Ann Coulter: Bush’s Finest 30 Seconds—The Willie Horton Ad

See, earlier, from 2006:The Fulford File: Ann Coulter On Willie Horton, Joey Fournier—And What Life Is Really Like

The press in America is even worse than we imagine. We sense that they’re biased and stunningly incompetent. They are those things, but so much more. Our media’s version of the news is mathematically and precisely the opposite of the truth.

The death and burial of George H.W. Bush is only the latest example.

In the puffery and revisionism that accompany funerals, the man who gave us David Souter, an unnecessary war, tax hikes he promised not to impose and the Americans With Disabilities Act (aka The Destruction of Small Libraries Throughout New England Act) has been elevated to saintlike status.

But the one incident the media decided to excoriate Bush for was, in fact, his finest moment: the Willie Horton ad.

If we let the media get away with this, they will have once again redefined what constitutes acceptable discourse in America and cemented the notion that our political process should never be soiled by such a campaign ad—the one thing Bush got right in his entire public career.

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.Read more >>