Oh How The Mighty Have Fallen, Mr. Hardin

    

“You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you.” Ezekiel 28:15

            Lou Hardin, the consummate career politician and peoples’ servant through occupancy of many and various taxpayer funded political positions, friend of the mighty and famous, has pled guilty to money laundering and wire fraud.

            Seems that while President of the University of Central Arkansas he lost more money gambling than he could afford. His solution was to ‘defraud’, or whatever the correct term is, UCA of some $300,000.00 in one stroke of the forger’s pen.

            To his credit he pled guilty rather put all through the expense of a mock trial. But based on the outpouring of sympathy and empathy reported in the local paper, he may have pulled the trigger too quickly.

Friends from Arkansas’s Governor Mike Beebe to former Presidential hopeful and former Governor Mike Huckabee have been effusive in their praise of Mr. Hardin. Had they been on the jury, his acquittal just might have been achieved; sort of ‘politicians professional courtesy’. After all, one never knows when one may need the same ‘courtesy’. (Do you note the curious coincidence of the names of the current and former governors?)

            In fact former Governor Mike Huckabee not only gave a glowing recommendation and endorsement of Mr. Hardin in August of 2002 to become the President of UCA; he repeated the same glowing endorsement of Mr. Hardin in 2009 for the job as President of Palm Beach Atlantic University. Curiously enough, this was well after all of Mr. Hardin’s efforts to secure funds illegally from UCA had been exposed. Well, he did pay it back after he was caught red handed so maybe that overcame his complete lack of honesty and ethics in Mr. Huckabee’s opinion. Even though Mr. Hardin  had implicated three others in his scheme, who, it turns out were not only innocent, but were victims of Mr. Hardin’s forgery. By the way this is the same Mike Huckabee who while Governor pardoned a prisoner who then proceeded to travel to Washington State where he assassinated 4 police officers in cold blood. So perhaps the folks at Palm Beach Atlantic University shouldn’t have taken Mr. Huckabee’s judgment as all that wonderful. (One wonders why the need to ensure that everyone know that this school is near the Atlantic by including that in the name. Many of us would have inferred that from the city in the title, might be a clue as to the depth of the thinking process used to hire Mr. Hardin in the first place.)

The local paper reports that maximum penalties for the crimes to which Mr. Hardin pled guilty are as follows: Wire Fraud maximum of 20 years in prison and $250,000.00 fine; Money Laundering maximum of 10 years in prison and $250,000.00 fine. Mr. Hardin faces a combined total of 30 years in prison and $500,000.00 in fines.

Care to wager on whether Mr. Hardin, friend of the powerful and famous, spends any time in jail, or whether his fine comes close to the $300,000.00 he tried to sneak out of UCA? Be careful, remember it’s alleged that it was gambling that forced Mr. Hardin to do this dastardly deed.