Ann Coulter: "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. …
The Horton ad was the highest, best form of political campaigning, serving to illustrate stark differences between the candidates on an important policy issue." …….
Just so.
BTW, It's amazing how the Mass. Supreme Court was able to find a Murderer's Right to Weekend Passes in a Constitution written by John Adams.
It's not Law--it's Anti-Law.
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