to the man accused of killing 4 police officers just nine years after clemency was granted.

The conservative blogosphere unleashed a torrent of criticism against Mike Huckabee Monday after a man whose sentence he commuted as Arkansas governor was suspected of gunning down four police officers in Washington state over the weekend.

Maurice Clemmons, whom Huckabee granted clemency to nine years ago, remained at large after local police in Lakewood, Wash. mistakenly thought they had him trapped in a house early Monday. Clemmons is reported to have shot the officers as they were sitting at a table in a local coffee shop.

While many details of the murders were still unclear Monday, leading online conservative voices were quick to pass judgment on Huckabee, whose 2008 presidential campaign was forced to respond to accusations that he was too lenient with violent criminals during his years as governor.

“The man being sought by police was granted clemency by former GOP Arkansas Mike Huckabee despite his violent history and vehement protestations from prosecutors and victims’ family members,” wrote conservative Michelle Malkin on her widely read blog. “This disaster is just one of Huckabee’s ill-considered clemency legacies.”

“This isn’t Huckabee’s first Horton moment,” Malkin continued, referring to the convicted murderer who raped a woman during a weekend furlough program supported by then-Massachusetts governor and later Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. Willie Horton was featured prominently in damaging ads from George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign painting the Massachusetts Democrat as soft on crime.

On his conservative RedState blog, Erick Erickson wrote that the shooting “is going to be extremely problematic for Governor Huckabee.”

Read the rest here.

Jeb Bush makes some great points here:

(CNN) – Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told an interviewer that he could not say whether or not President Barack Obama is a socialist, and that the president would not have been elected if he had been honest with Americans about his agenda.

“I believe he’s a collectivist. He believes that through collective action, through government, you can solve more problems.” He added that he believed the word “socialism” was a pejorative, and “didn’t help” the GOP make its case.

The brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H.W. Bush dismissed the idea that his party’s policies were unpopular with most Americans. “I don’t think there’s any seismic shift. The Democrats have won on tactics,” he said. “Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he’d let us in on his secret plan prior to the election,” he said, pointing to the president’s economic agenda and energy proposals.

“….He made it appear like McCain was going to raise taxes, which was unfair, but there was no response back. When there was an ideological component, it was generally centrist or even center-right. Had he said what he was going to do as a candidate, (Obama) would have lost.”

He downplayed the president’s approval ratings, which remain above average. “First of all, who cares?” he said.

“His popularity is no greater – in fact it’s less – than what my brother’s was during the beginning of his tenure, in a time of unbelievable friction, if you think about it, because of the 2000 election. His approval ratings were higher than Barack Obama’s during his first one hundred days.”