By John Brummett

In the course of trying to talk his way through this jam over having commuted the sentence of a man who murdered four police officers, Mike Huckabee decried the “disgusting” actions of those trying to cash in politically.

He was pounding a straw man there.

Huckabee was getting pummeled mainly not by overt political rivals, but by commentators from both right and left whose motives ranged from the obvious to the understandable.

Those commentators on the right decried that Huckabee was either soft on crime or damaged goods for appearing so. Those on the left never liked him in the first place and couldn’t believe he got away on the national scene two years ago with having supported the release of Wayne DuMond, the subsequent murderer.

One potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, got asked about this latest Maurice Clemmons matter on a local radio show Tuesday and merely hastened — quite justifiably in that context — to make the point that he’d not issued many pardons or commutations.

Meantime, the most incisive critique of Huckabee’s jam came not from a political foe, but from a friendly and fair-minded Christian evangelical activist named Joe Carter. He actually came to Little Rock to work in Huckabee’s presidential campaign in late 2007.

As the tiny campaign’s research director charged with defense of Huckabee’s gubernatorial record, Carter pored over the hundreds of prison sentence commutations that Huckabee granted — more than his three predecessors put together and far more than the quintessentially cautious man who succeeded him.

Carter weighed in on his Web site Monday morning, explaining that he still admired Huckabee but was no longer associated with him formally and therefore had the luxury of writing freely.

He wrote that what Huckabee did on commutations was generally defensible. He said he could explain all but a half-dozen or so of the hundreds of cases. Those few exceptions, he wrote, tended to fall into a couple of categories.

One covered those that percolated to the governor’s office from what Carter called “Clinton hatred” and would never have received Huckabee’s attention but for that.

DuMond’s case was in that category. People were able to allege that DuMond got railroaded because the alleged rape victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton.

Huckabee always bore an exaggerated idea of Clinton’s corruption. So he was keenly sensitive to such allegations.

It’s odd. Clinton has so many faults. He has a weakness for the girls. He’d climb a tree to dice the truth rather than stand on the ground and tell you all of it. He practiced some situational ethics.

But Clinton never was corrupt, certainly not in a way that poisoned the state’s criminal justice system — at least any more than it might have been corrupted already or might still be corrupt in a few spots.

Only irrationality and paranoia could advance such an idea.

I always believed Huckabee thought he was occasionally undoing the unjust effects of the culture he inherited, one he apparently believed to be vile.

The other category cited by Carter would be the obvious: Huckabee’s theological affinity for the concept of “restorative justice,” redemption and second chances.

Those are laudable concepts, of course. They can become problematic only when they impair judgment on secular governmental decisions.

If the cons hear that the governor gets all misty-eyed over letters about prison conversions, then they’re liable to look around for pen and paper.

It’s almost as if Huckabee disbelieved everything Bill Clinton ever said and believed every penitence every prisoner ever professed.

But sometimes Clinton was all right. And sometimes the prisoners weren’t.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.