Ya know, next Tuesday’s debate, I suspect that the Huckster just might pull off an upset. He’s articulate, he can speak “plain speak”, he’s got the relgious credentials. We’ll hear alot about Mike in the coming months as he crawls to the top of the second tier. To be rudely pulled back to the bottom of the pile by Wayne DuMond. Bad judgement, you bet — there is not a women I know, that after hearing Mike’s unforgiveable bad judgement and his slight of hand on the release of DuMond would be compelled to vote for a man let a brutal rapist soon to be killer loose.

DuMond was the Arkansas celebrity inmate of the 1990 s. Convicted of raping a Forrest City high school cheerleader at knife point in 1985, he became famous for two reasons.

First, somebody castrated him while he was free on bond awaiting trial. (Local investigators said they suspected drunken self-mutilation, not unknown among sex offenders. ) Worse, the local sheriff exhibited DuMond’s testicles in a jar of formaldehyde, an Arkansas-gothic stunt triggering rumors of vigilante justice.

Second, DuMond’s victim, who’d recognized her attacker on the street weeks after the crime, was a distant cousin of Clinton. That excited the kinds of conspiracy nuts who circulated Clinton “death lists.” They portrayed DuMond as a victim of the Clinton machine’s satanic wrath. His innocence became an article of faith on the fruitcake right.