Wacky Pacifica: Huckabee Should've Indicted Clinton As a Murderer

January 4th, 2008 5:05 PM

Public radio is a left-wing preserve, but some corners of public radio are so far to the left that they treat liberals as gangsters and monsters. A brief listen to Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" program on Thursday brought me to a segment on the presidential candidates, and how they're all, from left to right, compromised by their warmongering national-security experts. Radical journalist Allan Nairn attacked Mike Huckabee, for example, for failing to treat Bill Clinton as a war criminal: 

Huckabee recently was attacked by Romney for being soft on crime. So Huckabee responded, "Soft on crime? I executed sixteen people in Arkansas. How many people did you execute in Massachusetts?" Well, Massachusetts didn’t have the death penalty. But if Huckabee were really tough on crime, he would have used his post as governor of Arkansas to extradite Bill Clinton to Arkansas to stand trial before the courts there, as is permissible under international law, for the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths brought on by the Iraqi sanctions during the Clinton administration. But that’s unthinkable in American politics. It probably didn’t even occur to Huckabee. But if we had a civilized political order and we defined crime and murder objectively, something like that would have been on the table, and Huckabee would have been challenged on it.

Nairn was interviewed by Pacifica hostess Amy Goodman, and the two of them survived a nasty bout of war reporting in 1991 in East Timor, a precious mini-square of Asian geopolitical space to the radical left. Nairn's fellow guest in denouncing the candidates for their ties to strident alleged human-rights abusers was Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who wrote an article on this subject for The American Conservative magazine. She also writes for FoxNews.com. Does Fox News know its "conservative" writers freelance on radical-left radio shows?