Five Things Mike Huckabee Doesn't Want You to Know About Him

Look who's the dark horse now: Not Fred Thompson, the Law & Order actor whose get-off-my-lawn glower was initially mistaken by the media for Reaganesque magic, but Mike Huckabee, the ex-Arkansas governor with the beady stare and steely proclamations about the Iraq war. You might remember him from the Fox News Channel debate in September, when he reproached Ron Paul by appealing to the "honor" of the Republicans as a reason to keep occupying Baghdad -- winning both applause and comparisons to Star Trek's Klingons.

Suddenly, heading into the primary season, it's Huckabee who is making moves, polling at 24 points in the crucial primary state of Iowa. (Thompson: three points.) His ratings, as his campaign is gloating, put him within striking distance of Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachussetts

So who is he? His latest ad finds him repeating Chuck Norris internet jokes, borrowing for his campaign a har-har style from Jesse "The Body" Ventura that would suit him well if it were 1999 and he were promising to give Minnesotans tax breaks instead of vowing (as he did the other day) to bomb Iran "in a heartbeat" without consulting Congress if President Huck deems it necessary. "Like our Founding Fathers," Norris wrote in a mass email to Huckabee supporters on Nov. 13, playing to conservative evangelicals frustrated by bad choices, "he's not afraid to stand up for a Creator against secularist beliefs."

A complex figure, Huckabee, an ex-Baptist minister, has been treated in the media as a simpleton, with more attention devoted to his folksiness than his foreign policy (raised in poverty, he comes by this duck-hunter schtick more honestly than did George W. Bush.) But that's chicken scratch next to the pile of controversies that have remained out of sight.

Here are five things you probably didn't know about him.

1. Clinton conspiracy theories inspired his biggest mistake.

Like today's 9/11 Truthers, some conservatives in the 1990s were fixated on signs allegedly revealing monstrous crimes -- in their case not discrepancies in the melting point of steel but murders and other dark acts supposedly masterminded by the Clinton family. "Clinton's biggest crime," claimed New York Post scribe Steve Dunleavy in 2000, was allowing a Vietnam veteran named Wayne DuMond to go to prison for 50 years after being convicted -- falsely, Dunleavy said -- for the 1985 knifepoint rape of the 17-year-old cheerleader Ashley Stevens, a distant cousin of the Clintons. "That rape never happened," Dunleavy said.

In cloudy circumstances, DuMond had suffered castration before his jailing. He said a lynch mob had severed his testicles. They somehow ended up as trophies on the desk of a crooked local sheriff, Coolidge Conlee. In the view of the theorists, Conlee was somehow an "ally" of the Clintons, conjuring up a world in which state politics were on the scale of The Dukes of Hazzard. "He didn't have no right to take them," DuMond said of his balls in 1988.

By the time Huckabee became governor, it was believed by many on the Right that DuMond had not only been maimed but also framed by the Bill & Hillary Octopus. Responding to the pressure, Huckabee said DuMond had gotten a "raw deal" and wrote to the imprisoned DuMond: "Dear Wayne, [m]y desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction into society to take place."

In June 2001, Ashley Stevens heard on her car radio that DuMond -- let loose by the state of Arkansas -- had beein seized for strangling 39-year-old Carol Shields in Kansas City, leaving her naked and bound on a bed. Authorities had also suspected DuMond in the similar rape-murder of a 23-year-old pregnant victim, Sarah Andrasek.

Huckabee has since sought to pin the blame on a parole board for freeing the ingrateful DuMond. The next year, however, the Arkansas Times took home an alt-newsweekly award for a piece, "Huckabee Frees Career Rapist," in which numerous inside sources said it was the governor who made the decision.