Huck's clumsy departure
More will come on this in the morning column in some of your newspapers and at arkansasnews.com, but, for now, let me report that I have synthesized what my other favorite blogger calls Gimmegate and come to these tentative conclusions about Huckabee's crushing those hard drives and taking off with that audio-visual equipment and depleting the governor's emergency fund: (1) A sophisticated erasure of computer hard drives is common when an office is closed, and actual crushing is simply a more extreme step to make sure no computer whiz can ever restore anything at all. Huckabee's action was a tad strange, but not out of character considering his paranoia that the only thing Democrats in the Capitol ever thought about was trying to hurt him. (2) Huckabee people — not Huckabee himself, to whom I haven't spoken — seem reasonably confident those lights and speaker system were properly private property. Whose? I await a call and explanation. (3) The most serious transgression — and the one Beebe was most plainspoken about when confronted by reporters before a luncheon speech to a Delta advocacy group at the Clinton library just now — was Huckabee's doling out the emergency fund for pet interests and leaving Beebe with no emergency fund for, you know, emergencies. We had flooding last weekend. We could have ice this one. Spring brings tornados. Beebe will get his supplemental appropriation. But senses of courtesy and responsibility would have kept the average guy from the late spending spree that Huckabee went on.