I always thought the whole Willie Horton ad campaign that got our first bad president named Bush elected was a smarmy affair in which a lie was effectively sold. Actually, during that election, I thought Bush and Michael Dukakis were more or less evenly matched in terms of qualification and up until the last week or so of the campaign, my vote could have come down to a coin flip.
Ultimately, I went for Dukakis largely because a couple of late Bush statements about the Horton ads — simultaneously defending them and claiming he had nothing to do with them — were maybe the most disingenuous, weasely things I ever heard uttered by a serious candidate for public office. I was less disappointed that he won than I was that that advertising campaign did. I suppose it was because in response, Dukakis looked rather clueless and unpresidential. In any case, I thought its whole premise — holding Dukakis responsible for the actions of that furloughed prisoner and making him seem more involved than he was — was, like I said, a good example of selling a lie.
The newly-surfaced report of Mike Huckabee pardoning a guy who went out and shot four cops struck me initially as…well, I'm not sure anyone is lying about the whole matter at the moment. Huckabee isn't really a candidate right now so there's no reason for anyone to gin up a story about him…yet. But it sounded to me like someone was just applying the same (dubious) principle that a governor following procedure is responsible for what a released prisoner does. This article by Joe Conason, who's been on top of this story for some time, suggests that it's not the same thing. And to Conason's credit, he doesn't even mention Willlie Horton.