Mugged (33 page)
Where to begin?
Goldwater did not “storm the GOP.” He was nominated after a contentious convention fight and went on to lose in a historic landslide, as a blunt, purist, abortion-supporting libertarian only the Cato Institute could love. Republicans got nothing from his candidacy and wouldn’t win the southern states he carried for another three decades, except in epic landslides.
Newsweek
’s other markers on the left’s racist
via dolorosa
are some of the most popular ones. They get traded in and out as the truth emerges, and then people forget what the truth was, so liberals can trot the discredited ones out again.
In 2002, the
New York Times
’s Bob Herbert cited four other liberal chestnuts, which, he claimed, proved that the “Republican Party has become a haven for white racist attitudes and anti-black policies.”
2
Excluding random name calling (“southern strategy”! “Dixiecrats”!), Herbert’s evidence against the Republicans was:
1.
“the Willie Horton campaign ad”
2.
“Bob Jones University”
3.
“[In] Reagan’s 1980 presidential run…his first major appearance in the general election campaign was in Philadelphia, Miss., which just happened to be the place where three civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney—were murdered in 1964.”
4.
“During that appearance, Mr. Reagan told his audience, ‘I believe in states’ rights.’”
How many times do we have to disprove these tall tales? Let’s go through them in chronological order.
PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI—1980
Reagan’s Philadelphia speech is classic Democratic princess-and-the-pea campaigning.
Romney is speaking in Chicago—what can I be offended about?
I’m working on it—give me a minute.
Hurry! I’m going on TV in thirty minutes. Where’s my indignation button?
I’ve got it! “How anyone can give a speech on the economy less than three weeks away from the fifty-seventh anniversary of Chicago native Emmett Till’s death! In Chicago, no less!”
During Obama’s 2008 campaign, doleful reminiscences of Reagan’s kickoff speech in Philadelphia reached an all-time election year high. Former president Jimmy Carter nearly brought Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to tears, saying:
“When [Reagan] made his speech in Philadelphia, I wept, because he expressed the essence of racial discrimination clearly.…And since then, the Deep South has been dominated by the Republican Party, using the race issue as a subtle and sometimes overt mechanism to gain a majority.…And I remember when my opponent in 1980 opened his campaign, Ronald Reagan, it was in the little town in Mississippi where the three civil rights workers were buried in a dam.”
3
Also, in 2008, Irv Randolph wrote in the
Philadelphia Tribune
that Republicans “have a well documented history of injecting race in presidential campaigns” and then gave as his case-in-chief (besides the GOP’s alluring “southern strategy”): “In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan called for states’ rights in a speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier.”
4
Roger Simon wrote in Politico.com of Republicans’ history of exploiting racial fears: “Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in 1980 by giving a speech at a county fair in Philadelphia, Miss, where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—had been murdered in 1964.”
5
(Wait until he finds out about Reagan introducing AIDS into the black community! Or was that Bush?)
On MSNBC’s
The Ed Show
in 2010, Bob Shrum, author of the lying, racism-accusing ad in the Maryland gubernatorial campaign, said, “You know, Ed, [opposing Obama] is perfectly appropriate for a Republican party, a modern Republican party, that’s driven out all the moderates and was born in the southern strategy. We all know what the southern strategy was about. Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where those civil rights workers were killed.”
6
As is evident, Reagan’s Philadelphia speech is a liberal folktale classic.
First, and least important, the speech wasn’t Reagan’s first major campaign speech. It was one of several summer events more than a month before the traditional Labor Day kickoff speech. That’s why the
Washington Post
headlined a September 1, 1980, article, “Candidates’ Labor Day Speeches Mark Start of Presidential Race,” stating: “The official campaign for America’s 48th presidential election begins today, with President Carter in his native South and Ronald Reagan wooing Democratic voters in the industrial East.”
7
Reagan’s opening day campaign speeches were given in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan.
Second, Reagan’s earlier, summertime, speech wasn’t in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three CORE workers were killed. It was at the Neshoba County fairgrounds, seven miles away. There happens to be a major state fair there every year. Contrary to what you may have thought, the state fair has nothing to do with the three CORE workers being killed several miles away in 1964.
But if we’re blaming politicians for hideous crimes that happened within several miles of the towns where they give speeches:
Obama kicked off his 2008 presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, where, just a few years earlier, Mark Winger had beaten his wife to death with a hammer and murdered a van driver after framing him for the crime.
Obama gave a major speech during the 2008 primaries to seventeen thousand people at the Reunion Arena in Dallas—the very town where John F. Kennedy was shot!
Obama, the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had, gave his 2008 convention speech in Denver, not far from where JonBenét Ramsey was murdered and a mass murder of schoolchildren in Columbine occurred.
If liberals truly believed there was something uniquely horrible about the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, why did Michael Dukakis give a campaign speech there during his 1988 presidential campaign?
8
Third, now that liberals have told us the symbolic value of where the opening day speech is given, guess where Jimmy Carter gave his while Reagan was in Liberty Park and Detroit?
Carter actually did kick off his campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama—home to the national headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
9
Yes, that would be the same Jimmy Carter weeping over Reagan’s “Philadelphia speech” on MSNBC in 2008. Carter kicked off his campaign in the town where the KKK was based. Then—not sixteen years earlier.
Reagan even made a crack about Carter’s choice of opening day venues, telling a man wearing a Carter mask in Detroit that he was supposed to be in Alabama “in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.”
10
The KKK responded by denouncing Reagan for using his jab at Carter to try and curry favor with black voters.
11
The remaining exhibit of Reagan’s racism for a speech (which was not his opening speech) at the Neshoba County Fair (which was not the site of the civil rights workers’ murders) was that Reagan mentioned…“states’ rights.” Obama’s official position on gun rights during the 2008 campaign was to say he supported states’ rights, and his reelection suck-up to gays on gay marriage is to say it’s a states’ rights issue. I guess “states’ rights” is no longer considered secret code for racism.
WILLIE HORTON—1988
The nadir of dirty campaigning is supposed to be the Willie Horton ad run by George H. W. Bush in 1988 against Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Willie Horton appears in textbooks only as an example of how race is used in an ugly way in American politics.
Evidently, most people do not remember the ad because liberals invoke it as if we all agree that it was obviously racist, and Republicans’ only response is to say, “Al Gore used Willie Horton first!”
The truth is: It was the greatest, fairest, most legitimate ad ever used in politics. Learn your history, Republicans.
The campaign ad described actual Dukakis policies that had effects on real people, clearly illustrating why Dukakis was the kind of left-wing loon who should never be let anywhere near the White House. It was so devastating that all liberals could do was to cry “racism.”
As governor, Michael Dukakis signed a bill eliminating the death penalty. Then, the wacky Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court—the same court that discovered a right to gay marriage in a document written in 1779 by John Adams, and that kept a manifestly innocent man, Gerald Amirault, in prison for eighteen years—ruled that prison furloughs had to be extended to first-degree murderers, who were never supposed to be released under any circumstances.
The whole idea of prison furloughs is to acclimate prisoners to life on the outside before their release back into the community. It’s for check-kiters, drug dealers, extortionists and other convicts serving a term of years—not first-degree murderers like Horton, who were never going to be reintroduced into the community. First, liberals tell you life in prison without possibility of parole is just as good as capital punishment, then they start giving weekends off to lifers. Even the overwhelmingly Democratic
Massachusetts legislature realized the court’s ruling was insane, and quickly passed a law prohibiting first-degree murderers from being furloughed.
With great fanfare and the enthusiastic support of the ACLU, Dukakis vetoed the bill. It was this precise veto, showily executed by Dukakis, that allowed a savage murderer, Willie Horton, to be released from prison.
The crime that had put Horton in prison was loathsome: He had robbed a gas station of about three hundred dollars and, after getting the money, stabbed the teenaged station attendant, Joseph Fournier, nineteen times then stuffed his body into a garbage can, where he was found by a friend. This was Horton’s second stint in prison, having earlier served time in South Carolina for attempted murder.
But under a furlough policy that existed solely because of Michael Dukakis, Horton was released from prison.
