Mugged (34 page)

While out of prison on his Dukakis-enabled furlough in 1987, Horton broke into a Maryland couple’s home, beat the man, Cliff Barnes; bound, blindfolded and gagged him; stabbed him twenty-two times; and then spent the next several hours raping and slashing Barnes’s fiancée, Angela Miller. Barnes listened to it all helplessly from the basement. Miller didn’t know if Cliff was dead or alive. Early the next morning, as Horton was raping Miller again, Barnes managed to escape and call the police—twelve hours after he had first encountered Horton in his home. Realizing Barnes had escaped, Horton fled in the couple’s Camaro and was captured after a shootout with the police.
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The Maryland judge who sentenced Horton—to two life terms—refused to return him to Massachusetts, saying he didn’t want to take the chance that Horton would ever be released again. Which was too bad, because Horton had dinner plans with Dukakis during the following month’s weekend furlough.

Everyone knew it was crazy to be springing first-degree murderers. Everyone except the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the ACLU…and the doctrinaire liberal nut the Democrats were running for president.

After their ordeal, Barnes and Miller flew to Boston to request a meeting with Dukakis. All they wanted was an apology and an explanation. But even after a convicted murderer had used his Dukakis-granted furlough to commit a barbarous crime, the governor refused to admit that furloughing remorseless murderers was a mistake. Dukakis hid from the couple and issued a statement reaffirming his strong support for furloughing first-degree murderers.

The Bush campaign thought voters should know about this. In one of the proudest moments in Republican election history, the campaign produced an ad describing the Dukakis furlough program—the perfect emblem of liberal idiocy on crime.

The furlough ad destroyed Dukakis. It exposed him as the kind of reflexive left-wing zealot who would do something stupid and get us all killed. Dukakis was one of the most ridiculous characters ever presented to the American people as a presidential candidate, and because of the Willie Horton ad, the voters knew it.

There was nothing the Democrats could do. As one Dukakis aide said to a reporter: “OK, you write our response to Willie Horton. You write the catchy phrase. You come up with the 30-second spot. You come up with the jingle. What are we supposed to say? That Horton wasn’t let out of prison and that he didn’t rape that woman? What the hell are we supposed to say?”
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First, Democrats tried lying. They falsely claimed prison furloughs were a Republican policy. It would be like saying prisons are a Republican policy. The issue wasn’t furloughs—and it wasn’t prisons—it was prison furloughs
for first-degree murderers
. No other state in the union had furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole. That was Dukakis’s innovation.

With no place to go, no stinging comebacks, no answers at all, liberals went to their old reliable charge: racism. For those of you who have ever been to our planet, it will not come as a surprise to learn that Horton was black.

But you wouldn’t know that from the Bush ad, which went to heroic lengths to hide Horton’s race. It certainly did not show a picture of Horton. Rather, in accordance with the stultifying politically correct codes of our day, the Bush campaign did everything possible to hide Horton’s race, to the point of showing a “revolving prison door” with all-white criminals passing through it. It was like an Aaron Sorkin production.

Horton’s photo did appear in a thirty-second commercial produced by a private group, but the scariest photo in that ad was the one of Dukakis. This ad was seen by about seven people: It ran only on cable and this was back in 1988, when public-access channels had larger audiences. The private group’s commercial described Dukakis’s furlough policy and Horton’s crimes. Only a liberal would imagine that Angela Miller and Cliff Barnes wouldn’t have minded being raped and tortured for twelve hours—if only Horton had been white!

And yet the Bush campaign commercial on Horton has gone down in liberal history as the most beastly, monstrous act of racist demagoguery in campaign history. As Peter Brimelow says: “A ‘racist’ is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal.” A Louis Harris poll taken in October 1988 showed that Dukakis’s furlough policy had influenced voters more than any other issue in the campaign.
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It was the greatest ad in political history, a one-sentence explanation of why people like Michael Dukakis should never be allowed to run any part of government. I’ll stop writing about the Horton ad when liberals stop lying about it and conservatives stop apologizing for it.

BUSH’S RESTRICTIVE COVENANT—1988

There was more race mongering against Bush for the Willie Horton ad than any racism in either of the Horton commercials. Five days before the election, the
Washington Post
ran a breathless article about a “whites only” restrictive covenant on a parcel of land owned by Vice President Bush.

Restrictive covenants have been unenforceable in this country since 1948, when the Supreme Court held them unconstitutional in
Shelley v. Kraemer
. The language of such covenants still appears on deeds, principally because, as a legal matter, no one knows how to get them removed. But any restrictive covenant is a dead letter, utterly meaningless. It would be like trying to enforce a contract for murder.

And yet days before the election, a column in the
Post
said that Bush’s deed “was not only dirty, it was illegal.” Needless to say, Bush quickly denied even knowing about the null and void covenant and denounced such restrictions as “repugnant.” But the crackerjack
Post
reporter droned on and on: “It is not ‘irrelevant.’ It is not legal. It is not smart. It is not cute.”
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If liberals spent less time looking for apocryphal constitutional provisions about abortion and ObamaCare, they might notice that there is an an actual Equal Protection Clause and accompanying case law.

BOB JONES—2000

The imbroglio over George W. Bush speaking at Bob Jones University was about that school’s policy against interracial dating. That may have been
silly. It may have been theologically incorrect. But it wasn’t racist. Whites couldn’t date people of other races every bit as much as blacks couldn’t date people of other races.

In fact, the policy had nothing to do with blacks at all. The issue arose when an Asian family threatened to sue the school back in the 1950s when their son met and almost married a white girl at the school. So the school banned interracial dating.
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Nonetheless, the school’s dating policy had been a liberal fixation for decades.
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Missing in action when there was real racism to fight, Democrats kicked into high gear for fake racism. Merely for speaking to these peaceful Christians in 2000, Bush was ritualistically censured and made to apologize. Which he did. A few months later BJU dropped its nonracist, utterly irrelevant policy banning interracial dating.

Yet that’s cited as proof of Republican “racism.”

BATTLE FLAG—2000

Like clockwork, every election year the Confederate flag becomes a major campaign issue. This always thrills the Democrats because it finally gives them an issue to run on: their new-found support for the Union side in the Civil War. Which Democrats opposed during the actual war.

Democrats love talking about the Confederate flag because they relish nothing more than being morally indignant. They can’t take the moral high ground on abortion, adultery, illegitimacy, the divorce rate, drugs, crime, a president molesting an intern and then lying to federal investigators—or anything else of any practical consequence. Democrats stake out a clear moral position only on the issue of slavery. Of course, when it mattered, they were on the wrong side of that, too.

Bush’s big moment of racism was to say, during the 2000 Republican primaries, that the people of South Carolina could decide for themselves what to do about the battle flag. In 2008, when Howard Dean said he wanted to “be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” no one had asked him—he just said it.

Bush hadn’t said anything about the Confederate flag, but NBC’s Brian Williams demanded that he take a position—coincidentally, just before the South Carolina primary.

In a breathtaking bit of legerdemain, John Edwards once said of the Confederate flag: “I had such a strong reaction to seeing it there, the first time.”
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Strong–good, or strong-bad? Journalists didn’t ask. Oh, to run for president as a Democrat.

The Confederate flag is a totally synthetic issue that liberals use to slander southerners and insult blacks. Liberals take sadistic pleasure in telling blacks that everyone hates them—except themselves. Trust no one but a liberal, the truest, most loyal friend anyone has ever had.

The Confederate flag is a reflection of the South’s warrior ethic that black Americans share more than white New Yorkers. Despite the media’s obsessive claims that the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, in 2001
about 30 percent of blacks in Mississippi voted to keep the 1894 state flag, which displays the Confederate flag in the upper left corner.

What is commonly known as the Confederate flag—by Vermonters, for example—is the Southern Cross, the battle flag Confederate troops carried into the field. It was not the official flag of the Confederacy and never flew over any Confederate buildings. It was the flag of the Confederate Army.

Confederate soldiers fought because they lived in the South—not because they held a brief for slavery. As the historian Shelby Foote described it: “You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn’t even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I’m fighting because you’re down here.”
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At an abstract level, of course, the war was about slavery, but that’s not why the soldiers fought. They didn’t own slaves—their honor is really inviolate. And they were spectacular soldiers.

The Confederate battle flag is a symbol of military valor, not racism. Although the South was outnumbered by the North in men of military age 4.4 to 1, was outgunned in firearms production 32 to 1, and had only one-third the wealth of the North, “the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic,” as David Hackett Fischer says in
Albion’s Seed
. In 1852, there was one militia officer for every 216 men in Massachusetts; there was one officer for every sixteen men in North Carolina.
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The Confederate soldiers also fought for Robert E. Lee, who was as much a symbol of the South as the battle flag. Lee opposed slavery and had freed all his slaves. He fought on the Confederate side because Virginia was his home. His men, many of them hungry and barefoot, followed him because of his personal qualities of honor and because they lived in the South, too. When General George Pickett rallied his men before their history-making charge at Gettysburg, all he needed to say was: “Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia.”

A small number of blacks served in the Confederate army, presumably for reasons other than their support of slavery. In February 2003, a Confederate funeral was held for Richard Quarls, a slave who had served in the Confederate States Army alongside his master’s son and fought in several battles. Quarls’s great-granddaughter said he was proud to be the only black person from Tarpon Springs to attend the 1916 National Convention of the United Confederate Veterans in Washington, DC, where he saw the
president. He drew a Confederate soldier’s pension, which his wife continued receiving until her death in 1951. When he was freed, after the war, Quarls changed his name to Christopher Columbus.

The 2003 memorial service was organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy after Quarls’s unmarked grave was discovered. Though Quarls had died in 1925, the service was packed, with about a hundred fifty people attending, including Quarls’s descendants, community leaders, Civil War reenactors and Confederate daughters. Also attending was Quarls’s great-great-great-grandson, Michael Brown, an enlisted man in the U.S. Air Force. They sang “Dixie.” Quarls’s great-granddaughter told the newspapers: “He was a proud man and would have been honored to see this.”
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It is the proud military heritage of the South that the Confederate flag represents—a heritage that belongs to all southerners, black and white. The whole country’s military history is shot through with southerners. Obviously boys from all over fought in this country’s wars, and fought bravely, but it is simply a fact that southerners are overrepresented in this country’s heroic annals.