by Ann Coulter
But when Dukakis lost, a whole myth had to be created about the racist Willie Horton ads. Whenever Democrats lose—especially to people as stupid as they say Republicans are—they claim they were cheated somehow. Liberals would spend the next decade trying to persuade Americans that they were bigots who had fallen prey to the ugly racist tactics of the Bush campaign. The transmitter of all liberal idiocy, Michael Moore, summarized what liberals think of Americans in Bowling for Columbine when he said, “[W]hether you’re a psychotic killer or running for president of the United States, the one thing you can always count on is white America’s fear of the black man”—as evidenced by Michael Moore, who has done everything possible to avoid contact with them.
Even before Dukakis lost the 1988 election, liberals were hard at work setting up the argument that Bush won because of the racist Willie Horton ads. At a Republican press conference before the election to discuss Dukakis’s record on crime, national defense, and fiscal policy, Bush’s spokesmen showed three campaign ads, with Governor John Sununu, Senator Arlen Specter, and former senator John Tower on hand to answer questions. But the reporters only wanted to ask about the unfairness of the Willie Horton ad based on their entire knowledge of the case, which they had gleaned from Dukakis campaign press releases. Here’s a sample of press questions about the Horton ad:
QUESTION: Senator Specter, Democrats suggest—Reverend Jackson said it only a few minutes ago—that the Willie Horton situation and the furlough situation bears the opportunity or the risk to polarize the entire country, and that while the Bush-Quayle team maintains that this is not something to sow the seeds or bring up bad blood, that this is exactly what’s going on and it should be stopped. What do you have to say to that?
SEN. SPECTER: Well, as I understand it, Governor Dukakis and his key campaign aides have moved off the issue of racism…. Racism just isn’t in this issue, just isn’t in this campaign.
Everybody wants to have security on the streets and in their homes….
QUESTION: Senator Specter, to follow up if you can on this Willie—you didn’t show us the Willie Horton spot but you’ve used it. Don’t you think the use of that picture, whether or not it is originally intended, can be seen as a racial overtone to this spot?
SEN. SPECTER: … I do not think that is a fair characterization; you can judge for yourself. But the Bush-Quayle campaign has not depicted race in any way, shape, or form, either as to any culprit from the furlough program, or any victim of such a culprit.
QUESTION: Senator, I experienced stonewalling from the Federal Bureau of Prisons when I asked about furloughs and they withheld totally details on transfer furloughs. Point number 9, here on page 3, says that Angel Medrano is not on furlough. Was he not on a transfer furlough, which is one of the furlough programs of the Federal Bureau of Prisons?
BUSH STAFF: We can do that right now. According to the Bureau of Prisons, Medrano was not on furlough.
QUESTION: Was he escorted?
BUSH STAFF: He was in a—he escaped from a halfway house.
GOV. SUNUNU: There’s an important point. What was the charge under which Medrano was being imprisoned?
QUESTION: That’s not my point.
BUSH STAFF: It was drugs. He was not imprisoned for murder. QUESTION: Isn’t that the exact same thing? .. .
SEN. SPECTER: No. No. That is not the same thing.’
And then there were thirty seconds left for John Tower to answer questions about national defense.
Whatever else voters knew about Willie Horton in 1988, one thing the media didn’t want them to know about was his crimes. In the entire Nexis archives for 1988, the only place you will find a detailed description of what Horton did to Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller is in a press conference that Barnes had to hold himself—and where reporters repeatedly asked him if he was a racist. A search for the words “Willie Horton and the Maryland couple” produces 219 documents on Nexis. A search for the words “Willie Horton and Joey Fournier” produces 219 documents. But run the words “Willie Horton and racism,” and Nexis tells you, “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 1,000 documents.”
Reporters were more interested in getting Horton’s side of the story. So many reporters wanted to interview Horton that he needed an aide to help him field media requests. (Full disclosure: For a brief period in 1989 Willie Horton and I shared the same publicist.) Even Horton knew Dukakis couldn’t win—though he did support Dukakis for president. Talking about his attack on the Maryland couple in the same abstract way liberals talk about 9/11, Horton said, “It occurred at the most unopportune time for me and Dukakis.”
And yet books have been written on how the media played right into Bush’s hands on the Willie Horton matter. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a 3,000-word treatise—which she turned into a book—about how the Bush campaign played the media like a fiddle with the Willie Horton issue, “insinuat[ing] an entire vocabulary about the campaign into press coverage.”
For example, Jamieson claims it was a Bush administration dirty trick to get the media to call him “Willie Horton”—she refers to him only as “William Horton.” As proof that “Willie” was a cruel invention of the Republicans, Jamieson cites the following facts: “[H]is given name is William, he calls himself William, court records cite him as William, a July 1988 Reader’s Digest article identifies him as William J. Horton, Jr., and press reports prior to the Republican ad and speech blitz name him `William.’ ” I’m pretty sure what really caught people’s attention about the Horton case was his rape and torture of Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller while on furlough from a life sentence—and not that his name was “Willie.”
In any event, except for the claim about what “he calls himself,” these are all restatements of the same manifestly obvious fact: Horton’s given name is “William.” I assume everyone grasped this without Jamieson’s laborious exegesis. Of course prison records referred to Horton as “William,” and for that reason, so would early news accounts. That’s his legal name. Orenthal James Simpson’s court records don’t refer to him as “O.J.”
Jamieson’s only real claim is that Horton called himself “William.” First of all, how on earth does she know? Did she interview his cellblock buddies? Do a phone survey of Horton’s surviving victims? Unless Horton is an aspiring host for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it doesn’t exactly ring true. “Bill” we might have believed—but “William”? No. In fact, in an interview with liberal columnist Jimmy Breslin the day of Bush’s inauguration, Horton refers to himself in the third person as “Willie Horton.”
According to Jamieson, another example of the media’s pro-Bush bias was the constant reference to “weekend furloughs.” Jamieson indignantly reports that Horton was actually released on a 48-hour furlough that began on a Friday, “which means he should have returned to prison while most of us were still enjoying what we usually define as a weekend.” No doubt most Americans would have approved of the furloughs had they realized that. What was invidious about the “weekend furloughs” phrase, Jameison said, was that “weekend is a time for recreation and leisure. This association suggests that the assault and rapes were leisure activities for the prisoners.” In fact, of course, the prisoners spent their furloughs reading the New York Times, having brunch, and taking in a Woody Allen movie at the Beekman like everyone else. Again, I think what people had a problem with was the fact that rapists and murderers were being released from prison at all, not whether the furloughs ended on a Sunday or a Monday.
Jamieson was appalled that Bush lackeys over at the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, CBS, and MacNeil/Lehrer used words like slashed, terrorized, and tortured to describe what Horton did to the Maryland couple. Such words, she said, “are not the words usually used by reporters to characterize crime” (especially when they’re describing counterfeiting, bribery, and fraud cases). Compared with a
detailed accounting of what Horton actually did to the Maryland couple, words like terrorized and tortured are sweet euphemisms, like saying “Hitler subdued the Sudetenland.” Apparently, Jamieson thinks reporters should have said Horton “interviewed,” “met with,” or “chatted with” the Maryland couple.
Most peculiar coming from a good progressive like Jamieson, she was indignant that reporters did not stress the fact that at the time of the attack, Barnes and Miller were living in sin! According to Jamieson, only pro-Bush bias in the press could explain why reporters did not muddy up the victims by pointing out that the couple only married sometime after Horton’s attack. She even provided a list of the worst offenders.
This was the same press that used some variation of the word racist nearly ten times more (295) than Cliff Barnes’s name (30) in news stories about Willie Horton in 1988. While Jamieson was indignant about news stories that referred to a 48-hour furlough that began on Friday as a “weekend furlough,” she seemed to miss media lies that fell more within the accepted definition of lie, such as that Dukakis inherited the furlough program from a Republican governor or that other states had the same furlough program.
In a rash act of journalism, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the newspaper in the town where Joey Fournier had been murdered, ran a major series on Dukakis’s furlough program. Unaware that good reporting consists of writing about Jeff Gannon week after week (see Frank Rich) or calling Bush “Bushie” (Maureen Dowd), the reporters produced nearly 200 factual articles about the Massachusetts furlough program. The Eagle-Tribune’s coverage was widely credited with ending furloughs in Massachusetts for first-degree murderers. Even the Pulitzer committee broke a long-standing tradition of ignoring good journalism and awarded the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for the series.
Journalism professors attacked the series as the “journalistic version of a lynching,” in the words of Bruce Porter, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. There were sleazy maneuvers available to the reporters that they did not use! As an example of the slipshod reporting, Porter noted that “the paper never mentioned that furlough programs had been created in 1972 under a Republican governor, Francis Sargent, or that first-degree murderers were ruled eligible for it by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1973.” For failing to reprint Dukakis campaign press releases, the Eagle-Tribune had committed “outrageous errors”—or as normal people would say, it was “bristling with facts.”
The liberal hysteria on Willie Horton was so intense that the lead author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series disavowed the prize. Susan Forrest, now a reporter with New York Newsday, said she was “ashamed” of her work on Massachusetts’s furlough program. She added that when the prize was announced, “there was a party and I didn’t even go. Deep down I never felt I deserved it.” I’m sure Comrade Stalin will give her a fair trial.
The Democrats ran a man for president who had released a violent lunatic from prison despite a life sentence. But instead of Republicans raising Willie Horton constantly to say, This is the same Democratic Party that released Willie Horton, it’s Republicans who are supposed to be embarrassed by Willie Horton. The reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Massachusetts furloughs leading to a change in the law retracted her work. The rewriting of history was complete.
4
THE HOLIEST SACRAMENT: ABORTION
No liberal cause is defended with more dishonesty than abortion. No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time—undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals—the single most important item on the Democrats’ agenda is abortion. Indeed, abortion is the one issue the Democratic Party is willing to go to war over—except in the Muslim world, which is jam-packed with prohibitions on abortion, because going to war against a Muslim nation might also serve America’s national security objectives. To a liberal, 2,200 military deaths in the entire course of a war in Iraq is unconscionable, but 1.3 million aborted babies in America every year is something to celebrate.
The Orwellian dishonesty about abortion begins with the Left’s utter refusal to use the word abortion. It would be as if members of the National Rifle Association refused to use the word gun. These “pro-choicers” treat abortion the way Muslims treat Mohammed: It’s so sacred, it must not be mentioned. Instead we get a slew of liberal euphemisms for baby-killing: “reproductive freedom,” “a woman’s right to control her own body,” “terminating a pregnancy,” “freedom of choice,” “a woman’s own private medical decision,” “a procedure,” “access to health care,” “family planning,” “our bodies, our selves,” “choice.” Choice is important when it comes to killing babies, but not so much when it comes to whom you hire, whom you associate with, what you think about evolution, how much gas your car consumes, how much water comes out of your bathroom showerhead…. The only other practice that was both defended and unspeakable in America like this was slavery. There are three indirect references to slavery in the Constitution, but the words slave and slavery never appear.
The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media will only refer to partial birth abortion as “what its opponents refer to as partial birth abortion.” What do its supporters call it? Casual Fridays? Bean with-bacon potato-chip dip? Uh … Steve? “Partial birth abortion” isn’t some meaningless, poll-tested name, like “assault weapon.” It’s a straightforward legal description of the procedure that is to be prohibited by law. If there were a better name for it, you can be sure the New York Times would use it.
The 2003 partial birth abortion ban enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bush defines a “partial birth abortion” as an abortion in which the person performing the abortion
deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus.
As one can see, actual descriptions of partial birth abortion do not tend to help the pro-abortion side. “Partial birth abortion” is the euphemism.
In 1995, 60 Minutes set out to prove there was no such thing as “a partial birth abortion.” Ed Bradley asked Colorado abortionist Warren Hern what the term meant.
BRADLEY: What is a partial-birth abortion?
DR. HERN: Well, I’m not really sure I know. The—there’s no such thing in the medical literature.
BRADLEY: Would most doctors in this country know what a partial…
DR. HERN: No, there’s no such thing.
BRADLEY: It doesn’t exist?
DR. HERN: No.
BRADLEY: So where does this term come from?
DR. HERN: Propaganda term. It’s a political term; has no medical meaning.’
This is as opposed to precise medical terms, like choice and back alley abortions. This is pure sophistry, along the lines of liberals pretending not to know what liberal means. Battery and sexual assault aren’t “medical” terms, either. They’re legal terms, descriptions of what the law prohibits. The fact that the medical community has not dignified this particular form of infanticide with a name doesn’t mean legislatures can’t ban it.
60 Minutes also sought to assure viewers that despite all the hullabaloo about partial birth abortion—whatever the hell that is—such abortions were extremely rare, performed only in extenuating circumstances. You know, like pregnancy. Consider the lunacy of both denying that “partial birth abortions” exist and then discussing the frequency of that nonexistent procedure. Bradley interviewed two women who had had partial birth abortions on horribly deformed babies who could not have lived outside the womb. One woman told Bradley, “In terms of mi
sinformation, the biggest one is that they are—there are thousands and thousands of these abortions being done in the third trimester on normal babies with healthy mothers carrying normal babies. Well, if that’s the case, where are they?” Yes, indeed. Why aren’t more of these dead babies speaking up?
In a voiceover, Bradley then said that Helen Alvare, spokeswoman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, “wouldn’t tell us where they are, but she insists they are there.” In fact, Alvare did better than tell Bradley “where they are”: she quoted the man credited with inventing partial birth abortions, Martin Haskell, who told American Medical News that 80 percent of the partial birth abortions he performs are “purely elective.” At this, Bradley asked Alvare, “Why is this interview with Dr. Haskell so important?”
Bolstering the claim that partial birth abortions are extremely rare, Bradley insisted, “Of the one and a half million abortions performed every year, only a tiny percentage, somewhere between 600 and 1,000, are performed in the third trimester of pregnancy.” To talk only about how many abortions are performed in the “third trimester” is just another way of lying about abortion. It is like talking about only the number of partial birth abortions performed by left-handed abortionists with hairy moles on their faces. The third trimester begins at 26 weeks. Babies can take a breath outside the womb at around 19 weeks. At 14 weeks, they have eyes, ears, hair, toes, fingers, and fingernails. I think what repels most people about partial birth abortions (or “casual Friday”) is the fact that that baby is having its brains suctioned out.