by Ann Coulter
Nearly five hours after Barnes was attacked, his fiancee, Angela Miller, came home, where she was set upon by Horton. He dragged her into the bedroom by the throat, cut her clothes off with a knife, and savagely beat and raped her. Barnes heard it all, gagged and bound in the basement, unable to help her or even let her know he was alive. This is the point at which it is believed that Cliff’s support for Michael Dukakis began to erode.
As Horton was raping Miller again a few hours later, Barnes managed to escape—twelve hours after he had first encountered Horton in his bathroom. Bleeding through his shredded clothes, Barnes had to go to four houses before he found anyone who would let him in to call for help. (The people at the first three houses later explained that they mistook him for a violent inmate furloughed by Governor Dukakis.) Back at the house, as soon as Horton realized Barnes was gone, he took off in Barnes’s car, leading police on a wild chase before he was finally captured.
Horton was tried and convicted in Maryland. The judge sentencing him refused to send Horton back to Massachusetts, saying, “I’m not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released.”
Until the presidential campaign, Dukakis had displayed “F-you” arrogance whenever anyone questioned his precious furlough program. After their ordeal, Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller never heard a peep out of Dukakis, certainly no apology. They tried to meet with him, traveling to Massachusetts—just to talk to him, tell him what they went through, and ask him how someone like Horton could have been released. Dukakis refused to meet with them. He imperiously dismissed their request for a meeting, saying, “I don’t see any particular value in meeting with people.” (Perhaps they should have broken into the governor’s mansion and lain in wait, nylon stockings over their heads, until he came home.) Dukakis actually took the occasion of the Maryland couple coming to see him to reaffirm his support for the furlough program, saying Massachusetts had “the kind of furlough program we should have.” The sister of Joey Fournier, Horton’s first victim, started a group, Citizens Against an Unsafe Society, to prevent murderers like Horton from being furloughed, but Dukakis refused to even meet with the group and, according to Fournier’s sister, fought them “tooth and nail.”
When Al Gore raised the issue of the lunatic Massachusetts furlough program during the Democratic primaries in 1988, Dukakis responded, “Al, the difference between you and me is that I have run a criminal justice system and you never have.”
Even the Democratic Party knew not to defend the furlough program the way Dukakis had. Instead, during Dukakis’s presidential bid, they claimed the furlough program was first enacted under a Republican governor. Needless to say, this was a lie. Yes, some furlough program existed under the prior governor, but not one that allowed the release of first-degree murderers. The idea behind prison furloughs was to reintroduce prisoners sentenced to a term of years back into society gradually, before their inevitable release. The problem wasn’t furloughs per se; it was furloughs for people like Willie Horton, who were never supposed to take a free breath again. It took the famous Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to discover a right to furloughs for first-degree murderers. (The next thing you know, they’ll be discovering a right to gay marriage.) After the court extended furloughs to first-degree murderers, the Massachusetts legislature quickly passed a bill prohibiting furloughs for first-degree murderers.
The Greek midget vetoed it. He vetoed it. Dukakis defended his veto, saying that removing murderers from the furlough program would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation.” (At least he didn’t say removing murderers from the furlough program would slash inmate rehabilitation with a knife nineteen times and stuff it into a garbage can after it had turned over all the money.) I mention again: Horton was sentenced to LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE! He didn’t need “rehabilitation,” because he wasn’t supposed to be released, ever. Only through the specific intervention of Dukakis did the furlough program become a way for liberal politicians to do end runs around a life sentence. This is why we need the death penalty. Without it, you always run the risk that a Democrat will come to power and start releasing all the prisoners sentenced to life in prison.
So it wasn’t going to work for the Democrats to keep saying the furlough program was originally signed into law by a Republican governor. It was Governor Michael Dukakis who insisted on furloughing first-degree murderers.
It was only well into the 1988 presidential campaign, after Willie Horton became a major issue—and after 75,000 angry Massachusetts citizens signed a petition to put the furlough policy on the ballot—that the Greek homunculus finally yielded to the legislature’s demand that the furlough program be off-limits to first-degree murderers. Forced to sign the bill, Dukakis still said he opposed it: “I don’t agree with the House vote.”
Releasing Willie Horton is the perfect emblem of liberal idiocy. Michael Dukakis, the Duke of Brookline, bought into the whole liberal catechism on how to deal with criminals, starting with the idea that the government is not supposed to lock up vicious murderers but rather develop programs to help them increase their self-esteem. Horton had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. But Dukakis thought Horton should only spend six days a week in prison for committing a mutilation murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in cold blood.
Liberals always claim they want to talk about “issues” in presidential campaigns—I suppose because “character” isn’t a good topic for them. Well, the Massachusetts furlough program that released Horton was an issue, as good an issue as you’ll ever get. Rarely in politics has an attack ad been so honest. State legislators tried to correct an insane ruling by a crazy liberal court allowing first-degree murderers to be released on furlough. But Dukakis wouldn’t let them. And he wanted to be president.
Republicans thought that was a relevant issue. But the fair, unbiased, objective media were outraged at the Bush campaign for running ads on the furlough of Willie Horton. There were actually two Willie Horton ads, and they are generally conflated. Both were terrific ads. The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ad never showed a picture of Horton, which complicated their sneaky plan to appeal to Americans’ nearly hysterical hatred of black people. The only ad to show Horton’s face was produced by an independent group that included Horton’s victims, Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller. The victims’ ad was made on a shoestring budget and was probably seen by about six people in West Virginia. More people have seen Britney Spears’s failed reality show than saw the victims’ Willie Horton ad. (And a lot fewer people saw the victims’ Willie Horton ad than the NAACP’s ad during the 2000 campaign assigning responsibility to George Bush for the murder of James Byrd.) No one would have even been aware of this Willie Horton ad but for the Democrats’ caterwauling about it. If anything, the Horton ads helped Dukakis by allowing the Democrats to stir up black voters, who might not otherwise have warmed to the Greek geek.
In all, Dukakis had furloughed 82 first-degree murderers, 184 second-degree murderers, and 287 sex offenders.’ The media ignored this. It was left to Cliff Barnes to investigate the furlough program being unreported by our aggressive watchdog media that shouldn’t be required to reveal their sources because they are working in “the public interest.” Other murderers furloughed by Dukakis included Donald Robertson and Bradford Boyd. Robertson raped a ninety-three-year old woman and her seventy-two-year-old daughter and then stamped on their chests so hard that he crushed their internal organs. Despite being sentenced to two consecutive life terms, Robertson was released under Michael Dukakis’s furlough program after only eight years in prison. He never came back. Bradford Boyd was serving time for rape when he committed first-degree murder in prison. Still, he was furloughed. While out on furlough, he viciously beat a man, repeatedly raped a woman, and then killed himself. (On the plus side of the ledger, Boyd hasn’t committed any crimes since then.) The mainstream media didn’t find these stories, Barnes did. They were too busy writin
g articles about Bush “Slinging Mud on the Low Road to Office,” and “Republicans Riding to Victory on Racism,” and “Bush Tactics Turn Ugly.” According to the vast majority of media stories on the 1988 presidential campaign, it was an “ugly” tactic for the Bush campaign to mention the Massachusetts furlough program.
The mainstream media were bristling with defenses of Dukakis’s furlough program—in particular, the claim that practically every state had furlough programs just like Massachusetts. On June 24, 1988, the Washington Post ran a news story by T R. Reid titled “Most States Allow Furloughs from Prison; Bush Lashes Dukakis for Stance on Policy That Has Been Adopted by Much of Nation.” The article began, “Dukakis’ support for the concept of furloughs puts him squarely in the mainstream today among corrections officials from coast to coast.” On NBC’s Today show, Anthony Travisono, then the executive director of the American Correctional Association, said, “Governor Dukakis has taken the rap for something that everybody does.” He compared the furlough program to Ivory soap, saying, “It’s the decent thing to do. It’s like the Ivory soap commercial, which is 99 and 44 one-hundredths percent pure. Occasionally, an inmate lets us all down.” Yes, under any criminal justice system, occasionally a drug dealer or armed robber is released and then commits a murder. The only way to avoid that is to lock up all first-time criminals for life—which, come to think of it, was exactly how long Horton was supposed to stay in prison. Also on the Today show, Princeton’s John DiIulio assured viewers, “Virtually every state in the country has some kind of a furlough program.” He said, “Over 30 other states will furlough someone who is a murderer.” his still misses the point. Not all murderers are sentenced to life in prison. Horton had been.
No other state in the union would have furloughed a murderer serving a life sentence. The only one that would had a governor who wanted to be president.
But the headlines told a different story:
PRISON EXPERTS SAY BUSH ATTACKS DUKAKIS UNFAIRLY
Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1988
STUDY SAYS S3,000 GOT PRISON FURLOUGHS IN ‘87 AND FEW DID HARM
New York Times, October 12, 1988
SPECIALISTS DEFEND FURLOUGH POLICY:
MASS. PROGRAM SAID TO BE IN MAINSTREAM (The “mainstream,” no less!)
Boston Globe, October 15, 1988
REPORT SAYS PRISON FURLOUGHS WIDESPREAD, SUCCESSFUL
Associated Press, October 13, 1988
SUCCESS HIGH IN MOST PRISON FURLOUGH CASES
Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), October 23, 1988
EXPERTS: BUSH DISTORTS ON FURLOUGHS
Newsday (New York), October 21, 1988
These headlines—typical in the days before the alternative media—were provably false. No other state furloughed murderers ineligible for parole. And you wonder why liberals have lost their minds over Fox News Channel, where it is now possible to hear something other than press releases from the Democratic National Committee.
Eventually, the Dukakis campaign tried counterattacking with a furlough “attack ad” of its own. For weeks on the campaign trail, Dukakis had blatantly engaged in the rhetorical device of preterition mentioning the murder of Patsy Pedrin while pretending not to mention it. I would never stoop so low as to talk about my opponent’s homosexuality! Pedrin, a pregnant mother of two, had been murdered by Angel Medrano, a drug dealer furloughed from a federal prison while Bush was vice president. Dukakis raised the subject of Pedrin’s murder to suggest that it had resulted from the exact same sort of furlough policy as the one that freed Horton. Over and over again, Dukakis said, “I would never use that kind of human tragedy to accuse the president of being soft on crime.”
To make it absolutely clear that he would “never” exploit a family tragedy like the murder of Patsy Pedrin for political gain, Dukakis’s campaign ran commercials about the murder. Dukakis apparently had trouble grasping abstract concepts, like “without possibility of parole” and “never.” In the commercial, the narrator accused Bush of “false advertising,” saying, “Bush won’t talk about this drug pusher—one of his furloughed heroin dealers—who raped and murdered Patsy Pedrin, pregnant mother of two.” The commercial showed Pedrin’s dead body being carried out of her house in a body bag—something her children must have enjoyed seeing.
Contrary to Dukakis’s self-advertisements, his ad did nothing but exploit a family tragedy. In fact, Medrano was not on furlough; he was in a halfway house because he had served his sentence and was about to be released. Until he killed Pedrin, Medrano had no record of violence of any sort, much less murder. The only policy that could conceivably have prevented Pedrin’s murder would be life imprisonment for drug dealers. Was Dukakis for that? I don’t think so: as Massachusetts governor, he had vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers.
Even if the halfway house program had been to blame for Pedrin’s murder—which it wasn’t—Vice President Bush was not running for president based on his good work on the federal criminal justice system. Dukakis was constantly bragging about his experience running a criminal justice system—including his innovative furlough program.
Since none of their other defenses of Dukakis’s furlough program were working, the Democrats reverted to their default argument: they accused Republicans of racism. This was consistent with author Peter Brimelow’s definition of a “racist” as “someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.” At first, the Democrats didn’t realize the Horton ad was racist. Only when nothing else managed to defuse the issue did it suddenly hit them like a ton of bricks: The only reason anyone could possibly object to Horton’s release from prison is that he was black.
On This Week with David Brinkley, Dukakis’s running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, allowed that there were “racial elements” to Bush’s raising the furlough issue. Representative Richard Gephardt referred to the Bush campaign’s Horton ad, saying, “Hitler would have loved these people.” Dukakis’s former campaign manager, Susan Estrich, said, “There is no stronger metaphor for racial hatred in our country than the black man raping the white woman.” Horton wasn’t a “metaphor”! He was a real murderer and rapist who had already killed a person before being released from a life sentence by Dukakis, whereupon Horton savagely beat a man and raped a woman. Say, aren’t feminists against rape? Wait, let me get my notes… . Yes! I have it right here! They are against rape. Dukakis aide Donna Brazile said the Bush campaign had used the “oldest racial symbol imaginable,” referring to the image of “a black man raping a white woman while her husband watched.” Again, this wasn’t an “image,” it was a real case, and I’m not sure how that image would be improved if it had been a white man raping a woman while her husband watched. As Cliff Barnes said: “It didn’t make any difference to me or my wife whether Willie Horton was black.”
Years later, the Democrats would forget that it was racist to mention Willie Horton. Al Gore was the first politician to mention Horton, raising his name during a 1988 primary debate with Dukakis. But during the 2000 Democratic primary, when Bill Bradley tried pointing out to Democratic primary voters that Gore was the man who had injected Willie Horton into the 1988 presidential campaign, liberals decided it wasn’t racist after all and chose Gore as their presidential candidate.
What some might say is racist is the liberal idea that blacks should be required to defend the worst elements of their race. White people are never put in a position of having to defend white scum.
Timothy McVeigh? Sure, go ahead, kill him!
Jeffrey Dahmer? Kill him!
John Wayne Gacy? Kill him!
Robert Alton Harris? Kill him!
Why do blacks have to support Willie Horton? Who made that rule? It’s not as if white people were looking at Horton and saying, This shows what all blacks are like. What white people were saying was: This shows what idiot liberals like Michael Dukakis are like. As Alan Keyes said, when Democrats “look at Willie Horton they see a black man. When I look at him, I see a rapist and a murderer.”
The only reason the Democrats cried racism over the Willie Horton ads was that it was one of the greatest campaign issues of all time. The Massachusetts furlough program wasn’t an odd, extraneous little issue Dukakis got tagged with unfairly. Dukakis was almost a parody of the Democrats on crime. He had been given repeated opportunities to change course on furloughs—even on the precise issue of Willie Horton’s furlough. He could have apologized, met with Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller, signed a bill to deny furloughs to first-degree murderers, or simply refrained from criticizing the bill he finally did sign doing just that. But he wouldn’t do it. Dukakis didn’t even have someone on his staff to warn him, just in case you ever think about running for president, sir, you might want to tone down your gushing about furloughs for first-degree murderers. Horton was the essence, the heart, the alpha and omega of liberal ideas about crime and punishment, to wit: Release the guilty. Willie Horton showed the American people exactly what was wrong with liberal theories about crime.