Free Republic

EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT WILLIE HORTON IS BULL “One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” —Joe Biden, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, bragging Democrats were tougher than Republicans on criminals, 1990 The nation’s 2022 top-tier fear is crime. Three quarters of Americans say violent crime is a major problem, and getting worse. Democrats’ cashless bail laws, attacks on police, and other liberal soft-on-crime policies have unleashed unrestrained criminality across the country, particularly in Democrat-run cities, where dangerous criminals are no longer locked up in jail. At all. “Arrested-and-released” is now the most...

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), running against Mehmet Oz for the state’s open United States Senate seat, is worse than failed Democrat presidential candidate Michael Dukakis when it comes to freeing violent criminals from prison, Kimberly Guilfoyle says.In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, Guilfoyle blasted Fetterman as a “dangerous” choice to fill Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat as a crime wave sweeps the state and nation.“It’s appalling to me the number of murderers, people who have committed violent crimes that [John Fetterman] has actually let out … that’s what people don’t get — he’s a very...

At seventy years old, Willie Horton is serving multiple lifetime sentences in a Maryland prison. His case was once famous enough that we can be reasonably certain that this recidivist monster will never again be released to commit another crime. The nation is safe from Willie Horton. But the Democratic Party should not be. Thirty-three years ago, this generally unremarkable piece of detritus provided an important lesson to the American electorate....

Let this sink in—under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo—who is being hailed as the next great thing in Democratic presidential politics, the New York State prison system just released eight sex offenders from jail. Three of these inmates had been convicted of raping children. So, while liberals race to save prison inmates from coronavirus, we are releasing sexual deviants back into the community to rape again. Law Enforcement Today has learned from Breitbart News that this weekend in Monroe County, New York, the jail freed more than 50 inmates from custody as part of the state’s legalized jailbreak program sponsored by the Department of...

HW’s passing was met with what always greets the passing of a Republican – a rehashing of liberal grievances against them. The most popular liberal grievance against Bush was the famous “Willie Horton ad” in the 1988 campaign. Liberals declared it to be racist, even though nothing about the ad was untrue, and blamed Bush for it, even though it was run by an outside group and not by the Bush campaign or with their blessing. The Bush campaign ran a different ad about the Massachusetts furlough program that did not mention Horton at all. Still, liberals spent the weekend...

In an otherwise observant Politico article, “The Death of Clintonism,” Todd Purdum unwittingly reminded conservative readers why they distrust the major media. For the article, Purdum interviewed Elaine Kamarck, a senior domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton whose White House Purdum covered as a reporter. Having been around long enough to remember George W. H. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, Purdum and Kamarck have no excuse for misrepresenting the campaign’s most decisive ad. The subject of the ad was Dukakis’s support of his state’s insane furlough program for convicted killers as a form of criminal rehabilitation. The...

Actually the Democrats have been race baiting for decades. And it’s not going away. Using fear and race-polarizing agitation to drive minority voters to the polls is going to be the increasingly overt face of the Democratic Party. They can’t win any other way. What’s new is that the mainstream media has suddenly discovered all of this.Through the years, these same news outlets have wasted no time at all in spotting anything that even hints of Republican race baiting. Take the presidential campaign of 1988.Willie Horton was a black murder convict who raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend...

Is Kesler Dufrene Barack Obama’s Willie Horton? He should be. Remember Horton? Furloughed for the weekend from a Massachusetts prison Horton, a convicted killer, brutalized a couple, stabbed the man and raped his fiancé twice. Presidential candidate Al Gore exposed the furlough fiasco in a Presidential Candidate Debate with Michael Dukakis, .... Kesler Dufrene, on the other hand, is the direct responsibility of President Obama... According to North Miami detectives, a twice-convicted felon and Haitian illegal alien whose deportation was stayed by the Obama administration murdered three people, including a 15-year-old girl last year. Though an immigration judge ordered that...

In advance of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech Wednesday to the NAACP, a liberal group headed by a former New York Times reporter and ex-Media Matter executive have produced a video “satire” that claims blacks don’t like Romney, who they dub so white he makes “Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel.” The YouTube from “The Message,” an online “media hub,” is described as a satirical video of Romney getting advice on what to say to the civil rights group. Or, as they said in a release, the video “lacerates Romney and his advisors as they prepare for his speech to...

After weeks of keeping himself in the headlines and growing more explicit about his intentions to run for president in 2012, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee touted himself as the Republican front-runner, The Hill reports. Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Huckabee attempted to remain elusive about his presidential ambitions, but showed he is closely watching his poll numbers. "I end up leading a lot of the polls," Huckabee said. "I'm the Republican that clearly at this point does better against Obama than any other Republican." About his presidential run, Huckabee added: "I haven't closed the door. I think that would...

There is no need to tiptoe gingerly around this topic: Maurice Clemmons, who was shot and killed as authorities tried to apprehend him for the shooting deaths of four Washington police officers - is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's Willie Horton. Horton, you might recall, is the convicted killer who raped a woman while wrongly released as part of a prison furlough program supported by former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis - thus helping to torpedo the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee's bid for the White House. The Clemmons' story likewise should kill any chance of Huckabee winning, should he run in...

The man wanted in this morning's shooting deaths of four Washington State police officers was granted clemency by then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee nine years ago.

Commuted sentence citing his "young age" at the time...

THE GRATING COMMUNICATOR October 21, 2009 The Obama administration has attacked Fox News in order to prevent government corruption stories broken on Fox from bleeding into the other media, which are all-consumed with daily updates on Levi Johnston's Playgirl spread and Carrie Prejean's breast implants. That's understandable. But I think the administration should have picked someone other than David Axelrod to deliver the claim that Fox News is "not really news," inasmuch as Axelrod was behind the leak of scurrilous allegations in Jack Ryan's sealed divorce papers when he was running for a Senate seat against Obama. Talk about vicious...

Another great misconception is on its way to becoming translated into a great, liberal lie that must be confronted before it becomes part of the political landscape of lies that are repeated over and over again – and believed by a body politic that doesn’t think for themselves. Here are just a few of the backdrop of hundreds of liberal lies that come quickly to mind.

Former Gov. Michael Dukakis said Monday that John McCain's presidential campaign is using the same race-based tactics that were used against him in the 1988 presidential run...

This week's Fox News Watch was a mix of the candid, the intriguing and the downright funny. Let's start with the humor. Good-hearted liberal panel member Jane Hall, wringing her hands over the fact that the Wright matter has injected race into the campaign, got off this bit of unintentional comedy. JANE HALL: Unfortunately, this is going to be what's going to be associated [with Obama]. I mean, it's like Willie Horton, except that Obama knew Reverend Wright. So it's unfair to pin this Wright stuff on Obama, except for the fact that it's . . . fair. View video...

By Christopher CookThe National Campaign Fund has produced a devastating campaign ad exposing Barack Obama's weakness on matters of crime, and positing questions about his potential conduct in waging the War on Terror. The ad can be viewed at the site ExposeObama.com.After you've watched it, check out these headlines, culled from a single day of reporting on the ad: How Republicans Plan on Ganging Up on Obama for Being "Weak" on Street Gangs Obama Gets the Willie Horton Treatment Breaking... Obama "Swiftboating" Plan Revealed Conservatives rolling out attack ads aimed at Obama, supporters Willie Horton Mastermind Takes Aim at Obama...

The political operative behind the Willie Horton ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race is releasing a new ad this week targeting Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama. Floyd Brown, a longtime conservative strategist who heads the conservative National Campaign Fund, said he is launching the ad to expose Obama’s weakness on gang violence. “The ad draws a parallel between Obama’s weakness on gang violence and the war on terror,” said Brown. Brown is the former head of Citizens United, which claims to be the largest political action group for conservatives in the United States. In...

Democrats have been playing the race card against Republicans for decades, so it should come as no surprise that race has become an issue in a contest with a black candidate running for president. However, Hillary Clinton’s “Willie Horton” campaign against Barack Obama has shocked most Americans and broken open a wide rift in the Democratic Party. For those who might not remember, during the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H. W. Bush ran ads against Democrat Michael Dukakis that featured the face of Willie Horton, an African-American man. While Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Horton, a convicted murderer, was...