You can read the column here or at AnnCoulter.com.
The press in America is even worse than we imagine. We sense that they’re biased and stunningly incompetent. They are those things, but so much more. Our media’s version of the news is mathematically and precisely the opposite of the truth.
The death and burial of George H.W. Bush is only the latest example.
In the puffery and revisionism that accompany funerals, the man who gave us David Souter, an unnecessary war, tax hikes he promised not to impose and the Americans With Disabilities Act (aka The Destruction of Small Libraries Throughout New England Act) has been elevated to saintlike status.
But the one incident the media decided to excoriate Bush for was, in fact, his finest moment: the Willie Horton ad.
If we let the media get away with this, they will have once again redefined what constitutes acceptable discourse in America and cemented the notion that our political process should never be soiled by such a campaign ad — the one thing Bush got right in his entire public career.
Far from representing the “low road,” the Willie Horton ad was the greatest campaign commercial in political history. The ad was the reason we have political campaigns: It clearly and forcefully highlighted the two presidential candidates’ diametrically opposed views on an issue of vital national importance.
Bush’s opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, had championed a self-evidently insane criminal justice program that provided prison furloughs to first-degree murderers.
One of the murderers let out under Dukakis’ program was a career violent criminal, Willie Horton. In 1974, Horton sliced up a 17-year-old convenience store clerk, Joey Fournier, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after Fournier had already handed over all the money. He then stuffed the boy’s corpse in a garbage can. That wasn’t Horton’s first offense: Years earlier, he’d been convicted of attempted murder for stabbing a man in South Carolina.
No sane person would have allowed Horton to take a breath of free air again.
Horton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility
of parole, which was the maximum possible penalty, inasmuch as Gov.
Dukakis had vetoed the death penalty. The whole idea of sentencing
first-degree murderers to life without parole is that they are
never supposed to be let out of prison. But under the weekend furlough
program lustily promoted by Dukakis, Horton was released.
On April 3, 1987, months after running away from his most
recent furlough, Horton broke into the Maryland home of Cliff Barnes and
his fiancee, Angela Miller, and waited for them to return. When Barnes
got home, Horton lunged at him, dragged him to the basement, tied him
up, and spent hours torturing him, slashing him and jamming a pistol
butt in his mouth and eyes. He told Barnes he planned to hang him and
watch him die.
Five hours later, Barnes’ fiancee came home. Horton left Barnes
bound and gagged in the basement, went upstairs and repeatedly raped
and beat Miller, as Barnes listened helplessly from the basement.
Twelve hours after he had first encountered Horton, Barnes
managed to escape. When Horton realized Barnes was gone, he stole the
couple’s car and led police on a high-speed chase before finally being
captured — again.
The Maryland judge who sentenced Horton refused to send him
back to Massachusetts, saying: “I’m not prepared to take the chance that
Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released.”
The following year, Michael Dukakis offered himself up to be president of the United States.
Dukakis was directly responsible for Horton’s release — as
well as the release of hundreds of other murderers, many of whom went on
to commit similarly heinous crimes. Even Dukakis’ own Democratic
legislature in liberal Massachusetts had tried to reverse a state
Supreme Court decision granting furloughs to first-degree murderers.
But the Greek homunculus vetoed the bill.
When Horton’s survivors Barnes and Miller tried to meet with
Dukakis after their ordeal to ask him to rescind the furlough policy, he
refused to see them, arrogantly announcing, “I don’t see any particular
value in meeting with people.” This marked the first time the media
supported a politician’s refusal to meet with victims of one of his
policies.
What could be more central to a presidential campaign than an
ad highlighting how Bush would handle criminal justice issues versus how
the elected governor of Massachusetts was at that moment handling them?
Liberals’ response was to accuse Republicans of racism because
Horton was black, knowing full well that the GOP would have given
everything it owned for him to have been white. But it was too important
an issue to ignore just because the poster-boy for Dukakis’ insane
crime policies happened to be black.
Bush’s ad was so “racist” it never even showed Horton’s picture. Instead, white male actors were shown passing through the “revolving door” of criminal justice.
(An independent group unconnected to the Bush campaign produced
an ad seen by 16 people showing Horton — appalling the press by using
his mug shot, rather than his First Communion photo as prescribed by The
New York Times’ standards and ethics policy for black criminals.)
Liberals smugly cite Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater’s
deathbed apology for the Horton ad. Yes, he hoped for a nice obituary
and didn’t want his kids teased at school, so he said whatever his
captors wanted him to say. (By the way, it didn’t work.)
Just like Atwater, the reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for
her articles on Horton disavowed her own reporting, after going through
the media’s re-education camp.
You don’t have the right to “apologize” for something you did that’s not factually incorrect.
The Horton ad was the highest, best form of political
campaigning, serving to illustrate stark differences between the
candidates on an important policy issue. People should have won awards
for that ad. Instead, it became one of the stops on the left’s Via
Dolorosa of Racism. Idiot Republicans are ashamed of it, thinking the
best response is to say: Al Gore brought up Horton first!
Yammering morons don’t have any argument against the ad, other than feigned outrage. You’re seriously defending the Willie Horton ad?!
Yes I am! It demonstrated that Michael Dukakis should have
never been anywhere near a position of power, least of all, the
presidency. What’s your argument against it?
COPYRIGHT 2018 ANN COULTER
Defending Ann Coulter's Honor 