Republicans may not have figured everything out when it comes to controlling crime, but Democrats have figured out nothing. We must maintain constant vigilance over the criminal justice system, because no matter how often liberals are caught coddling criminals, they always will go right back to it when no one's watching.

Even after the complete failure of liberal policies on crime in the sixties and seventies, and the success of conservative policies on crime beginning in the eighties, liberals are itching to start springing criminals again. Attempts to rehabilitate liberals on this are futile. It's in their DNA. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who followed the spectacularly successful mayor Rudy Giuliani, knows the one thing he can't touch is the Giuliani crime policy. So liberals are biding their time, waiting for Bloomberg to be term-limited out of office. By then, the insanity of the Dinkins years will be a distant memory—no memory at all for the recently arrived New Yorkers who moved in after Giuliani made the city safe again. As soon as Bloomberg is out and a Democrat is in, the ACLU will be back again, hamstringing law enforcement, bringing endless police brutality cases, and setting violent predators free. (How does "Mayor Mumia Abu-Jamal"

sound to you?)

Liberals believe it is important to never, ever punish criminals because—well, I'm not sure why. They produce a constantly scrolling list of reasons: The perpetrator is too young; the perpetrator is too old; the perpetrator has been rehabilitated; the perpetrator will not be rehabilitated in prison; similarly situated perpetrators got a different sentence; the perpetrator wrote a children's book; the perpetrator was making a statement about 20

society; the perpetrator says he didn't do it (and we're too busy writing him mash notes to look at the evidence); the perpetrator was on cold medication when he raped, murdered, and cannibalized a family of four.

Liberals complain about the cruel injustice of disparate sentences, but then they turn around and howl with indignation when legislatures try to implement some degree of consistency by imposing mandatory minimums. They say overcrowded prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, but they always oppose building more prisons. Voters are sternly advised how much new prisons will "cost the taxpayer." When the voters still want to build more prisons anyway, politicians are attacked for "pandering" to voters on crime.

Needless to say, the death penalty is always verboten, except in the narrow case of Enron executives or clothing designers who use fur. Liberals just keep moving fast and talking loudly so you can never nail them on one reason.

Liberals say:

• We're the only modern democracy with the death penalty.

I think this should be treated as a selling point: "Come to the United States for the economic opportunity, stay because we fry our Ted Bundys!" Among our many other unique characteristics are these: We're the only modern democracy founded on a belief that all men are created equal; we're the only modern democracy that fought a revolution to redeem that idea and a civil war to prove it; we're the only modern democracy that nearly single-handedly smashed Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia; of all modern democracies, we are the wealthiest, most productive, most religious, and most charitable.'

Do liberals want us to apologize for that, too? While we're at it, I note that we're also the only modern democracy to spurn nuclear power. How about we fire up the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station again and then talk about the death penalty? (Also, incidentally, Japan has the death penalty.)

• innocent men will be executed.

Apparently not. Death penalty opponents would love nothing more than to produce the case of an innocent person who has been executed in this country, but after decades of fanatical research going back more than half a century, they have not been able to find a single one. The last time liberals claimed to have examples of executed men later "proved innocent," attorneys Stephen Markman and Paul Cassell reviewed the cases and found that "proof of innocence" included the word of the executed murderer; any confession by another murderer, no matter how preposterous the claim; defense counsel's bald allegations in opening statements supported by no evidence at trial; and the innocence of a fictional character in a novel that was based on a true crime—even though the author himself repeatedly stated that his book was a work fiction and he believed the real defendant to have been guilty.'

The death penalty does not deter.

How do liberals know? This is an article of faith, not a statement of empirical fact. If the death penalty doesn't deter murder, how come Michael Moore is still alive and I'm not on death row? In the forties and fifties, before the courts started halting executions on the 21

basis of the judges' personal opposition to the death penalty, murder was rare.3 As soon as the Supreme Court declared the death penalty "unconstitutional" in 1972, the murder rate soared and has only begun to come down as capital sentences have been gradually reintroduced. Of course the death penalty might deter a little more effectively if the average time spent on death row were not nearly a decade or if death row inmates were not more likely to die of causes other than execution while awaiting their executions.

When convicts on death row are dying of old age, we may be a few tweaks short of an effective deterrent.

It is applied unfairly.

This is as opposed to murder and rape, which are distributed among the general population according to a complex formula ensuring fairness and proportionality. Any system of justice that allows compassion, discretion, and leniency will lead to wildly divergent sentences for seemingly similar crimes. For consistency, you want something like the Taliban's Sharia law. Anyone found guilty of homosexuality under Sharia law has a wall dropped on him. End of story.

Capital punishment must be suspended until the exact same percentages of blacks and whites are executed.

What if they don't commit the same number of murders? And how do we compare one murder case with the next? There are all sorts of factors that go into the imposition of the death penalty: pre-meditation, multiple murders, the killing of a police officer, torture, accompanying crimes, the background of the defendant, prior record, provocation, acceptance of responsibility, and on and on and on. As it stands, white murderers already receive more death sentences than black murderers4—a fact attested to by the current liberal complaint that the death penalty is racist because the system values the lives of white victims more than the lives of black victims. Murderers, it seems, behave much like the University of Michigan admissions committee and take race into account when choosing their victims. Thus, blacks are more likely to murder blacks and whites are more likely to murder whites. The only way to "value" the lives of black victims more is to start executing more black murderers. No matter what the facts, the death penalty can always be described as "racist": Either we're executing more black murderers than white murderers or we're executing more murderers of whites than of blacks. And so it is, by people who don't care whether or not the death penalty is racist, but simply op-pose the death penalty in all cases.

It's a primitive act of retribution.

I'm not sure we need to be lectured on "primitive" behavior by the people who defend abortion on demand and suicide bombers, but eating and bathing are also "primitive"

acts. The fact that something has been embraced by many cultures over a long period of time is generally not an argument against its practice. What is "primitive" about being arraigned, formally charged, tried, and convicted by a jury, having that conviction upheld on appeal, and then being executed in a far gentler manner than their victims? Far from primitive, this is the deliberative, sane act of an advanced civilization protecting itself from predators. If anything, modern execution methods are too humane ("Okay, it will 22

only sting for a minute, Mr. Bundy....").

• Life in prison spent thinking about the crime is worse than death.

Evidently not to the murderers on death row who regularly fight their executions tooth and nail. But just so we understand: Is the problem here that the death penalty is too humane or not humane enough?

• It diminishes us as a society.

Unlike abortion and the president's being serviced by a White House intern, which elevates us as a society.

These aren't just nuts being interviewed by Fox News's Bill O'Reilly. People who believe it's unfair to punish criminals used to be a majority on the Supreme Court. The heyday of liberal activism on the Supreme Court was from 1953 to 1969, with the Warren Court re-making criminal law to benefit criminals. Hundreds of thousands of violent criminals were unleashed on society, where they could commit more rapes and murders.

Liberal ideas on crime led like night into day to skyrocketing crime rates in the sixties and seventies. It is impossible to calculate the blood on the hands of Supreme Court justices whose personal view was that it is unfair to punish the guilty. (On the plus side, pervasive outrage over leniency toward criminals gave rise to awesome movies like Charles Bronson's Death Wish and Clint East-wood's Dirty Harry movies.) Soon after liberals got control of the Supreme Court, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional—as were laws against loitering and vagrancy. The Court suddenly discovered a constitutional right to a taxpayer-funded lawyer in the 1963 case Gideon v.

Wainwright. Today, a foreigner being tried for the murder of his American wife and child can demand that U.S. taxpayers pay for his lawyers and private investigators. As long as everything's paid for, there is no reason for even the manifestly guilty not to waste everyone's time and money on a trial.

In 1961, the Court announced the ever-popular exclusionary rule in Mapp v. Ohio, requiring that evidence obtained "illegally" by the police be banned from trial. The exclusionary rule is among the strangest policies ever concocted by the Court: In order to vindicate the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the criminal goes free. How about punishing the misbehaving policeman? How about docking his pay?

Why do random citizens have to be raped, robbed, and murdered because of a policeman's misconduct? This would be like a rule intended to reduce noise during an opera that mandated shooting the soprano whenever anyone in the audience coughed. Although, given the damage the exclusionary rule does to society, it's more like shooting the audience if the soprano coughs.

In a series of cases culminating in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Warren Court completely eviscerated criminal confessions. Despite the myth of people constantly confessing to crimes they didn't commit—and who among us hasn't copped to a random murder or armed robbery we didn't commit during a moment of weakness?—there are few better methods of distinguishing the guilty from the innocent than a confession.

There are some facts only the perpetrator could possibly know, such as where the body is 23

buried. But this tool was taken away from the police, not because of anything in the Constitution but because liberal justices believed confessions caused our system of justice to "suffer morally."

Writing for the majority in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), Justice Arthur Goldberg quoted John Henry Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law: "As Dean Wigmore so wisely said: `[A]ny system of administration which permits the prosecution to trust habitually to compulsory self-disclosure as a source of proof must itself suffer morally thereby.' "

And so the Court issued a series of opinions that ensured provably guilty criminals would be put back on the streets, rather than al-lowing our system of justice to "suffer morally." Also in Escobedo, the Court held it was unconstitutional to continue to question a suspect the moment he requested a lawyer. In Massiah v. United States (1964), the Court held that it was unconstitutional to use informants to investigate a suspect released on bail, because any incriminating statements made to a police informant would be made in the absence of a lawyer. And in Miranda, the Court held it unconstitutional for the police to question a suspect without first reciting a speech guaranteed to prevent the suspect from confessing.

Ernesto A. Miranda was a rapist who had admitted to kidnapping and rape in a written confession after two hours of questioning by the police. He was convicted of the crimes, but in a 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court threw out the written confession of a rapist because he was not clearly informed of his right to a lawyer before they questioned him. In 1996, NBC News's Tom Brokaw informed his TV audience that Republicans don't care about rape.5 At least we would have locked up Ernesto Miranda the first time.

(He was eventually re-convicted in a retrial.)

At the outset of the Warren Court's campaign to outlaw criminal confessions, Justice Goldberg had proclaimed that confessions were not "reliable"—a position he ascertained not from facts or evidence but from a bald assertion about "the lesson of history" that "a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the 'confession' will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently se-cured through skillful investigation." (I've got a confession to make right here and now: I think Justice Goldberg had a few screws loose.) If it were reliability the Court was worried about, the confession in Brewer v.

Williams (1977) should have warmed their hearts. In Brewer, a suspected child-murderer, Robert Williams, voluntarily led the police to the body of his murder victim. That's about as reliable as it gets. Williams was being driven in a police car from Davenport, Iowa, where he was apprehended, back to Des Moines, where a little girl, ten-year-old Pamela Powers, had been abducted. Before setting out on the trip, Williams had been warned by three policemen and two lawyers that he had a right not to talk to the police during the drive—pursuant to the full-dress idiocy required by the Supreme Court.

On the drive, one of the detectives said this to Williams: I want to give you something to think about while we're traveling down the road.... Number one, I want you to observe the weather conditions, it's raining, it's sleeting, it's freezing, driving is very treacherous, visibility is poor, it's going to be dark early this evening. They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl's body is, that you yourself have only been there once, and if you get a snow on top 24

of it you yourself may be unable to find it. And, since we will be going right past the area on the way into Des Moines, I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas [Five and murdered. And I feel we should stop and locate it on the way in rather than waiting until morning and trying to come back out after a snow storm and possibly not being able to find it at all. . . . I do not want you to answer me. I don't want to discuss it any further. Just think about it as we're riding down the road." 6

About an hour later, Williams told the police where he had buried the little girl's body. This wasn't a question of beating a confession out of the suspect with a rubber hose. The detectives had appealed to the last remnants of humanity in a child-murderer and, amazingly, it had worked.

But the Supreme Court ruled the detective's magnificent "Christian burial speech"

unconstitutional and excluded all evidence that resulted from it, including the rather crucial fact that Williams had led the police to the girl's body. Williams, it seems, had been deprived of his constitutional right to counsel. If his lawyer had been in the car with him, Williams would have had no conscience at all and would not have directed the police to the body. Pamela Powers would have rotted by the side of the road, and her parents never would have been able to bury her. But at least we would have avoided a justice system that "suffered morally"!

Liberal justices didn't care whether confessions were "reliable." They just wanted to release child-murderers. Instead of favoring policies that would distinguish the guilty from the innocent, liberals think the guilty deserve as much right as everyone else to go free. The criminal justice system should be like Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," with the courts playing the Handicapper General to ensure that everyone is equal—both the innocent and the guilty. The guilty get a bag of "constitutional rights" so that they are no more likely to be convicted than anyone else.

It wasn't as if no one could predict what was going to happen as a result of all these rulings. Dissenting in Massiah, Justice Byron White warned his colleagues that their academic arguments about "whether we should punish, deter, rehabilitate or cure" would allow crime to flourish. He characterized the decision in Massiah as discovering a new constitutional right "barring the use of evidence which is relevant, reliable and highly probative of the issue which the trial court has before it—whether the accused committed the act with which he is charged." Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented in Miranda, saying the Court was engaging in "dangerous experimentation" with society's criminal laws.

As a result of the Court's experiment, millions of violent predators were unleashed on the public to continue their barbarism. The crime wave of the sixties and seventies can be traced directly to the insanity of the Warren Court era. In the fifties, crime rates were low, but starting right around 1963, crime began to soar. One year after Miranda, New York County district attorney Frank Hogan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that confessions in his district alone had fallen from 49 percent to 14 percent solely as a result of the Miranda decision. Federal judge and former law professor Paul Cassell has calculated that one decision alone, Miranda, has led to the release of about 100,000 violent criminals a year.' Instead of hanging their heads in shame and trying to make up for the 25

needless suffering and death inflicted on America by their policies, liberals are proud of re-leasing violent criminals. In the book The Warren Court and American Politics, Lucas A. Powe Jr., a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says liberal law professors, of which he is one, have a 'religious and mystical' view of the Warren Court."8

Judge David L. Bazelon, a Truman appointee who was chief judge of the D.C. Circuit from 1962 to 1978, didn't wait for the Supreme Court to act before freeing guilty criminals. Punishment, Bazelon said, was "dehumanizing." (And the last thing we'd want to do to animals like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy is "dehumanize" them.) Bazelon referred to society's "need to punish" as a "primitive urge" based on

"vindictiveness" that was "highly irrational." The idea that we should lock criminals up, he said, reflected a "deep childish fear that with any reduction of punishment, multitudes would run amuck."9 Bazelon believed the criminal is just "like us, only some-what weaker." Thus, he "needs help if he is going to bring out the good in himself and restrain the bad." The fact that there are criminals is our "social failure," and we are using the criminal as our "scapegoat. "10

In other words, America's judges were crazier than the criminals they were releasing.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, liberal judges behaved like members of the Comintern, issuing new rules based on theories that ignored human nature: But how can Communism work if there are no incentives for workers?

Answer: The theory makes it impossible.

Okay good, because at first I thought it might not work.

To cap it all off, in 1967, Lyndon Johnson appointed Ramsey Clark attorney general of the United States. That alone should have been enough to never allow another Democrat in the White House. In fact, that should be its own chapter: Chapter 2.1

Under the Democrats, Ramsey Clark was made attorney general of the United States.

The end.

Clark, most recently Saddam Hussein's lawyer, immediately imposed a moratorium on the death penalty and halted all new prison construction. Clark believed it was the government's job to rehabilitate violent criminals, not to keep them away from the public.

"Prisons," Clark said, "are usually little more than places to keep people." Yes—I think that's the idea in a nutshell.

Arthur Shawcross is the two-word explanation for why normal people prefer locking criminals up to releasing them, despite the risk we run of turning them into "scapegoats."

In 1972, Shawcross molested and murdered a ten-year-old boy he had lured into the woods. A few months later, he raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. He was arrested and confessed to the crimes. For reasons that remain mysterious, the charges against Shawcross for the boy's murder were dropped altogether. Instead, Shawcross pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the girl's rape and murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

In 1987, after serving only fifteen years in prison, Shawcross was released by a parole board chosen by Democratic governor Mario Cuomo.12 Despite the conclusion of Cuomo's appointees on the pa-role board that Shawcross was ready to become an integral part of society again, society didn't think so and repeatedly protested having him in their neighborhoods.

Fortunately for Shawcross, Cuomo's parole board abjured primitive emotions like vengeance and retribution and helpfully relocated him to Rochester, New York—without warning anyone, not even the police department. The important thing was to treat Shawcross with dignity and respect. Within two years, Shawcross committed eleven more murders in the Rochester area. He was eventually caught and convicted a second time. This time, he was put away for good—assuming a Democrat never gets into power and sets him loose again.

That's what happened in America when liberals were at the controls. Only in the eighties did the country finally begin to fight its way back from liberal insanity on crime, electing Republican presidents, Republican governors, and Republican legislatures. After owning the Supreme Court lock, stock, and barrel from 1953 to 1973, liberals are now fighting like screaming banshees to preserve the worst of the Warren Court.

Republicans immediately set to work to try to get Miranda over-turned. President Reagan's sainted attorney general, Ed Meese, as-signed a team of lawyers to look into it.

Judy Goldberg of the ACLU condemned the campaign against Miranda, saying, "Mr.

Meese has revealed a profound misunderstanding of what the Miranda right is all about."

She said Meese and those around him seemed to have the idea that "there's something improper about making people aware of their constitutional rights."13 Leaving aside the loose meaning of the phrase "constitutional rights" in that sentence, there's also nothing

"improper" about having port after dinner, but if my host forgets to serve it, I don't demand that a murderer be unleashed on society. If these are such sacred "constitutional"

rights, why are liberals afraid to speak honestly about them?

After twenty years of hard work by Republicans, in 2000, Miranda was finally reconsidered by the Supreme Court in a case called Dickerson v. United States—where it was upheld on the grounds that the case was now a "precedent." Even Justice William Rehnquist refused to overrule it on grounds of stare decisis. Stare decisis—also known as

"what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable"—is a ratchet preserving only cases liberals like, while they feel free to completely ignore Supreme Court precedents they don't like. Liberal affection for stare decisis was not much in evidence when they were overruling all those cases dealing with habeas corpus and criminal confessions in the first place. No Democrats seemed to mind when the cases being overruled were Stanford v.

Kentucky (death penalty for juveniles not unconstitutional) or Penry v. Johnson (death penalty for the retarded not unconstitutional) or Bowers v. Hardwick (laws against sodomy not unconstitutional). So we got stuck with Miranda while liberals wantonly overruled Stanford, Penry, and Bowers—all within fifteen years of the original decision.

Still, though lacking the revolutionary zeal of the Warren Court, the courts have gradually restored at least some common sense in the criminal justice system. As a result of the return to the Republican idea of punishing violent criminals, rather than the Democrat idea of treating violent criminals with kindness and hoping they will repay us with law-abiding behavior, crime rates have plummeted in the past twenty years. Since 1981, most serious crimes have declined dramatically in the United States, while rising or 27

remaining the same in other industrial democracies, such as Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—and the rest of those modern democracies that, unlike us, don't have the death penalty. Notably, the rates of conviction and imprisonment increased in America during that time, while declining in the countries that saw an increase in crime. Only when England began to send more criminals to prison in the nineties did their crime rate begin to fall, too.74

One group of people has steadfastly ignored the lesson of the six-ties and seventies about the release of criminals being linked to more crime. We call them "liberals."

Republicans think that after someone has committed a heinous crime, he should be punished and separated from society. Democrats think that after someone commits a brutal crime, our most important objective should be to help him achieve his personhood.

The New York Times is obsessed with giving convicted felons the right to vote, running dozens of articles and editorials every year: "Stripping convicted felons of the right to vote is a slap at America's democratic ideals."15 With liberals, the same experiment has to be repeated over and over again.

In a comical episode in 1992, "mainly [ Jimmy] Carter appointees" on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as described in the National Law Journal, entered repeated stays of execution in a single night for Robert Alton Harris. Harris had been sentenced to death a decade earlier for kidnapping and murdering two sixteen-year-old boys. He was scheduled to be executed just after midnight on April 21, 1992. But from midnight to 6

A.M., Harris was repeatedly strapped in and out of the gas chamber as "mainly Carter appointees" openly defied the Supreme Court by staying his execution.16 Evidently no one on the Ninth Circuit noticed that constantly strapping someone into and out of an execution chamber might itself be considered cruel and unusual punishment (although not cruel and unusual enough to suit at least one conservative author). After the Supreme Court was forced to vacate the Ninth Circuit's third stay of the night in the wee hours of the morning, the Supreme Court issued an unusually intemperate order saying there was

"no good reason for this abusive delay." This was a ruling so explicit even the Florida Supreme Court might have under-stood it.

Hours later, Carter-appointed judge Harry Pregerson stunningly defied the Supreme Court a fourth time by entering yet another stay of execution. When liberals act as though they don't know what we mean by "judicial activism," one might point to this as the sort of thing we have in mind. This time, the High Court vacated the stay with an unprecedented order: "[N]o further stays of Robert Alton Harris's execution shall be entered by the federal courts except upon order of this Court." Harris was finally executed at around 6 A.M. on April 21, 1992. The execution would have proceeded with greater alacrity if California had simply relabeled Harris's execution a very late-term abortion.

In 2001, twelve-year-old Lionel Tate savagely murdered six-year-old Tiffany Eunick, a girl his mother was babysitting. Tate kicked, punched, and stomped the little girl for at least five minutes. The beating was so severe that Tiffany's skull was cracked open and her liver split in two. Tate claimed he had been mimicking moves he had seen on professional wrestling on TV, but his own defense experts testified that Tiffany's injuries were not consistent with that story, and the judge called it "inconceivable" that Tiffany's injuries were caused by wrestling moves. After the trial, Tate's new lawyers admitted that the "wrestling defense" was "bogus."

Tate was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury and sentenced to life in prison.

Democrats in the state legislature immediately leapt to action and began drafting legislation that would prohibit adult sentences for juvenile offenders like Tate. They needn't have worried—they had Democrat-appointed judges ready to release Tate.

Two years later, a Florida appellate court did release Tate, reducing his sentence for the barbaric murder of a little girl to time served. The original jury had heard the evidence—including the defense's evidence—and had rendered their verdict, knowing it would result in putting an adolescent away for life. But judges who had never heard any of the evidence or laid eyes on Tate thought they knew better. Within a year of Tate's release, he was rearrested for armed robbery of a Domino's Pizza deliveryman, who fortunately ran the moment he saw Tate's gun. If a Democrat judge doesn't release him again, Tate could be well on his way to his own show on Pacifica Radio—or challenging incumbent Mumia Abu-Jamal in the next New York City may-oral race. The opinion that unleashed a dangerous psychopath on society was written by Judge Barry J. Stone, appointed to the bench by Democrat governor Lawton Chiles. Stone had nothing to worry about: He doesn't deliver Domino's pizza. He always feels perfectly safe at his Pompano Beach home. Releasing dangerous killers has consequences for other people. (For an addendum regarding Lionel Tate's future crimes, please refer to the paperback version of this book, tentatively scheduled for release in Fall 2007.) No Democrat ever abandoned the Democrats' position on crime more aggressively than Bill Clinton. He rushed back to Arkansas to execute Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton did everything but pause for a post execution photo op with the killer's dead body. In his first year in office, Clinton promoted a Democratic "crime bill" to fake out voters and make them think he was against crime. But he never strayed far from the mother ship. Even Mr. Triangulation, "Third Way" Democrat couldn't abandon the basic belief system of his party. As a repeat offender himself, Clinton may have identified with his fellow felons a bit too closely.

Consider just three typical Clinton judicial nominees:

One of Clinton's Third Way, centrist choices was Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who had already been appointed to a district court by Jimmy Carter. As district court judge, Sarokin found that a homeless man had a constitutional right to stink up libraries and frighten patrons with his obsessive staring. According to Sarokin, the library's "offensive odor" ban violated the First Amendment—apparently because it was a library and there are books in a library, which contain speech, which is protected by the First Amendment.

The No-Stinking-the-Place-Up rule also violated "substantive due process" (which doesn't exist), because the odor rule was a "reader-based restriction." And it violated the Equal Protection Clause (which does exist), because the rule had a "disparate impact" on people who refuse to bathe compared with those who bathe regularly. In a rousing conclusion that ought to have gotten him put in a straitjacket rather than elevated to an appellate court, Sarokin wrote that instead of hoping to "shield our eyes and ears from the homeless ... we should revoke their condition, not their library cards."17

A Democratic Senate confirmed Sarokin's appointment to the Third Circuit, and the judge was given greater power to ruin the lives of ordinary Americans. On the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, heoverturned the death sentences of two brutal, multiple murderers. William Henry Flamer had fatally stabbed his aunt and uncle a total of 145

times after gaining entry to their home by claiming his grand-mother had had a stroke. He 29

confessed to the murders. The other murderer, Billie Bailey, escaped from a work release program and killed an eighty-year-old man and his seventy-three-year-old wife in their farmhouse. Immediately after the murder, he was spotted by a police helicopter running from the farmhouse and was rearrested.

Both men were duly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, which, on Planet Sane would have ensured their speedy dispatch to a Great Beyond where real punishment awaited them. Instead, both men repeatedly clogged up the state and federal courts with their frivolous appeals, all of which were denied—including three petitions to the U.S.

Supreme Court. In none of the appeals did the killers claim they were innocent. But when the murderers' appeals landed on Sarokin's desk, he voted to overturn the capital sentences, an opinion that, mercifully, was in dissent.18 It was also Sarokin who overturned Rubin "Hurricane" Carter's sentence on the grounds that the prosecution's theory of motive was not supported by the evidence19—something that is ordinarily for a jury to decide.

Judge Rosemary Barkett caught Clinton's eye when she was chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. (And after the 2000 election, I think we all know what kind of credential that is.) Barkett was described by one of her colleagues on the Florida court as believing murderers were basically good people except for their tendency to sometimes kill people.20 One such killer was Jacob John Dougan, leader of what he called the "Black Liberation Army," the goal of which was to "indiscriminately kill white people and thus start a revolution and a race war." Dougan killed an eighteen-year-old white hitchhiker, Stephen Anthony Orlando, and then made a tape describing Orlando's murder in gruesome detail, which he mailed to the victim's mother and, this being America, to the media. "I enjoyed every minute of it," Dougan said on the tape. "I loved watching the blood gush from his eyes."

Nearly twenty years after Dougan's conviction, Barkett voted to overturn the killer's death sentence—fortunately, in a dissenting opinion. According to Barkett and her fellow dissenters, Dougan's case was "not simply a homicide case," it was also a "social awareness case." The opinion Barkett joined is worth quoting at some length:

[T]his killing was effectuated to focus attention on a chronic and pervasive illness of racial discrimination and of hurt, sorrow, and rejection. Throughout Dougan's life his resentment to bias and prejudice festered. His impatience for change, for understanding, for reconciliation matured to taking the illogical and drastic action of murder. His frustrations, his anger, and his obsession of injustice overcame reason. The victim was a symbolic representation of the class causing the perceived injustices.

To some extent, [Dougan's] emotions were parallel to that of a spouse disenchanted with marriage, full of discord and disharmony which, because of frustration or rejection, culminate in homicide. We seldom uphold a death penalty involving husbands and wives or lovers, yet the emotions of that hate-love circumstance are somewhat akin to those which existed in this case.

Such a sentence reduction should aid in an understanding and at least a partial reconciliation of the wounds arising from discordant racial relations that have permeated our society. To a large extent, it was this disease of racial bias and discrimination that infect an otherwise honorable person and contributed to the 30

perpetration of the most horrible of crimes. An approval of the death penalty would exacerbate rather than heal those wounds still affecting a large segment of our society.

The ruling failed to speculate as to why millions of other black Americans, many of whom may have also experienced racial discrimination, chose not to brutally murder white people at random and gash their eyes out. In 1993, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, Barkett was confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in a 61–37 vote.

Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson, of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, was known for shouting obscenities from the bench and identifying undercover policemen in open court. In 1997 Clinton nominated Massiah-Jackson to be a federal district court judge.

Among other notable rulings, she sentenced the brutal rapist of a ten-year-old girl to the statutory minimum and apologized to the rapist, saying, "I just don't think the five to ten years is appropriate in this case even assuming you were found guilty." She refused to allow the D.A. to give a pre-sentence report or victim impact statement, saying, "What would be the point of that?" After his release, the defendant was re-arrested for raping a nine-year-old boy.

In another special moment for the Rainbow Coalition, after being informed that both the defendant and the victim in a rape case had AIDS, Massiah-Jackson said, "Why are we having a trial? We are talking about life expectancy of three years for both of them.

What's the difference?" In fact, the victim of the rape did die while Massiah-Jackson's refusal to recuse herself for these statements was tied up in appeals. In the end, Massiah-Jackson sentenced the rapist to one-year probation, allowing him to serve no time for a vicious rape and beating.

Sentencing a defendant who had slashed a woman in the face with a straight razor while stealing her purse, Massiah-Jackson refused to apply a sentence enhancement for use of a deadly weapon. When the D.A. noted that the enhancement was required by sentencing guide-lines Massiah-Jackson was presumed to be vaguely familiar with, the centrist judge accused the prosecutor of being "vindictive." Massiah-Jackson was reversed on appeal for ignoring the enhancement.21

Indeed, Massiah-Jackson was reversed in a whole slew of criminal cases. But in response to the Judiciary Committee request that she provide a list of her reversals—a pro forma request—she repeatedly claimed she had not been reversed in a single criminal case. After having been caught in this and other lies, largely thanks to Senator John Ashcroft, Massiah-Jackson decided to withdraw her nomination. If Republicans had not won a majority in 1994, Massiah-Jackson would be a federal judge now.

Massiah-Jackson wasn't some random nut nominated by Clinton by accident, like Janet Reno. She was a liberal heroine. The New York Times was in high dudgeon when Massiah-Jackson withdrew—and not because Massiah-Jackson had sneered at AIDS

victims and rape victims, shouted obscenities from the bench, and outed undercover cops.

The Times was in a snit because of the "judicial mugging" the Senate had put her through. Massiah-Jackson, the Times said, "now re-turns to the state bench, battered but with her honor intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Senate." Indeed, even after all this came out about Massiah-Jackson (despite the encumbrance on getting facts because of the judge's tendency to lie), she was avidly supported for a life-tenured federal 31

judgeship by Philadelphia mayor Edward G. Rendell, top Philadelphia law firms, judges, the NAACP, the Barristers' Association of Philadelphia, the Hispanic Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of the Delaware Valley, the Philadelphia Bar Association, and various other now-discredited liberal groups.

The last time the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency was during the first two years of the Clinton ad-ministration. So we have a pretty good idea of what Democrats think of as a crime-fighting initiative. When Democrats were running the show, their idea for fighting crime was to spend $40 million to set up midnight basketball leagues, $650 million to provide children with "positive attitudes and alternatives to the street life of crime and drugs," and $1.8 billion—billion—on the Violence Against Women Act, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Liberals tout the spectacular reduction in crime in the nineties as if criminals were so touched by Bill Clinton's raising taxes on the middle class and establishment of Midnight Basketball Leagues that they decided to abandon their lives of crime and pursue honest lives. This is consistent with liberals' belief—published mostly in journals in Manhattan—that people commit crime because they're angry at "the system," and that if we could just convince them that the system is fair by not putting them in prison, no one would ever commit crime again.

Crime didn't go down in the nineties because of Clinton's idiotic COPS program (Community Oriented Policing Services), which was designed to spend more money on fax machines at rape crisis centers than on new cops. (Despite receiving over $15 million from the federal COPS program, the Atlanta police department, among others, actually reduced the size of its police force between 1994 and 1998.22) The crime rate went down mostly because Republican legislatures built a lot of prisons and because Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. Needless to say, Democrats ferociously opposed both prison building and Mayor Giuliani.

Whether it is building prisons, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes laws, or the death penalty, if it has to do with punishing criminals, Democrats are against it. Liberals prefer treatment, rehabilitation, alternatives to prison, even creative alternatives to prison—but not prison! That would be "blaming the perpetrator." As a 1993 episode of 60 Minutes put it, "Building more prisons and jails does not seem to be the answer to high rate of crime in the U.S." Mike Wallace explained: Àmerica has been hit by a crime storm of hurricane proportions, and so there's been an outcry to get even tougher on crime, to send more Americans to prison for longer terms. But does prison work?"23 The answer was an emphatic no, as attested to by the many experts interviewed by CBS News.

The proposition that prison doesn't work is like saying deodorant doesn't work (which college liberals also seem to believe). Of course prison works: It keeps people who commit crimes off the streets be-cause they're in prison. Let's run the numbers: The recidivism rate of armed robbers behind bars is ... hmmmm, looks like 0 percent!

In addition to the usual pompous idiots touted as "experts" by the mainstream media, Wallace deemed the inmates themselves experts on the efficacy of imprisonment. And who better to debate the merits of punishment than the people being punished?

WALLACE (voiceover): So that $25,000 a year in tax money to keep a prisoner here, what does it buy?

GROUP OF INMATES (in unison): Nothing.

[Group of Sane Viewers: Yeah, except it keeps you from killing, raping, and robbing us, so there's that.]

UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #1: We don't even—we don't even get any type of program here.

WALLACE: No program? No work?

INMATES: Nothing.

By "programs," liberals generally have in mind things like the "early release program"—or as I call it, "one-on-one partnering of violent criminals and their future victims." One inmate interviewed on 60 Minutes warned Wallace, "If prison doesn't offer something, if prison doesn't give some type of way out or some type of future, or some type of life to look for, America is in big trouble." Oddly enough, most Americans were willing to risk the wrath of the 60 Minutes in-mates and keep them behind bars. Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars,24 rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades.

You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction"25 and "As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages."26

So liberals turned to their second-favorite argument against policies they oppose.

(Their first-favorite policy argument is to threaten to kill themselves in back-alley abortions.) To wit, they complained about the burden to the beleaguered taxpayer. As the Times put it, "[S]ome of the researchers questioned whether the benefits from the growth of incarceration were worth the cost to taxpayers." Whenever liberals claim to be worried about how much money the government is spending, you know they have some other objection but dare not tell the voters.

All over the country, unbiased, objective newspapers consistently report on prison building solely on the basis of what it will cost the taxpayer. Here are some typical headlines, these from 2005 alone:

PRISON COSTS ARE RUNNING OUT OF CONTROL

Denver Post27

REPORT: PRISON COSTS HURTING EDUCATION

Charleston Gazette (West Virginia) 28

SMALL JAIL, LESS CRIME: SUFFOLK IS SMART TO REDUCE THE

COST OF A NEW JAIL WITH ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION

Newsday (New York)29

PRISONS EAT UP TAX DOLLARS

Wisconsin State Journal (Madison)30

MORE SERVING TIME AS TAXPAYERS FOOT BILL

Kansas City Star'

How about some newspaper describing an actually useless government program in 33

terms of the cost to taxpayers? What does the federal Department of Education cost?

How about the EPA? The Commerce Department? The Bureau of Land Management?

Chuck Schumer's office?

An alarmist article in the New York Times in 1991 reported that in New Jersey, the Corrections Department "consumes 7 percent of all state spending."32 (The remainder of the state budget is dedicated to paper for publishing the state's sexual harassment guidelines and payroll expenses for any married governor's gay lovers.) Besides enforcing the law, what other crucial functions does state government have? Keeping marauding predators off the streets is the most basic function of any government. Liberals think the government should be responsible for things like establishing a national "Earth Day," deter-mining how much water we can have in our toilets, and sending mammoth delegations on taxpayer-funded sightseeing trips to Africa because Clinton has just been caught with an intern and needs to shore up his black support. They view keeping killers and rapists off the streets as a crazy luxury for times when government coffers are flush.

Democrats aren't worried about the cost of prison; they are worried that if there are more prisons, criminals might be sent there.

The second major factor in reducing crime in the nineties was Rudy Giuliani, Republican mayor of New York City. By pursuing policies that were relentlessly opposed by liberals throughout his tenure in office, Giuliani reduced the murder rate in New York City from about 2,000 murders a year under Democratic mayor David Dinkins to 714 the year Giuliani left office. Giuliani cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent his first year in office. Major crimes dropped by 16 percent his first year in office and another 14

percent the next year. (And the amazing thing is that he did all this without midnight basketball, which was replaced by a Giuliani program known as "mid-night rounding up of armed suspects.") New York became one of the safest cities in America. The New York Times noted the remarkable development in an article headlined "New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery"33—which it was, at least to liberals, who spent most of the Giuliani years calling him a fascist.

Lives were saved when Giuliani cut the murder rate—mostly black lives—but liberals weren't praising Giuliani for the miraculous reduction in crime; they were attacking him as a stormtrooper every single year he was in office. But by the end of Giuliani's administration, the Reverend Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who "brought order, peace, the law back to the land." The black minister told the Times, "I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun."34

Even after Giuliani's triumphant success, liberals demean his accomplishment. Those who won't believe will never believe. They say the crime rate was already falling, as if the drop in the number of murders during the Dinkins administration from 2,154 murders in 1991 to 1,995 murders in 1992 was the equivalent of the Battle of Midway. It was probably a bookkeeping error. Or they attribute the plummeting crime rate under Giuliani to the end of the crack epidemic, the economy, and, most charmingly, the increase in abortions among the "poor" beginning in the seventies. (Just wait until Bill Bennett hears about that!) What's striking about the factors liberals stress is that they never involve catching and punishing criminals. Under no circumstances are we to fall for the canard about the reduction in crime being caused by obvious explanations like enforcing the law, issuing longer sentences, or supporting the police.

Saying the end of the crack epidemic ended the crime wave merely begs the question, What ended the crack epidemic? It's like saying the end of the crime wave ended the crime wave.

And that must have been one hell of an abortion rate in the first half of the century for the nation to have enjoyed such low crime rates up until the sixties. In any event, I believe we're already aborting as many babies as NARAL's Kate Michelman can get her hands on.

The "Clinton economy"—which only became something to brag about sometime after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994—provably had nothing to do with declining crime rates. Under the "Clinton economy," the crime rate went up in cities all over America—Baltimore, Charlotte, Columbus, Las Vegas, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Contrary to liberal ideas about improving criminals' self-esteem, it turned out that raising the cost of committing crime worked even better. In the midst of a terrible national economy in Clinton's first years in office (the real "Clinton economy"), Giuliani cut crime dramatically in New York City. And of course, New York's economy was booming throughout the eighties, when the crime rate was exploding.

Few opposed Giuliani more aggressively than Bill Clinton. Even before Giuliani took office, Clinton had campaigned against him in ugly racial terms. When Giuliani was running against Dinkins in 1993, Clinton publicly bemoaned the fact that some New Yorkers would not vote for Dinkins solely because he was black. Not make-believe black, like me, Clinton added. You know, black-black. "Too many of us," Clinton said, "are still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are." In case that was too subtle, Clinton added, "[This is not as simple as overt racism," but a "deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out across those lines." Then again, maybe it was a deep-seated reluctance to reinstall a mayor under whose watch about 8,000 New Yorkers had been murdered.

Once Giuliani was elected, Clinton opposed him every step of the way, but then he turned around and claimed credit for Giuliani's crime policies. Even the New York Times was shocked by Clinton's shamelessness in using crime as a "bragging point" during his 1996 reelection campaign—without once mentioning Giuliani. Giuliani's policies on crime, the Times said, would do "as much to re-elect [Clinton] as any Democratic mayor."35 Thirty-five percent of the reduction in the national crime rate from 1993 to 1995 was attributable solely to the reduction of crime in New York City during Giuliani's first years in office. As the New York Times admitted in one of the rare articles during the nineties not calling Giuliani an "authoritarian,"36 "[W]hile constituting less than 3 percent of the country's population," New York City alone "was responsible for 155,558 of the 432,952 fewer re-ported crimes over the three years."37

But according to Clinton, it was Democratic policies like "community policing" that had caused the massive reductions in crime in the nineties. Campaigning for reelection in 1996, Clinton said, "I'm telling you, folks, we can prevent crime and catch criminals if we have more people serving their communities out there, visible, who know the kids on the streets, who know the neighbors, who know the law-abiding folks."38 David Dinkins had been a big proponent of "community policing," too. Giuliani jettisoned the policy and reduced the crime rate of the Dinkins era by nearly 70 percent.

Far from crediting Giuliani, Clinton's Justice Department repeatedly investigated the 35

New York City police for alleged civil rights violations—investigations that became suspiciously frequent about the time it appeared that Clinton's wife would be running against Giuliani for Senate. Inasmuch as New York police shot fewer civilians than any other big-city police department, New York was an odd place for the Clinton administration to concentrate its investigative efforts. In Washington, D.C., for example, the police were seven times more likely to shoot civilians than New York police.

Washington was also conveniently located in the same city as the U.S. Department of Justice that was sending investigators up to New York.

To this day, Democrats demand that we credit Clinton for the plunging crime rate in the nineties—which did not begin to plunge until Giuliani became mayor of New York.

Clinton may have tried to socialize health care, presided over a phony Internet bubble, spurned Sudan when it offered him Osama bin Laden on a silver platter,39 sold a burial plot in Arlington cemetery to a campaign contributor, engaged in sex romps in the Oval Office, been credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, obstructed justice, had his law license suspended and gotten himself permanently disbarred from the U.S. Supreme Court, and pardoned a lot of sleazy crooks in return for political donations on his way out of office—but, we're told, at least he was terrific on crime! Everything Clinton actually did himself was a failure or a felony, so he has to claim credit for the successes of Republicans like Giuliani.

After 9/11, when the Clinton presidency looked even more ridiculous than it did when he was still in office, Clinton convened a group of his former advisers to create a PR

strategy to burnish his legacy. (You know, just as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan did.

Great presidents always do this after they leave office, right? Hello? Is there any-body there? Hello?) Prominent among the Clinton flacks' talking points was one about how Clinton cut the crime rate. Campaigning for John Kerry in 2004, Clinton told a Philadelphia audience that when Democrat Ed Rendell had been the mayor, "we worked together to bring down the crime rate. We did it with more cops on the street and assault weapons off the street."40 According to the New York Times, Philadelphia was one of nine major cities where the crime rate went up in the years following the enactment of Clinton's crime bill.41

Democrats are not interested in restoring order. They will never abandon their deranged sentimentality about violent criminals. Now it's just a matter of catching them when they forget to lie. Or finding the liberals who don't know they're supposed to lie. On MSNBC's H ardball, Chris Matthews asked Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice:

"In the history of New York, did you have safe streets till Giuliani came along?"

Goldstein said, "Chris, I lived in New York all my life, okay? I was safe, I was safe, I did not see cops pulling down the pants of black kids in the streets. I feel less safe today in New York City than I did twenty years ago. Now, you know, you, you, your class of people did very well under Giuliani. Mazel tov. But a lot of people really suffered under him. The police practices in this city were reprehensible. They were—the federal government called him on this." 42

It was like watching an interview of an insane person. I can't seem to find any documentation of cops-pulling-down-the-pants-of-black kids rates under Dinkins versus those rates under Giuliani, so I am unable to address that very important point that Goldstein raised. But we do know that a lot fewer blacks were murdered during the 36

Giuliani years. Indeed, Goldstein was claiming to feel less safe in Giuliani's New York just a few months after the Reverend Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah of the Bible. 43 What does he know? He's just a black man in Harlem.

One by one, a stumped and bewildered panel responded to Gold-stein, saying New York sure seemed a lot safer to them:

MATTHEWS: . . . when I go to New York, it's not funny, when I go to New York, it's safe to walk around. . . . I feel a lot better in New York. And I'll tell you something, the subways, every-thing, has changed about New York. And one guy's responsible for it that I can see. And I'm not loving the guy. I'm just admitting it. Go ahead.

TERRY JEFFREY, Human Events: Yes, I'm not a New Yorker; I do visit there. It's stark when you go there how much nicer it is in New York City than it was twenty years ago.

To this, Goldstein said, "Well, you like South Carolina. What do you expect?" What a stunning rhetorical riposte, sir! I say, you've cut me to the quick! The incisive thrust of your logical cutlass has struck me to the bone! Alas, I fear the wound is fatal! Oh, untimely death!

But back to the point—which was it? Was New York safer before Giuliani or did Goldstein simply prefer it when there were three times as many murders per year and it was less like South Carolina? Or—and this is the theory I'm favoring—is Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice mentally retarded?

Most Democrats have at least learned they're supposed to lie about their ideas on crime. Now liberals are forced to sit around thinking, Can we get away with this? It is a striking fact that, after Giuliani, in order to be mayor of New York even liberal politicians have to claim to be Republicans. After Giuliani's success, crime control in places like New York City could run on autopilot forevermore—if there were no liberals. But the moment Republicans leave the room, the ACLU will come back in and reset the controls.

While elected Democrats have learned not to have their careers dependent on the good behavior of criminals they release from prison, their constituents are still holding candlelight vigils for every heinous murderer on death row. It is a liberal ritual to turn palpably guilty criminals into causes celebres. Among the most famous liberal martyrs are executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Soviet spy and convicted perjurer Alger Hiss, the Central Park rapists, gang leader and multiple murderer Tookie Williams, cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, violent multiple murderer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, executed Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti—all provably guilty. With liberals' track record, it may be time to reopen the Scottsboro Boys' case.

Only recently have we learned not only that Sacco and Vanzetti were absolutely guilty of cold-blooded murder—which is no surprise—but also that their liberal defenders knew the truth all along. Their lawyer knew it and cooked up an alibi for them.

Phony progressive Upton Sinclair knew it, even as he denounced the American justice system for framing two innocent immigrants because of their unconventional political views.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were ruthless anarchists who killed a couple of payroll carriers for a Boston shoe factory in 1920 in order to bankroll their bombings 37

of government buildings. After their arrest, they repeatedly lied to investigators. Police found a loaded gun on Sacco that matched the crime weapon, almost literally giving prosecutors a smoking gun. Sacco and Vanzetti were tried by jury and sentenced to death.

In the U.S. justice system's typical "rush to justice" fashion, seven years passed between Sacco and Vanzetti's murder spree and their eventual execution. Among the appeals was one you will see whenever liberals start weeping for some criminal: They produced an eleventh-hour "confession" from someone who would face no additional punishment for confessing (in this case, be-cause he was already in prison).

But Sinclair wrote a groaning 750-page tome called Boston, a historical novel in the James Frey style, suggesting that Sacco and Vanzetti had been sentenced to die for a crime they didn't commit. According to Sinclair's novel, these two poor immigrants had been framed by the rich and powerful in Boston—despite the fact that their victims were hardly corporate chieftains but payroll carriers, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, the latter an Italian immigrant himself. Nonetheless, Sinclair insisted it was the social conservatism of the day that led to the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti simply be-cause they were immigrants with socialist and anarchist views.

Thanks to recently unearthed letters from Sinclair to his lawyer, we now know that Sinclair was aware all along that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. He also knew that the only perjured testimony at trial came from the defendants' alibi witnesses. In private letters to his lawyer, Sinclair admitted that while researching his book, he had met with the anarchists' defense attorney in a hotel room and asked for the truth. In Sinclair's own words, the defense lawyer said "the men were guilty," and even told Sinclair "in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."44

Facing what he called "the most difficult ethical problem" of his life, Sinclair decided to lie in his book, his moral indignation undimmed. As Sinclair explained in his letters,

"It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public." (In the article about the Sinclair letters that exposed him as a fraud, the Los Angeles Times reporter still insisted on referring to Sinclair as "one of America's most strident truth tellers." It's nice to be a liberal.) In one letter, Sinclair admonishes his lawyer, "This letter is for yourself alone.

Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter."45 But not while there was money to be made from the America-hating Left.

Sinclair accused Hollywood of "blacklisting" movies about Sacco and Vanzetti, apparently because no one turned his book into a movie. Liberal claims of "blacklisting,"

like sex tapes, always appear at the ideal time to advance the liberal's career goals. The Internet Movie Database lists seven films made about Sacco and Vanzetti, three made in Hollywood, including a TV movie by Sidney Lumet, which was nominated for four Emmys. The 1971 Italian film Sacco e Vanzetti— with music by Joan Baez—was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. I guess the two payroll carriers murdered in cold blood by Sacco and Vanzetti will have to wait another day for their movie.

Ginned up by liberal frauds like Upton Sinclair, 250,000 protesters marched in Boston the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and another 200,000 engaged in a violent march the day of their funeral. There were protests in Switzerland, Germany, Argentina, England, and Mexico and violent riots in France, where thousands fought with the police in Paris. Liberals would not have this much fun again until the Rosenbergs were 38

executed.

In some cases, it was literally the same people defending Sacco and Vanzetti who would later be defending Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In 1927, Felix Frankfurter—Harvard Law School professor and future character witness for Alger Hiss—wrote a book purporting to exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas referred to Frankfurter's book as his "bible." Edward R. Murrow championed Sacco and Vanzetti on his See it Now broadcasts for CBS News on one of the rare nights he wasn't scoffing at Soviet espionage. Liberals produced books, paintings, songs, even an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti, the last featuring Sacco's aria "The Whole Shoe." In 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of their executions, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis cleared their names and proclaimed August 23, 1977, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Day in Massachusetts.

These preening revolutionaries, secure behind the guns of a civilian police force in a democratic society—and in many cases, doorman buildings, private security forces, bodyguards, and gated communities—make a sport of demanding that the guilty be set free. To do the maximum damage to civil society, liberals love to claim that there is some larger social context to the alleged frame-up, exposing the ugly underbelly of American society—preferably discrimination against minorities. Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because they were poor Italian immigrants. The Rosenbergs were framed because they were Jews. Leonard Peltier was framed because he's an Indian, not because he shot and killed two FBI agents in the seventies.

Poor David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam killer) missed the liberal myth of wild anti-Jewish hysteria in America by about three decades, so there were no liberals to claim that he was innocent. Timothy McVeigh's Aryan features ensured that no liberals would weep for him. In fact, McVeigh's swift trial and execution illustrate how all death penalty cases might proceed in this country if we could just get rid of the liberals. Today, the favorite liberal template about America's corrupt criminal justice system is that the system is racist. So if you're a cold-blooded murderer, you want to be black to attract white liberals to your cause. (Who values the lives of black victims more now?) In 2005, when Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the violent Grips gang, was finally getting the punishment he deserved for four brutal murders he had committed twenty-six years earlier, he nearly surpassed Bill Clinton in popularity with liberals. His life story had been made into a movie, he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the usual array of Hollywood zombies were somberly discussing his "contributions to society." He was like the Lance Arm-strong of deranged shotgun killers.

Despite Tookie's overwhelming popularity with white liberals, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to pardon him, on the grounds that he had killed a lot of people, started one of the most violent gangs in America, and refused to admit his crimes, much less apologize for them. Schwarzenegger's Austria was so disgusted with their native son for refusing to grant Tookie clemency, they immediately stripped Schwarzenegger's name from a mammoth soccer stadium. Austrian politicians began proposing new names for the stadium, such as "Tookie Williams Stadium," "Grips Stadium," or perhaps the elegant "Quadruple Murderdome." (I made up only the last one.)

It's one thing to simply oppose the death penalty in all cases—and I mean all cases, 39

including Timothy McVeigh—but with the death row paparazzi, it never ends with that.

They develop relationships with the killers, clubs, newsletters, and fanzines. They turn themselves into overeager PR agents, helping ensure that no murderer's philosophical musings will be lost to the world. It is a religious obsession—except, because it's a false religion, there's no joy in it.

Instead of allowing fallen men like Tookie Williams to confess, re-pent, and ask God for mercy, liberal busybodies rush in and lock the men into a lie, damning their souls forever. They are like a Bizarroworld version of Christian missionaries, promoting eternal damnation. Surrounded by earnest "Innocence Project" groupies, the guilty will never confess, never repent, never get right with God. No! No! Don't repent! Tell a lie right before you die, Tookie!

Among the most unusual displays of affection for a killer concerns convicted child-murderer Dennis Dechaine in Maine. The fact that Dechaine is manifestly guilty is not what makes the case unique. What's strange is that Dechaine is white and therefore his conviction permits of no larger indictment of American society. There will be no "Free Dennis" rallies in Paris. His supporters would have preferred a founder of the Grips, but alas, they live in Maine. At least his crime was vile.

The case began in 1988, when Jennifer Henkel returned to her home in Bowdoin, Maine, to find her baby alone and her twelve-year-old babysitter Sarah Cherry missing.

Henkel found a notebook and a car repair receipt with Dechaine's name on it in the driveway. While searching for Cherry in the nearby woods, the police came across the very same Dennis Dechaine, who claimed he had been fishing and got lost, but oddly had no fishing pole. (Dechaine was not only one of the world's most depraved criminals but also among the stupidest.) When asked to explain how his notebook and car receipt had turned up in the driveway of the house whence Cherry had apparently been abducted, Dechaine initially denied the papers were his. Realizing that this explanation was preposterous, he said whoever abducted the girl must have stolen the papers from his pickup truck and placed them in the driveway to frame him. But when the truck was later located—near where Cherry's body would be found—it was locked. Further raising suspicions before they found Dechaine's truck, he had tried to hide the keys to his pickup under the car seat of a police cruiser—indicating that Dechaine knew his truck was locked and he had the keys even as he was claiming his papers had been stolen from it.

The tire tracks in the Henkels' driveway were later found to be consistent with Dechaine's pickup.

Still, the police hadn't found Cherry, so they released Dechaine.

Whether or not it is admissible evidence, consider this fact: Be-fore anyone knew what had happened to Cherry—even whether she was still alive—Dechaine's attorney told three government attorneys that Cherry was dead and that the police were looking for her body in the right place.

The police later found Cherry's body where Dechaine's lawyer indicated they would—in the woods where Dechaine had been fishing without a fishing pole. The little girl had been bound and gagged, raped anally and vaginally with sticks that were still protruding from her. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the throat and head, and strangled with a scarf. The rope used to bind Cherry was later demonstrated to be part of the same rope that was found in Dechaine's truck. The knife Dechaine had once kept on his key chain was about the size of Cherry's knife wounds, but after Cherry's murder, it 40

disappeared from the key chain. Various witnesses placed Dechaine, someone dressed like Dechaine, or someone driving a red pickup truck that matched Dechaine's at the Henkel home or walking to and from the woods where Cherry's body was found. Before the police found Dechaine, for example, he had stopped at one couple's home and asked to use their garden hose to wash himself off, which he did while they watched.

When the police picked up Dechaine after finding Cherry's body, Dechaine made a series of confessions. He said, "I can't believe I could do such a thing. The real me is not like that. I know me. I couldn't do anything like that. It must be somebody else inside of me." On three separate occasions throughout his arrest, booking, and arraignment, Dechaine made similar statements to four police officers, often emotional and crying, saying, "Oh my God, it should never have happened.... Why did I do this?"

After Dechaine's conviction, aging baby boomers in Maine with peculiar obsessions like camping and establishing a single global currency started a group dedicated to denying his guilt. Along with a few Democrats in the Maine legislature, they insist Dechaine is innocent, based on such arguments as that he is "nice." As one Dechaine sup-porter explained, "I could never imagine him doing anything like that because he's such a nice guy."46

The liberal busybodies supporting child-killer Dechaine now number more than one thousand. They ritualistically engage in ceremonial letter-writing, protesting, petition-circulating, fundraising, book- and songwriting in tribute to their icon, child-killer Dechaine. (The book that purports to vindicate Dechaine by systematically ignoring all incriminating evidence was written by a former member of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Perhaps his next project could be figuring out who killed all those kids at Waco.) They have bake sales and car washes—though a proposal for a no-pole fishing tournament was rejected on the grounds that it was "too soon." They try to enter floats in local parades. There is a website, Trial and Error Dennis, to spread Dechaine's lies on the Internet and draw in more advocates for the child-murderer.

They pore over the evidence like grim devotees of Court TV, savoring the jargon and legal minutiae they have not the slightest chance of ever comprehending. There was DNA on Cherry's fingernails that wasn't Dechaine's! Even if true—and the claim is questionable be-cause of chain-of-custody issues—this proves: There was DNA on Cherry's fingernails that wasn't Dechaine's. It doesn't prove Dechaine didn't murder Cherry. The world is fairly bristling with human DNA. If Cherry bought candy, read a magazine, or played with friends before arriving at her babysitting job that day, she might have picked up human DNA from any number of people. Only in the case of rape is DNA capable of excluding a suspect—and even then only if the victim was not sexually active and there was only a single rapist. In virtually all other cases, DNA can only include suspects; it can't exclude suspects.

And yet a Democrat in the Maine legislature, Rosaire Paradis, a longtime supporter of Dechaine's,47 has sponsored a bill that would essentially spring him from prison based on this utterly meaningless DNA evidence. The Democrat's bill would allow new trials for all convicted criminals in Maine if their defense lawyers can produce some DNA from the general vicinity of the crime scene that does not belong to the convict. Maine already allows a new trial based on DNA evidence—but only if the DNA is material to the convict's identity as the perpetrator. Under Paradis's bill, any DNA from the crime scene area—"including but not limited to" that found on any household item—that does not 41

belong to the convict will generally warrant a new trial. This is a get-out-of-jail-free card for all child-molesters and murderers in Maine who, like Dechaine, were convicted many years ago because it is virtually impossible to reconvict defendants in old cases, after witnesses have died or moved out of state and memories have faded. In Dechaine's case, one of the main witnesses against him was his own lawyer, who has since died.

With missionary zeal, the Dennis believers are utterly devoted to a child-killer. They are too busy being impressed with their own virtue to worry about torturing Cherry's parents with endless appeals on be-half of the man who murdered their daughter. The Dennis believers don't care. Self-righteousness is like a drug, creating the warm sensation that you are more moral, more compassionate, more sensitive than anyone else in the universe. Once you've done it, you have to do it again and again and again. Dechaine supporter Peggy Blanchard explained her commitment to Dechaine this way: "It's a gut feeling. I have looked into his eyes. I can tell he's not the man who killed that poor little girl."48 Really? How about looking into my eyes and telling me tomorrow's winning Lotto numbers? Never mind that Dechaine told his lawyer where her body was buried before the police found it. How about looking into his eyes and saying, "Confess, repent, Jesus loves you?"

Compare the Dennis groupies to ordinary Christian Ashley Smith. In March 2005, Smith was taken at gunpoint at her Duluth, Georgia, home and forced into her apartment by rape suspect Brian Nichols, who had killed four people in the previous forty-eight hours during his escape from an Atlanta courthouse. At some point during her abduction, Smith began reading to Nichols from the Christian book The Purpose-Driven Life—in direct violation of his constitutional right never to hear any reference to God, in public or private, for any purpose, ever, ever, ever! (For more on this right, go to the People For the American Way website.) Smith read a paragraph to Nichols about serving God by serving others, and Nichols asked her to read it again. He listened intently and told Smith he was already dead, saying, "Look at my eyes." But Smith looked into his eyes and told him God had a purpose for him, perhaps to minister to other lost souls in prison. Smith read some more, both from the Purpose book and from another popular book—the New Testament. (In the Hollywood version, Smith will be reading from the Koran and playing Kanye West CDs.) Nichols told Smith she was "an angel sent from God," calling her "his sister" and himself her "brother in Christ." He said he must have come to Smith's home for a reason—in Smith's words, that "he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people." The next morning, Nichols surrendered without incident, an utterly transformed human being.

Most people have trouble seeing the divine spark in people who take our parking spots. Smith could see God's hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing Nichols genuine Christian love, Smith turned him from a beast to a fellow sinner, still deserving of punishment, but also of forgiveness. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what's known as a "miracle." That's how a real religion responds to rapists and murderers. In the liberal religion, there is no grace, only lies and death, some of it everlasting.

3 THE MARTYR: WILLIE HORTON

he martyrdom of Willie Horton will go down in history as the beginning of the Democrats' official rejection of democracy. In 1988, the Democratic presidential candidate was Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, card-carrying member of the ACLU.

He was running against Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. Most people knew the election was over at the very beginning of the first presidential debate, when 6'2" Bush shook hands with Dukakis, who claims to be 5'8" (i.e., around 5'3"). Any remaining doubts were resolved during the second presidential debate, when CNN's Bernie Shaw asked Dukakis, an avid opponent of the death penalty, if he thought he would change his mind about the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered.

DUKAKIS [bloodless, technocratic voice]: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state. And it's one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state....

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz [Notice how the Radio Shack model seems eerily to imitate a real human being!]

But when the inevitable happened and Dukakis did lose the election, Democrats went to work creating a myth that the Bush campaign had won the election with a racist ad campaign about a black criminal named Willie Horton. Apart from what this suggests liberals think of the American people, since that election, without fail, liberals have refused to accept the results of any election that doesn't go their way. Democrats attribute their consistent inability to get a majority of Americans to vote for them to the machinations of evil, conspiratorial forces, such as the Supreme Court or the Diebold corporation—all beginning with the myth of the racist Willie Horton ad.

Liberals have an unparalleled capacity to create a myth when the truth will destroy them. The Willie Horton ad provoked hysteria from the Democrats because Horton's release exposed their obsessive fetish with releasing violent criminals. Horton is like Horst Wessel, the semi-retarded stormtrooper whose death in a bar fight with Communists was glorified in a song that became the official Nazi Party anthem. In liberal 43

mythology, Horton is a martyr, but instead of shed-ding his own blood, he spilled other people's blood. Today the only way you will hear about Horton is as an example of how race is used in an ugly way in American politics. That's the only apparent relevance of Willie Horton.

In fact, Horton is the full explanation for why someone like Michael Dukakis should never be allowed near any government job—although there are ample other reasons.

Horton was a career violent criminal who had been convicted for murder and duly sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. That should have been the end of the story. But while serving his life sentence, Horton was re-leased on "furlough" by Dukakis. Shocking penology experts at the ACLU, Horton struck again, viciously.

The crime that put Horton in prison—before Dukakis released him—was an act of wanton violence. After robbing a convenience store, Horton sliced up Joey Fournier, the seventeen-year-old kid be-hind the cash register, stabbing him nineteen times and then stuffing his mutilated body into a garbage can. It wasn't chance-medley, shots fired, and in the confusion someone ended up dead. It would not have made a fun segment on COPS. Fournier had already handed over all the money from the cash register when Horton savagely murdered him. This wasn't Horton's first run-in with the law: He had already been convicted of attempted murder in South Carolina for repeatedly stabbing a man.

Horton was duly convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Dukakis had vetoed the death penalty in Massachusetts, so this was the maximum sentence available. No sane person would have allowed Horton to walk the streets ever again. But under the weekend furlough program lustily promoted by Dukakis, Horton was released from prison. Despite his eleven disciplinary infractions in prison—and the fact that he had committed a brutal murder—Massachusetts prison officials concluded that Horton, I quote, "projects a quiet sense of responsibility." It is a point of pride with liberals that Horton came back from his first nine furloughs—which I believe breaks my old record of eight consecutive furloughs without raping or killing anybody. But then there was that tenth furlough. Horton was released on a 48-hour furlough on June 6, 1986, and he never came back.

On April 3, 1987, Maryland resident Cliff Barnes had just gotten home from work and was getting undressed when Horton burst through the bathroom door with a woman's stocking over his head. He began beating Barnes viciously, pistol-whipping him and screaming obscenities—or, if you prefer, "projecting a loud, obscene sense of responsibility." Fortunately, Barnes was white or at this point Horton almost certainly would have been guilty of a hate crime. Horton then dragged Barnes to the basement and bound and blindfolded him. Over the next several hours, Horton slashed Barnes's torso with a knife dozens of times. He jammed the barrel of a gun into Barnes's eyes and mouth, telling Barnes he planned to hang him and watch him die. As with Horton's murder of Joey Fournier, there was no purpose to these sadistic attacks. Barnes told him where the credit cards were. Horton had broken into the house much earlier in the day; he could have cleaned the place out and left. But Horton had waited for the homeowners to return so he could torture and kill them. The legal mumbo-jumbo for this is

"premeditated."

Nearly five hours after Barnes was attacked, his fiancee, Angela Miller, came home, where she was set upon by Horton. He dragged her into the bedroom by the throat, cut 44

her clothes off with a knife, and savagely beat and raped her. Barnes heard it all, gagged and bound in the basement, unable to help her or even let her know he was alive. This is the point at which it is believed that Cliff's support for Michael Dukakis began to erode.

As Horton was raping Miller again a few hours later, Barnes man-aged to escape—

twelve hours after he had first encountered Horton in his bathroom. Bleeding through his shredded clothes, Barnes had to go to four houses before he found anyone who would let him in to call for help. (The people at the first three houses later explained that they mistook him for a violent inmate furloughed by Governor Dukakis.) Back at the house, as soon as Horton realized Barnes was gone, he took off in Barnes's car, leading police on a wild chase before he was finally captured.

Horton was tried and convicted in Maryland. The judge sentencing him refused to send Horton back to Massachusetts, saying, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr.

Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released."

Until the presidential campaign, Dukakis had displayed "F-you" arrogance whenever anyone questioned his precious furlough pro-gram. After their ordeal, Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller never heard a peep out of Dukakis, certainly no apology. They tried to meet with him, traveling to Massachusetts—just to talk to him, tell him what they went through, and ask him how someone like Horton could have been released. Dukakis refused to meet with them. He imperiously dismissed their request for a meeting, saying,

"I don't see any particular value in meeting with people." (Perhaps they should have broken into the governor's mansion and lain in wait, nylon stockings over their heads, until he came home.) Dukakis actually took the occasion of the Maryland couple coming to see him to reaffirm his support for the furlough program, saying Massachusetts had

"the kind of furlough program we should have." The sister of Joey Fournier, Horton's first victim, started a group, Citizens Against an Unsafe Society, to prevent murderers like Horton from being furloughed, but Dukakis refused to even meet with the group and, according to Fournier's sister, fought them "tooth and nail."

When Al Gore raised the issue of the lunatic Massachusetts furlough program during the Democratic primaries in 1988, Dukakis responded, "Al, the difference between you and me is that I have run a criminal justice system and you never have."

Even the Democratic Party knew not to defend the furlough pro-gram the way Dukakis had. Instead, during Dukakis's presidential bid, they claimed the furlough program was first enacted under a Re-publican governor. Needless to say, this was a lie.

Yes, some furlough program existed under the prior governor, but not one that allowed the release of first-degree murderers. The idea behind prison furloughs was to reintroduce prisoners sentenced to a term of years back into society gradually, before their inevitable release. The problem wasn't furloughs per se; it was furloughs for people like Willie Horton, who were never supposed to take a free breath again. It took the famous Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to discover a right to furloughs for first-degree murderers. (The next thing you know, they'll be discovering a right to gay marriage.) After the court ex-tended furloughs to first-degree murderers, the Massachusetts legislature quickly passed a bill prohibiting furloughs for first-degree murderers.

The Greek midget vetoed it. He vetoed it. Dukakis defended his veto, saying that removing murderers from the furlough program would "cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation." (At least he didn't say removing murderers from the furlough program would slash inmate rehabilitation with a knife nineteen times and stuff it into a 45

garbage can after it had turned over all the money.) I mention again: Horton was sentenced to LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE! He didn't need

"rehabilitation," because he wasn't supposed to be released, ever. Only through the specific intervention of Dukakis did the furlough program become a way for liberal politicians to do end runs around a life sentence. This is why we need the death penalty.

Without it, you always run the risk that a Democrat will come to power and start releasing all the prisoners sentenced to life in prison.

So it wasn't going to work for the Democrats to keep saying the furlough program was originally signed into law by a Republican governor. It was Governor Michael Dukakis who insisted on furloughing first-degree murderers.

It was only well into the 1988 presidential campaign, after Willie Horton became a major issue—and after 75,000 angry Massachusetts citizens signed a petition to put the furlough policy on the ballot—that the Greek homunculus finally yielded to the legislature's demand that the furlough program be off-limits to first-degree murderers.

Forced to sign the bill, Dukakis still said he opposed it: "I don't agree with the House vote."

Releasing Willie Horton is the perfect emblem of liberal idiocy. Michael Dukakis, the Duke of Brookline, bought into the whole liberal catechism on how to deal with criminals, starting with the idea that the government is not supposed to lock up vicious murderers but rather develop programs to help them increase their self-esteem. Horton had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. But Dukakis thought Horton should only spend six days a week in prison for committing a mutilation murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in cold blood.

Liberals always claim they want to talk about "issues" in presidential campaigns—I suppose because "character" isn't a good topic for them. Well, the Massachusetts furlough program that released Horton was an issue, as good an issue as you'll ever get. Rarely in politics has an attack ad been so honest. State legislators tried to correct an insane ruling by a crazy liberal court allowing first-degree murderers to be released on furlough. But Dukakis wouldn't let them. And he wanted to be president.

Republicans thought that was a relevant issue. But the fair, unbiased, objective media were outraged at the Bush campaign for running ads on the furlough of Willie Horton.

There were actually two Willie Horton ads, and they are generally conflated. Both were terrific ads. The Bush campaign's Willie Horton ad never showed a picture of Horton, which complicated their sneaky plan to appeal to Americans' nearly hysterical hatred of black people. The only ad to show Horton's face was produced by an independent group that included Horton's victims, Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller. The victims' ad was made on a shoestring budget and was probably seen by about six people in West Virginia. More people have seen Britney Spears's failed reality show than saw the victims' Willie Horton ad. (And a lot fewer people saw the victims' Willie Horton ad than the NAACP's ad during the 2000 campaign assigning responsibility to George Bush for the murder of James Byrd.) No one would have even been aware of this Willie Horton ad but for the Democrats' caterwauling about it. If anything, the Horton ads helped Dukakis by allowing the Democrats to stir up black voters, who might not otherwise have warmed to the Greek geek.

In all, Dukakis had furloughed 82 first-degree murderers, 184 second-degree murderers, and 287 sex offenders.' The media ignored this. It was left to Cliff Barnes to 46

investigate the furlough program being unreported by our aggressive watchdog media that shouldn't be required to reveal their sources because they are working in "the public interest." Other murderers furloughed by Dukakis included Donald Robertson and Bradford Boyd. Robertson raped a ninety-three-year old woman and her seventy-two-year-old daughter and then stamped on their chests so hard that he crushed their internal organs. Despite being sentenced to two consecutive life terms, Robertson was re-leased under Michael Dukakis's furlough program after only eight years in prison. He never came back. Bradford Boyd was serving time for rape when he committed first-degree murder in prison. Still, he was furloughed. While out on furlough, he viciously beat a man, repeatedly raped a woman, and then killed himself. (On the plus side of the ledger, Boyd hasn't committed any crimes since then.) The main-stream media didn't find these stories, Barnes did. They were too busy writing articles about Bush "Slinging Mud on the Low Road to Office,"2 and "Republicans Riding to Victory on Racism,"3 and "Bush Tactics Turn Ugly."4 According to the vast majority of media stories on the 1988

presidential campaign, it was an "ugly" tactic for the Bush campaign to mention the Massachusetts furlough program.

The mainstream media were bristling with defenses of Dukakis's furlough program—

in particular, the claim that practically every state had furlough programs just like Massachusetts. On June 24, 1988, the Washington Post ran a news story by T R. Reid titled "Most States Allow Furloughs from Prison; Bush Lashes Dukakis for Stance on Policy That Has Been Adopted by Much of Nation." The article began, "Dukakis' support for the concept of furloughs puts him squarely in the mainstream today among corrections officials from coast to coast." On NBC's Today show, Anthony Travisono, then the executive director of the American Correctional Association, said, "Governor Dukakis has taken the rap for something that everybody does." He compared the furlough program to Ivory soap, saying, "It's the decent thing to do. It's like the Ivory soap commercial, which is 99 and 44 one-hundredths percent pure. Occasionally, an inmate lets us all down." Yes, under any criminal justice system, occasionally a drug dealer or armed robber is released and then commits a murder. The only way to avoid that is to lock up all first-time criminals for life—which, come to think of it, was exactly how long Horton was sup-posed to stay in prison. Also on the Today show, Princeton's John DiIulio assured viewers, "Virtually every state in the country has some kind of a furlough program." He said, "Over 30 other states will furlough someone who is a murderer."5

This still misses the point. Not all murderers are sentenced to life in prison. Horton had been.

No other state in the union would have furloughed a murderer serving a life sentence.

The only one that would had a governor who wanted to be president.

But the headlines told a different story:

PRISON EXPERTS SAY BUSH ATTACKS DUKAKIS UNFAIRLY

Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1988

STUDY SAYS S3,000 GOT PRISON FURLOUGHS IN '87 AND FEW DID HARM

New York Times, October 12, 1988

SPECIALISTS DEFEND FURLOUGH POLICY:

MASS. PROGRAM SAID TO BE IN MAINSTREAM6

(The "mainstream," no less!)

Boston Globe, October 15, 1988

REPORT SAYS PRISON FURLOUGHS WIDESPREAD, SUCCESSFUL

Associated Press, October 13, 1988

SUCCESS HIGH IN MOST PRISON FURLOUGH CASES

Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), October 23, 1988

EXPERTS: BUSH DISTORTS ON FURLOUGHS

Newsday (New York), October 21, 1988

These headlines—typical in the days before the alternative media—were provably false. No other state furloughed murderers ineligible for parole. And you wonder why liberals have lost their minds over Fox News Channel, where it is now possible to hear something other than press releases from the Democratic National Committee.

Eventually, the Dukakis campaign tried counterattacking with a furlough "attack ad"

of its own. For weeks on the campaign trail, Dukakis had blatantly engaged in the rhetorical device of preterition mentioning the murder of Patsy Pedrin while pretending not to mention it. I would never stoop so low as to talk about my opponent's homosexuality! Pedrin, a pregnant mother of two, had been murdered by Angel Medrano, a drug dealer furloughed from a federal prison while Bush was vice president. Dukakis raised the subject of Pedrin's murder to suggest that it had resulted from the exact same sort of fur-lough policy as the one that freed Horton. Over and over again, Dukakis said,

"I would never use that kind of human tragedy to accuse the president of being soft on crime."

To make it absolutely clear that he would "never" exploit a family tragedy like the murder of Patsy Pedrin for political gain, Dukakis's campaign ran commercials about the murder. Dukakis apparently had trouble grasping abstract concepts, like "without possibility of parole" and "never." In the commercial, the narrator accused Bush of "false advertising," saying, "Bush won't talk about this drug pusher—one of his furloughed heroin dealers—who raped and murdered Patsy Pedrin, pregnant mother of two." The commercial showed Pedrin's dead body being carried out of her house in a body bag—

something her children must have enjoyed seeing.

Contrary to Dukakis's self-advertisements, his ad did nothing but exploit a family tragedy. In fact, Medrano was not on furlough; he was in a halfway house because he had served his sentence and was about to be released. Until he killed Pedrin, Medrano had no record of violence of any sort, much less murder. The only policy that could conceivably have prevented Pedrin's murder would be life imprisonment for drug dealers. Was Dukakis for that? I don't think so: as Massachusetts governor, he had vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers.

Even if the halfway house program had been to blame for Pedrin's murder—which it wasn't—Vice President Bush was not running for president based on his good work on the federal criminal justice system. Dukakis was constantly bragging about his experience running a criminal justice system—including his innovative furlough program. Since none of their other defenses of Dukakis's furlough program were working, the Democrats reverted to their default argument: they accused Republicans of racism. This was consistent with author Peter Brimelow's definition of a "racist" as "someone who is 48

winning an argument with a liberal." At first, the Democrats didn't realize the Horton ad was racist. Only when nothing else managed to defuse the issue did it suddenly hit them like a ton of bricks: The only reason anyone could possibly object to Horton's release from prison is that he was black.

On This Week with David Brinkley, Dukakis's running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, allowed that there were "racial elements" to Bush's raising the furlough issue. Representative Richard Gephardt referred to the Bush campaign's Horton ad, saying, "Hitler would have loved these people." Dukakis's former campaign manager, Susan Estrich, said, "There is no stronger metaphor for racial hatred in our country than the black man raping the white woman." Horton wasn't a "metaphor"! He was a real murderer and rapist who had already killed a person before being released from a life sentence by Dukakis, whereupon Horton savagely beat a man and raped a woman. Say, aren't feminists against rape? Wait, let me get my notes. . . . Yes! I have it right here! They are against rape. Dukakis aide Donna Brazile said the Bush campaign had used the "oldest racial symbol imaginable," referring to the image of "a black man raping a white woman while her husband watched." Again, this wasn't an "image," it was a real case, and I'm not sure how that image would be improved if it had been a white man raping a woman while her husband watched. As Cliff Barnes said: "It didn't make any difference to me or my wife whether Willie Horton was black."

Years later, the Democrats would forget that it was racist to mention Willie Horton. Al Gore was the first politician to mention Horton, raising his name during a 1988 primary debate with Dukakis. But during the 2000 Democratic primary, when Bill Bradley tried pointing out to Democratic primary voters that Gore was the man who had injected Willie Horton into the 1988 presidential campaign, liberals decided it wasn't racist after all and chose Gore as their presidential candidate.

What some might say is racist is the liberal idea that blacks should be required to defend the worst elements of their race. White people are never put in a position of having to defend white scum.

Timothy McVeigh? Sure, go ahead, kill him!

Jeffrey Dahmer? Kill him!

John Wayne Gacy? Kill him!

Robert Alton Harris? Kill him!

Why do blacks have to support Willie Horton? Who made that rule? It's not as if white people were looking at Horton and saying, This shows what all blacks are like.

What white people were saying was: This shows what idiot liberals like Michael Dukakis are like. As Alan Keyes said, when Democrats "look at Willie Horton they see a black man. When I look at him, I see a rapist and a murderer."

The whole mythology of the racist Willie Horton ad is a joke. Even the victims' ad that showed Horton's face would not be deemed racist by anyone who had ever been to our planet. Was this Vermont circa 1780? No! It was Massachusetts in the 1980s. Some criminals in twentieth-century America are black. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign bent over backwards to avoid any acknowledgment of the fact that Horton was black, going to the ridiculous extreme of showing all white people in prison. You could have run that ad past the editorial board of the New York Times and the editors would have concluded, No, this ad is not racist. The Bush campaign surely wished that Horton had been Chinese, Indian, German, Malaysian—an Aleut!—anything but black. But the issue was 49

simply too important to drop just be-cause liberals would call Republicans racist.

The only reason the Democrats cried racism over the Willie Horton ads was that it was one of the greatest campaign issues of all time. The Massachusetts furlough program wasn't an odd, extraneous little issue Dukakis got tagged with unfairly. Dukakis was almost a parody of the Democrats on crime. He had been given repeated opportunities to change course on furloughs—even on the precise issue of Willie Horton's furlough. He could have apologized, met with Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller, signed a bill to deny furloughs to first-degree murderers, or simply refrained from criticizing the bill he finally did sign doing just that. But he wouldn't do it. Dukakis didn't even have someone on his staff to warn him, just in case you ever think about running for president, sir, you might want to tone down your gushing about furloughs for first-degree murderers. Horton was the essence, the heart, the alpha and omega of liberal ideas about crime and punishment, to wit: Release the guilty. Willie Horton showed the American people exactly what was wrong with liberal theories about crime.

But when Dukakis lost, a whole myth had to be created about the racist Willie Horton ads. Whenever Democrats lose—especially to people as stupid as they say Republicans are—they claim they were cheated somehow. Liberals would spend the next decade trying to persuade Americans that they were bigots who had fallen prey to the ugly racist tactics of the Bush campaign. The transmitter of all liberal idiocy, Michael Moore, summarized what liberals think of Americans in Bowling for Columbine when he said,

"[W]hether you're a psychotic killer or running for president of the United States, the one thing you can always count on is white America's fear of the black man"—as evidenced by Michael Moore, who has done everything possible to avoid contact with them.

Even before Dukakis lost the 1988 election, liberals were hard at work setting up the argument that Bush won because of the racist Willie Horton ads. At a Republican press conference before the election to discuss Dukakis's record on crime, national defense, and fiscal policy, Bush's spokesmen showed three campaign ads, with Governor John Sununu, Senator Arlen Specter, and former senator John Tower on hand to answer questions. But the reporters only wanted to ask about the unfairness of the Willie Horton ad based on their entire knowledge of the case, which they had gleaned from Dukakis campaign press releases. Here's a sample of press questions about the Horton ad: QUESTION: Senator Specter, Democrats suggest—Reverend Jack-son said it only a few minutes ago—that the Willie Horton situation and the furlough situation bears the opportunity or the risk to polarize the entire country, and that while the Bush-Quayle team maintains that this is not something to sow the seeds or bring up bad blood, that this is exactly what's going on and it should be stopped. What do you have to say to that?

SEN. SPECTER: Well, as I understand it, Governor Dukakis and his key campaign aides have moved off the issue of racism.... Racism just isn't in this issue, just isn't in this campaign.

Everybody wants to have security on the streets and in their homes....

QUESTION: Senator Specter, to follow up if you can on this Willie—you didn't show us the Willie Horton spot but you've used it. Don't you think the use of that picture, whether or not it is originally intended, can be seen as a racial overtone to this spot?

SEN. SPECTER: . . . I do not think that is a fair characterization; you can judge for yourself. But the Bush-Quayle campaign has not depicted race in any way, shape, or form, either as to any culprit from the furlough program, or any victim of such a culprit.

QUESTION: Senator, I experienced stonewalling from the Federal Bureau of Prisons when I asked about furloughs and they withheld totally details on transfer furloughs. Point number 9, here on page 3, says that Angel Medrano is not on furlough. Was he not on a transfer furlough, which is one of the furlough programs of the Federal Bureau of Prisons?

BUSH STAFF: We can do that right now. According to the Bureau of Prisons, Medrano was not on furlough.

QUESTION: Was he escorted?

BUSH STAFF: He was in a—he escaped from a halfway house.

GOV. SUNUNU: There's an important point. What was the charge under which Medrano was being imprisoned?

QUESTION: That's not my point.

BUSH STAFF: It was drugs. He was not imprisoned for murder. QUESTION: Isn't that the exact same thing? .. .

SEN. SPECTER: No. No. That is not the same thing.'

And then there were thirty seconds left for John Tower to answer questions about national defense.

Whatever else voters knew about Willie Horton in 1988, one thing the media didn't want them to know about was his crimes. In the entire Nexis archives for 1988, the only place you will find a de-tailed description of what Horton did to Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller is in a press conference that Barnes had to hold himself—and where reporters repeatedly asked him if he was a racist. A search for the words "Willie Horton and the Maryland couple" produces 219 documents on Nexis. A search for the words "Willie Horton and Joey Fournier" produces 219 documents. But run the words "Willie Horton and racism," and Nexis tells you, "This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 1,000 documents."

Reporters were more interested in getting Horton's side of the story. So many reporters wanted to interview Horton that he needed an aide to help him field media requests. (Full disclosure: For a brief period in 1989 Willie Horton and I shared the same publicist.) Even Horton knew Dukakis couldn't win—though he did support Dukakis for president. Talking about his attack on the Maryland couple in the same abstract way liberals talk about 9/11, Horton said, "It occurred at the most unopportune time for me and Dukakis."8

And yet books have been written on how the media played right into Bush's hands on the Willie Horton matter. Kathleen Hall Jamie-son, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a 3,000-word treatise—which she turned into a book—about how the Bush campaign played the media like a fiddle with the Willie Horton issue, "insinuat[ing] an entire vocabulary about the campaign into press coverage."

For example, Jamieson claims it was a Bush administration dirty trick to get the media to call him "Willie Horton"—she refers to him only as "William Horton." As proof 51

that "Willie" was a cruel invention of the Republicans, Jamieson cites the following facts:

"[H]is given name is William, he calls himself William, court records cite him as William, a July 1988 Reader's Digest article identifies him as William J. Horton, Jr., and press reports prior to the Republican ad and speech blitz name him `William.' " I'm pretty sure what really caught people's attention about the Horton case was his rape and torture of Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller while on furlough from a life sentence—and not that his name was "Willie."

In any event, except for the claim about what "he calls himself," these are all restatements of the same manifestly obvious fact: Horton's given name is "William." I assume everyone grasped this with-out Jamieson's laborious exegesis. Of course prison records referred to Horton as "William," and for that reason, so would early news accounts. That's his legal name. Orenthal James Simpson's court records don't refer to him as "O.J."

Jamieson's only real claim is that Horton called himself "William." First of all, how on earth does she know? Did she interview his cellblock buddies? Do a phone survey of Horton's surviving victims? Unless Horton is an aspiring host for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it doesn't exactly ring true. "Bill" we might have believed—but "William"?

No. In fact, in an interview with liberal columnist Jimmy Breslin the day of Bush's inauguration, Horton refers to himself in the third person as "Willie Horton."

According to Jamieson, another example of the media's pro-Bush bias was the constant reference to "weekend furloughs." Jamieson indignantly reports that Horton was actually released on a 48-hour furlough that began on a Friday, "which means he should have returned to prison while most of us were still enjoying what we usually define as a weekend." No doubt most Americans would have approved of the furloughs had they realized that. What was invidious about the "weekend furloughs" phrase, Jameison said, was that "weekend is a time for recreation and leisure. This association suggests that the assault and rapes were leisure activities for the prisoners." In fact, of course, the prisoners spent their furloughs reading the New York Times, having brunch, and taking in a Woody Allen movie at the Beekman like everyone else. Again, I think what people had a problem with was the fact that rapists and murderers were being released from prison at all, not whether the furloughs ended on a Sunday or a Monday.

Jamieson was appalled that Bush lackeys over at the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, CBS, and MacNeil/Lehrer used words like slashed, terrorized, and tortured to describe what Horton did to the Maryland couple. Such words, she said, "are not the words usually used by reporters to characterize crime" (especially when they're describing counterfeiting, bribery, and fraud cases). Compared with a detailed accounting of what Horton actually did to the Maryland couple, words like terrorized and tortured are sweet euphemisms, like saying "Hitler subdued the Sudetenland." Apparently, Jamieson thinks reporters should have said Horton "interviewed," "met with," or "chatted with" the Maryland couple.

Most peculiar coming from a good progressive like Jamieson, she was indignant that reporters did not stress the fact that at the time of the attack, Barnes and Miller were living in sin! According to Jamie-son, only pro-Bush bias in the press could explain why reporters did not muddy up the victims by pointing out that the couple only married sometime after Horton's attack. She even provided a list of the worst offenders.

This was the same press that used some variation of the word racist nearly ten times 52

more (295) than Cliff Barnes's name (30) in news stories about Willie Horton in 1988.

While Jamieson was indignant about news stories that referred to a 48-hour furlough that began on Friday as a "weekend furlough," she seemed to miss media lies that fell more within the accepted definition of lie, such as that Dukakis inherited the furlough program from a Republican governor or that other states had the same furlough program.

In a rash act of journalism, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the news-paper in the town where Joey Fournier had been murdered, ran a major series on Dukakis's furlough program. Unaware that good re-porting consists of writing about Jeff Gannon week after week (see Frank Rich) or calling Bush "Bushie" (Maureen Dowd), the reporters produced nearly 200 factual articles about the Massachusetts furlough program. The Eagle-Tribune's coverage was widely credited with ending furloughs in Massachusetts for first-degree murderers. Even the Pulitzer committee broke a long-standing tradition of ignoring good journalism and awarded the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for the series.

Journalism professors attacked the series as the "journalistic version of a lynching," in the words of Bruce Porter, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

There were sleazy maneuvers available to the reporters that they did not use! As an example of the slipshod reporting, Porter noted that "the paper never mentioned that furlough programs had been created in 1972 under a Republican governor, Francis Sargent, or that first-degree murderers were ruled eligible for it by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1973." For failing to reprint Dukakis campaign press releases, the Eagle-Tribune had committed "outrageous errors"—or as normal people would say, it was "bristling with facts."

The liberal hysteria on Willie Horton was so intense that the lead author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series disavowed the prize. Susan Forrest, now a reporter with New York Newsday, said she was "ashamed" of her work on Massachusetts's furlough program. She added that when the prize was announced, "there was a party and I didn't even go. Deep down I never felt I deserved it." I'm sure Comrade Stalin will give her a fair trial.

The Democrats ran a man for president who had released a violent lunatic from prison despite a life sentence. But instead of Republicans raising Willie Horton constantly to say, This is the same Democratic Party that released Willie Horton, it's Republicans who are supposed to be embarrassed by Willie Horton. The reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Massachusetts furloughs leading to a change in the law retracted her work. The rewriting of history was complete.

4 THE HOLIEST SACRAMENT: ABORTION

No liberal cause is defended with more dishonesty than abortion. No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time—undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals—the single most important item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion. Indeed, abortion is the one issue the Democratic Party is willing to go to war over—except in the Muslim world, which is jam-packed with prohibitions on abortion, because going to war against a Muslim nation might also serve America's national security objectives. To a liberal, 2,200 military deaths in the entire course of a war in Iraq is unconscionable, but 1.3 million aborted babies in America every year is something to celebrate.

The Orwellian dishonesty about abortion begins with the Left's utter refusal to use the word abortion. It would be as if members of the National Rifle Association refused to use the word gun. These "pro-choicers" treat abortion the way Muslims treat Mohammed: It's so sacred, it must not be mentioned. Instead we get a slew of liberal euphemisms for baby-killing: "reproductive freedom," "a woman's right to control her own body,"

"terminating a pregnancy," "freedom of choice," "a woman's own private medical decision," "a procedure," "access to health care," "family planning," "our bodies, our selves,"

"choice." Choice is important when it comes to killing babies, but not so much when it comes to whom you hire, whom you associate with, what you think about evolution, how much gas your car consumes, how much water comes out of your bathroom showerhead.... The only other practice that was both defended and unspeakable in America like this was slavery. There are three indirect references to slavery in the Constitution, but the words slave and slavery never appear.

The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media will only refer to partial birth abortion as "what its opponents refer to as partial birth abortion." What do its supporters call it? Casual Fridays? Bean with-bacon potato-chip dip? Uh . . . Steve?

"Partial birth abortion" isn't some meaningless, poll-tested name, like "assault weapon."

It's a straightforward legal description of the procedure that is to be prohibited by law. If there were a better name for it, you can be sure the New York Times would use it.

The 2003 partial birth abortion ban enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bush defines a "partial birth abortion" as an abortion in which the person performing the abortion

deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus.

As one can see, actual descriptions of partial birth abortion do not tend to help the pro-abortion side. "Partial birth abortion" is the euphemism.

In 1995, 60 Minutes set out to prove there was no such thing as "a partial birth abortion." Ed Bradley asked Colorado abortionist Warren Hern what the term meant.

BRADLEY: What is a partial-birth abortion?

DR. HERN: Well, I'm not really sure I know. The—there's no such thing in the medical literature.

BRADLEY: Would most doctors in this country know what a partial .. .

DR. HERN: No, there's no such thing.

BRADLEY: It doesn't exist?

DR. HERN: No.

BRADLEY: So where does this term come from?

DR. HERN: Propaganda term. It's a political term; has no medical meaning.'

This is as opposed to precise medical terms, like choice and back alley abortions.

This is pure sophistry, along the lines of liberals pre-tending not to know what liberal means. Battery and sexual assault aren't "medical" terms, either. They're legal terms, descriptions of what the law prohibits. The fact that the medical community has not dignified this particular form of infanticide with a name doesn't mean legislatures can't ban it.

60 Minutes also sought to assure viewers that despite all the hullabaloo about partial birth abortion—whatever the hell that is—such abortions were extremely rare, performed only in extenuating circumstances. You know, like pregnancy. Consider the lunacy of both denying that "partial birth abortions" exist and then discussing the frequency of that nonexistent procedure. Bradley interviewed two women who had had partial birth abortions on horribly deformed babies who could not have lived outside the womb. One woman told Bradley, "In terms of misinformation, the biggest one is that they are—there are thousands and thousands of these abortions being done in the third trimester on normal babies with healthy mothers carrying normal babies. Well, if that's the case, where are they?" Yes, indeed. Why aren't more of these dead babies speaking up?

In a voiceover, Bradley then said that Helen Alvare, spokeswoman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, "wouldn't tell us where they are, but she insists they are 55

there." In fact, Alvare did better than tell Bradley "where they are": she quoted the man credited with inventing partial birth abortions, Martin Haskell, who told American Medical News that 80 percent of the partial birth abortions he per-forms are "purely elective." At this, Bradley asked Alvare, "Why is this interview with Dr. Haskell so important?"

Bolstering the claim that partial birth abortions are extremely rare, Bradley insisted,

"Of the one and a half million abortions per-formed every year, only a tiny percentage, somewhere between 600 and 1,000, are performed in the third trimester of pregnancy."

To talk only about how many abortions are performed in the "third trimester" is just another way of lying about abortion. It is like talking about only the number of partial birth abortions performed by left-handed abortionists with hairy moles on their faces. The third trimester begins at 26 weeks. Babies can take a breath outside the womb at around 19 weeks. At 14 weeks, they have eyes, ears, hair, toes, fingers, and fingernails. I think what repels most people about partial birth abortions (or "casual Friday") is the fact that that baby is having its brains suctioned out.

A few months after Bradley assured viewers that the nonexistent partial birth abortion occurs only about 600 to 1,000 times per year, the Record (Bergen, New Jersey) reported that a single abortion clinic in Englewood, New Jersey, performs about 1,500 partial birth abortions every year on babies 20 to 24 weeks old.2 Contrary to the claims of the women interviewed by Bradley whose entire expertise was based on having had partial birth abortions themselves, one doctor at the clinic said, "[M]ost are for elective, not medical, reasons: people who didn't realize, or didn't care, how far along they were."

With the pro-choicers, even their talking points are lies. It is a point of honor with the abortion crowd to claim that no one is for abortion. As far back as 1978, Cory Richards of Planned Parenthood told Newsweek magazine, "Strictly speaking, no one is for abortion." Carol Werner of NARAL expanded on the point: "The phrasèpro-abortion' is totally inaccurate. We are pro-choice. What matters is that the option is there so the woman can exercise it."3 An op-ed piece in the Washington Post in 1989 titled "The Real Issue: Choice" re-minded readers, "No one is for abortion."4

And a 1991 op-ed in the Chicago Tribune argued for a federal law requiring taxpayer money to be spent on abortion counseling, saying, "No one is `for' abortion. Nonetheless, freedom to terminate an unwanted pregnancy must remain an option precisely because society has not yet made it possible for all pregnancies to be wanted."5 By 2005, the claim that "no one is for abortion" had to be stated as a cliche, as it was in an article in Conscience, a journal for pro-choice Catholics, attacking the bishops for missing this important point: "As stated many times by all prochoice advocates: no one is for abortion, no matter how often and how loudly the bishops and their minions say it. Saying it doesn't make it so, but they haven't figured out any-thing else to say."6

After all their prattle about how no one is for abortion, it took about five seconds for Mama Alito, magnificent primogenitress of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, to smoke them out. Speaking of her son, Rose Alito told reporters, "Of course he's against abortion." And then all hell broke lose.

USA Today raised Mama Alito's remark in an editorial demanding "straight answers"

from Alito on his views of "the court's established abortion-law jurisprudence" that

"keeps the government out of citizens' bedrooms and most intimate decisions."7

Columnist Ellen Goodman listed as a "telltale" sign about Judge Alito "we know what 56

Alito's 90-year-old mother knows: Òf course he's against abortion.' " Five Democratic congresswomen, along with Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, held a press conference to announce their opposition to Alito. In an adorable statement, Representative Jan Schakowsky cited Mrs. Alito's remark and said, "We trust what our mothers say."8 (It's so cute when the pro-abortion crowd starts citing mothers as moral authority.) But wait a minute! I thought everybody was "against abortion"! What happened to the talking point about how "no one is for abortion"? Mrs. Alito put an end to that in a hurry. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying."

Then there's the canard about a united front of women supporting abortion, while misogynist men try to keep it from us. Feminists have a charming slogan memorialized on buttons sold by the National Organization for Women, and the title of a book: "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Apparently it isn't a sacrament now only because of the overwhelming hatred men have for women. How about this slogan: "If women had to pay for dates, rape would be a sacrament."

It's rather churlish of the NARAL types to complain about men's insufficient support for abortion. Men support abortion more than women do. On the basis of casual observation, single men between the ages of eighteen and thirty are strongly supportive of a woman's right to have irresponsible, casual sex with them. Maybe NARAL should work on getting more women to support abortion before at-tacking the primary beneficiaries of it, or what we used to call "cads."

Indeed, it's hard to see how abortion could be any more of a sacrament for some men.

Bill Clinton sold out nearly every single Democrat special interest group (also his party, his vice president, his advisers, his wife, his daughter, and his family—but that's another story). There was only one issue Clinton was absolutely committed to: killing the unborn.

Congress passed bans on partial birth abortion twice in large bipartisan votes. Clinton vetoed the bills both times. This is a man who took polls to decide what he would do for his vacation. He even relied on a "quick show of hands" to decide which woman to hit on during stops on the campaign trail. But in the face of huge majorities opposed to partial birth abortion, Clinton's support for the gruesome procedure was unflagging. Say what you will about the man, at least he knows his base.

Moreover, if women are so pro-abortion, why are virtually all abortionists men? If ever there was a need for a Take Our Daughters to Work Day, it's at the abortion mills.

As the male director of a Cleveland abortion clinic explained, women tend not to enjoy doing "abortions over and over for moral reasons." Also, problems arise when the women doctors become pregnant. Not only does a pregnant abortionist tend to "upset the patients," but, he said, "if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn't like to abort someone else's."9

But according to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Roe v. Wade is critically important because "women all over America have come to depend on it." Leave aside any moral questions about baby-killing—a term I have come to understand baby-killing supporters dislike. At its most majestic, this precious right that women "have come to depend on" is the right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with.

There's a stirring principle! Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don't want to have children 57

with is not exactly "Give me liberty, or give me death." In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today's Democrats. It's as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc.

The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever writ-ten by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists—or "pre-Democrats," as I call them—were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today. Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party, may have had some unpalatable goals, but at least they were big ideas: wipe out the Indians, kill off the national bank, and institute a spoils system. Love him or hate him, he never said, "I'll be announcing my platform sometime early next year." The Whigs were formed in opposition to everything Jackson stood for. The Republican Party emerged from the Whigs when the Whigs waffled on slavery. (They were "pro-choice" on slavery.) The Republican Party was founded expressly as the antislavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today. Having won that one, with 600,000 white men having to die to redeem the principle that all men are created equal, today's Republican Party stands for life, limited government, and national defense. And today's Democratic Party stands for .

. . the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't especially like. We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies Party. They're the Hookup party. (For people who claim to be so concerned with "privacy," they certainly don't hesitate to make the sweaty details of their private lives central to the national debate.) No Republican is so crazily obsessed with any issue as the Democrats are with abortion. During the debate on the bankruptcy bill in 2003 and then again in 2005, Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) introduced an amendment to the bill that would exclude protesters at abortion clinics from bankruptcy protection. That was the Democrats' main objective in a major restructuring of the bankruptcy laws in America: ensure that fines levied against abortion-clinic protesters would not be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

It wasn't even a law vaguely related to children or reproduction, like a health care bill—it was a bankruptcy bill. How maniacally in-sane do you have to be to bring up abortion in a debate on a bankruptcy bill? How about the Defense appropriation bill?

There must be one abortionist for every thirty men in the field. This would be like Republicans demanding an amendment to the bankruptcy bill saying you can't discharge money you owe to a gun manufacturer in bankruptcy. The amazing thing is, the abortion amendment to the bankruptcy bill actually was approved by the Senate in 2003 and was only narrowly defeated in the Senate in 2005, by a 53-46 vote.

At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, which nominated Bill Clinton, the Democrats wouldn't even allow a pro-life Democrat governor of a large swing state to speak. Governor Robert Casey was the enormously popular governor of Pennsylvania.

But the Democrats wouldn't let him speak because of his pro-life views. You might say the Democrats were running that convention like a plantation—and I think you know what I'm talking about, girlfriend. (Copyright: Hillary Clinton.) When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was the Abortion Party's candidate in the 2004 presidential election, he expressly endorsed taxpayer-funded abortions—amid a stream of reminders that he had been an altar boy and that religion helped lead him

"through a war." In the sort of convoluted nonsense Democrats spout whenever the topic is abortion, Kerry said during the second presidential debate, "[Y]ou don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the Constitution affords them if they can't 58

afford it otherwise." Unless, of course, it's a quality education at a nonpublic school. I have a right to free speech; how about the government buy me a newspaper? Hey!

Doesn't the Constitution protect my right to travel in a brand-new Cadillac Escalade? I'll take a red one, please.

After Kerry lost an election in which voters said the most important issue to them was

"moral values," suddenly Democratic double-speak on abortion reached epic proportions.

Senator Dianne Feinstein began complaining that Republicans were "painting the view of the pro-choice movement as abortion on demand—and nothing can be farther from the truth." One thing that could be farther from the truth is something that's untrue. She seemed to have forgotten that the Democrats' presidential candidate stated loud and clear—in a widely viewed presidential debate, no less—that he was for abortions at any time for any reason, paid for by the taxpayer if necessary. This is also known as "abortion on demand." Former NATO general Wesley Clark was only slightly more explicit than all the other Democratic candidates for president, saying a woman should be free to abort her baby right up until the moment of birth. And consider: Clark might have been the Democrats' presidential candidate if he hadn't been endorsed by Michael Moore.

Another Abortion Party candidate for president in 2004 was Howard Dean, a former medical resident with Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. During a January 15, 2004, conference call with reporters, Dean, being a raving lunatic, said, "No doctor is going to do an abortion on a live fetus. That doesn't happen.

Doctors don't do that. If they do, they'll get their license pulled, as well they should."10

(Yes, you're reading that correctly.) At the risk of belaboring the obvious, abortions, by definition, are performed on live fetuses; otherwise it's called a "miscarriage." After the election, when Dean was campaigning to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he said the Democrats should stop turning their backs on pro-lifers. Doctor Demento said, "I don't have any objection to some-one who is pro-life, if they are really dedicated to the welfare of children." Conversely, I suppose, if you are pro-abortion and you hate kids, Dr. Dean would be cool with that, too.

Things were so bad, NARAL Pro-Choice America even decided not to oppose a bill that would require doctors to anesthetize babies being aborted after the twentieth week of pregnancy, called the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.12 Planned Parenthood, however, seems to oppose it still.13 How deranged would you have to be to oppose such a bill? Evidently the wording of the act contained several unacceptable terms, including unborn, child, pain, and awareness. The word act they were okay with.

The pro-abortion zealots demand that the Democrats swear absolute fealty to their craziest positions, and generally the Democrats are happy to comply. They need the money. In 2004, pro-abortion groups gave over $1.4 million in hard money to candidates for national office—more than twice as much as did pro-life groups. Emily's List is a political fundraising group that gives money only to female candidates who support abortion. In 2004, Emily's List raised $34 million. By comparison, the National Right to Life Committee raised only about $1.7 million.14

Showing the raw principle of the modern Democratic Party, among the Democrats who have abandoned pro-life positions to become pro-choice are former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Dick Durbin, former representative Richard Gephardt, Representative Dennis Kucinich, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and chubby nutcase Al Gore. All but Durbin have run for president. It's easy to imagine a person going from being pro-59

abortion to anti-abortion based on new information—ultrasounds, medical advances, pictures of babies smiling in the womb. But it's hard to see how new information could pro-duce the reverse conversion. Everyone knows it's a terrible thing for a woman who doesn't want to be pregnant to be pregnant. But Al Gore explained his conversion experience, saying he had "talked to a lot of women who taught me about the kinds of circumstances that can come and the kinds of dilemmas that women can face." Only for a Democrat could that constitute new information. How about I talked to a lot of plantation owners and I found out they really do need slaves to pick the cotton.

Still, despite the massive infusions of money, the NARAL ladies keep failing to produce the votes needed to win an election. The problem for the Democrats is that "Give me liberty or give me the right to have unprotected sex" just isn't that inspiring a rallying cry.

Republican presidential candidates win historic landslides when they make abortion a central part of their campaign, as Ronald Reagan did. Democratic candidates have to weasel out of defending abortion by claiming they want to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare" merely to win a plurality. What other basic, constitutional rights do its staunchest advocates urge us to exercise as little as possible? Speech? Free assembly?

Not quartering soldiers in our homes?

Not surprisingly, polls have shown that being pro-life was more helpful to politicians than being pro-choice. In a 1996 Los Angeles Times poll, 27 percent of respondents said they were more likely to vote for Bush because he was pro-life, but only 18 percent said they were more likely to vote for Al Gore because he was pro-choice.

The Democrats need pro-life votes, but there's the small problem that they won't budge an inch on abortion. So they make crazy arguments for abortion, allowing not the tiniest restriction, while periodically pretending to have qualms about abortion. It's the most amazing spectacle, as if Ronald Reagan were slashing our taxes while talking about what a "sad, tragic choice" it is to cut taxes or giving speeches about how tax cuts should be "safe, legal, and rare." Except that even Reagan didn't have the gusto for cutting taxes that the

Democrats have for ending human life. It would be so easy for the Democrats to say,

"Okay, we're against partial birth abortion," or "We've changed our mind on parental notification of a minor's abortion." But they can't even say that.

The Democrats' only hope is to lie and pretend they stand for something other than the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't like. For example: the right of women not to commit suicide. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for John Roberts, Senator Feinstein said, Às a college student at Stan-ford, I watched the passing of the plate to collect money so a young woman could go to Tijuana for a back-alley abortion. I knew a young woman who killed herself because she was pregnant." I know a man who killed himself because of high taxes.

To find out what Democrats really think about abortion, you have to read The American Prospect or listen to liberal hate radio talking about Republican judicial nominees like Priscilla Owen: This country cannot have a woman on any federal court if she interpreted a law that says a parent has to be notified of a minor child's abortion to mean that a parent has to be notified of a minor child's abortion. That's like the Nazis!

Lock your doors tonight, America!

One begins to appreciate why Democrats aren't wild about any political system that 60

permits people to vote. Liberals would have no chance of advancing their bizarre policy agenda if Americans were al-lowed to have a say in the matter. So they manufacture phony "constitutional rights" in which the Constitution always sounds suspiciously similar to the ideological agenda of the ACLU. We know what Democrats want to do, but it's suicide for candidates to run on ensuring the right of minor girls to have partial birth abortions paid for by the government without parental notification. This has to be done through the courts.

Abortion is the sacrament and Roe v. Wade is Holy Writ. This is why we have to have World War III every time there's an opening on the Supreme Court. As long as Roe is the law of the land, elected Democrats can hide behind the Supreme Court's ruling. They rarely have to cast votes on abortion bills, because the High Court has removed abortion from the democratic process. All the Democrats have to do is smear any Supreme Court nominee who might possibly vote to overturn Roe and finally allow Americans to vote on abortion.

Consequently, the single most important job in the universe for the Democrats is a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee—to protect made-up "constitutional rights" to things like abortion and the right never to have to see Christians praying. No Democrat from a swing state is allowed to sit on that committee. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee from the most liberal states in the nation are in utterly safe seats—Senator Chuck Schumer from New York, Senator Teddy Kennedy from Massachusetts, Senator Richard Durbin from Illinois, Senator Dianne Feinstein from California, Senator Herb Cole from Wisconsin, and Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin.

This leads to the astonishing spectacle of Teddy Kennedy, in full-dress sanctimony, getting all high and mighty with Supreme Court candidates as if the nominee had done something heinous like drown a girl and walk away from it because he had diplomatic immunity in the state of Massachusetts. Maybe there's a better committee for Senator Drunkennedy to sit on—one that does not require constant moral grandstanding from the Democrats.

Fortunately for the Democrats, People for the American Way holds the copyright to the words troubling and concerned. I bet Mary Jo Kopechne was "troubled" and

"concerned" about the senator's leaving her trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi. It's hard to imagine any group of people—who are American citizens—with less understanding of what Americans are like than People for the American Way. Some would say gun owner-ship is part of the Àmerican Way," but that's not what they have in mind. They probably thought it was kind of a corny name, but it was the only way people from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Malibu could push a left-wing agenda on America by stealth. They believe in the most extreme version of abortion rights, the right to an abortion at any stage of the pregnancy, no anesthesia for the baby—just as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln did!

Of course, if most people agreed with People for a Small Slice of the Upper West Side Way, Democrats might have won a majority of votes from the American people more than one time since Lyndon Johnson was president—and that was twenty years ago, when liberals made up "Watergate" and Jimmy Carter beat the hapless Gerald Ford with 50.1 percent of the vote. For the past decade, Democrats have rarely been able to get Americans even to vote for senators who might confirm judges who support their loony ideas on abortion.

Senator Dianne Feinstein is a great point person for the Democrats on abortion.

Unlike Durbin, Kennedy, and Schumer, she's not a hack, she never drowned anyone, and the Anti-Defamation League isn't trying to put her in a lockbox. But most important, Feinstein helps nurture the myth that abortion is a women's issue. Even Fein-stein prefers to cite "polls," as if she were just trying to represent the people of her state and abortion wasn't really that big a cause for her personally: "Well, obviously, I come from a state that is 71 percent supportive of Roe. The American people are—according to the latest ABC poll—60 percent supportive of Roe."

In a 2000 Los Angeles Times poll that surveyed more than 2,000 Americans over several days, 65 percent of respondents said abortions should be illegal after the first trimester. Seventy-two percent of women wanted to make second-trimester abortions illegal, compared with only 58 percent of men. More than half of the respondents said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances or only to protect the life of the mother or in the cases of rape and incest. Fifty-seven percent said they believed abortion was murder. The article describing the poll was bristling with rationalizations from "gender studies" professors who claimed support for abortion was declining because the younger generation had no memory of the terror before Roe v. Wade. Yeah, okay, maybe. Or maybe it's that support for all liberal ideas is always at its zenith before people figure out what liberals are talking about. (This is known as "the Howard Dean effect.") The opinion in Roe, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, has gone from being a joke to being the centerpiece of American jurisprudence. Liberals pretend to be shocked that then-judge Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings that he had never debated Roe. This is ridiculous—no one debates Harry Blackmun's opinion in Roe. It would be humiliating, like discussing the plot of a Will & Grace episode.

Roe was so preposterous that Supreme Court clerks referred to it as "Harry's abortion."15 Harvard law professor—and Watergate special prosecutor—Archibald Cox said of the opinion in Roe, "Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution." Stan-ford Law School dean John Hart Ely said Roe "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has said that "the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found." Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called Roe an act of "heavy-handed judicial intervention" and ridiculed the opinion during her confirmation hearings. A lot of people who favor abortion criticize the opinion in Roe. But no one who op-poses abortion says, "I'm against abortion, but Roe certainly is a well-argued opinion."

The idea that law students sit around discussing the subtle legal reasoning in Roe v.

Wade is absurd. No one talks about the "legal analysis" in Roe, because there is none.

Liberals wanted abortion, so they discovered a right to it. And yet Thomas is endlessly attacked for responding to Senator Patrick Leahy's question during the confirmation hearings about whether he had ever "debated" Roe, by saying, "Only, I guess, Senator, in the fact in the most general sense, that other individuals express concerns one way or the other and you listen and try to be thoughtful." Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women justified her organization's defense of President Clinton's sexual harassment after having opposed Clarence Thomas on the grounds that Thomas had "told an absolutely unbelievable story of saying that he had never even discussed Roe v.

Wade." 16

Michael Kinsley was still blathering in 2005 about Thomas's òut-right fib"—even

"perjury"—to denounce the idea of Thomas being nominated to chief justice." Kinsley sneers at the claim of Thomas's supporters that "he didn't commit perjury because he testified only that he had never `debated' Roe, not that he had never `discussed' it." I'll take "discussed" for 10. There's no there there—there's nothing to talk about in Roe.

Denounce, laugh at, ridicule, attack—yes. Discuss—no.

For people who pin their hopes and dreams on a right invented out of whole cloth in Roe v. Wade, liberals are real sticklers about what the Bible says. In 2005, the New York Times triumphantly announced that the word abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Marshaling its evidence, the Times noted that in the index to the Bible, one can find "how many times Jesus talked about the poor (at least a dozen), or what the Apostle Paul wrote about grace (a lot)." But those seeking instruction on abortion "will not find the word at all."18 It doesn't have words like child rape either, but that doesn't mean Christianity is ambiguous on the subject.

Incidentally, another text that doesn't have the word abortion in it is the U.S.

Constitution. It doesn't even have the word privacy. Would that liberals would be as literal when reading a constitution that sets forth specific enumerated rights as when reading the Bible! Liberals are incapable of extrapolating anything about abortion from commands like "Thou shalt not kill." But they unmistakably see a right to abortion hidden in the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

Liberals can't win on abortion in a frank discussion, so they come up with a series of feints, euphemisms, and stalking horses to pro-mote their most sacred belief. They raise procedural blockades to conservative judges, preferring to put the American people to sleep with long exegeses on the history of the filibuster rather than clearly explaining that what they mean by "out of the mainstream" is: "opposes abortion when a girl can't fit into her prom dress."

After the 2004 election, the Democrats took secret polls and determined that they could not defeat Bush's judicial nominees on ideological grounds.19 The Democrats' own polls showed that referring to Republican judicial nominees as radical right-wing Republicans was "the least effective approach."20 It wasn't the conservative judges whose viewpoints were radical, it was the American people's! Suddenly nothing made sense anymore to liberals who learned about the world from reading the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Abortion fanatics know they can't fly under their own flag. So the Democrats use the blacks to front for the feminists. Whenever you see a Democrat getting all worked up about some egregious violation of "civil rights," I promise you, he's not talking about discrimination against a black person. Democrats don't care about race discrimination: They are the party of race discrimination! George Wallace, Bull Connor, Bob Byrd—all Democrats! What Democrats mean by "civil rights" is the civil right of a woman not to inform her husband she's aborting his baby; the civil right of a minor to have an abortion with-out notifying her parents; the civil right of a woman to plunge a fork into the head of a child as it struggles through the birth canal because it has a cleft lip. That's "civil rights." Before we jettison the "living Constitution," how about inventing a constitutional right not to hear Democrats invoke the phrase "civil rights" when what they mean is

"abortion"?

The vicious smearing of Judge Robert Bork, Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court in 1987, was the Democrats' first open admission that they can't win on abortion in an open fight. Even Democrats knew they couldn't scare people by telling them Bork believed in terrible things like parental notification before a minor has an abortion.

America to Democrats: So do we. Instead, they had to make ugly allegations that Bork was an evil bigot who would bring back "segregated lunch counters," in Senator Drunkennedy's famous phrase. Bork had filed briefs in major civil rights cases and had won the respect of people like Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall told Legal Times reporter Stuart Taylor, "I think he'd have been a credit to this Court." Marshall complained to Taylor that Bork had gotten "a bum deal," and had been "tarred unfairly as an enemy of black people."21 Democrats didn't care that they were smearing a defender of blacks' civil rights: The right to destroy human life was at stake!

Democrats were stymied in their use of the race card to protect abortion rights when President George Bush (41) nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court the next year. The feminists had to call in Anita Hill for a last-minute Hail Mary smear of Thomas as asexual harasser. To preserve the right of women to have sex with men whose babies they don't want to carry, the Democrats nearly derailed the appointment of the second black justice ever to sit on the highest court in the land. That's their commitment to "civil rights." Hill was believed to be lying by two-thirds of the public. Liberals rewarded her with fawning profiles and a "Woman of the Year" award from Glamour magazine.

But the most outrageous example of the Democrats' using blacks to front for abortion rights was their ugly racial attack on Judge Charles Pickering. What the Democrats did to Pickering tells you all you need to know about how they use black Americans to protect abortion rights. As a young prosecutor in the sixties, Pickering worked closely with the FBI to go after the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. In 1966, he testified against Klan member Sam Bowers, on trial for murdering civil rights activist Vernon Darner. After testifying, Pickering and his family needed FBI protection. The Klan later claimed credit for defeating Pickering when he ran for the state legislature. Unlike all the Democratic members of the Judiciary Commit-tee who would later accuse Pickering of racism, he sent his children to the Mississippi public schools, where it was fairly certain they would run into black people.

Pickering's real crime was that he was "anti-choice." In 1976, he chaired the subcommittee of the Republican Party's Platform Committee, calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. As a state senator he voted to support a human life amendment to the Constitution. And as the president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, Pickering presided over a meeting where the convention adopted a resolution calling for legislation to outlaw abortion. His most virulent opponents were People for the American Way, NARAL, the National Women's Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice. NARAL President Kate Michelman declared that Pickering "has an open hostility to a woman's right to choose."22

The feminists wanted abortion on demand, so blacks in Mississippi were told to take a back seat. The Democrats used their Goebbels big-lie tactics to claim Judge Pickering had lowered the sentence of a cross-burner because he hates blacks. It didn't take a lot of investigation to get the real story—even 60 Minutes did it.

Pickering's objection to the sentence in the cross-burning case was simply that a wildly disproportionate sentence was being re-quested for the least culpable defendant.

The government struck a deal with two of the cross-burners, letting them off with misdemeanor convictions and no prison time. During the proceedings, it became apparent that the government had made deals with the wrong men—including the ringleader of the attack, who had a criminal record and had once shot a gun into the cross-burning victims'

home. After letting two defendants off with a wrist slap, the Department of Justice wanted the third defendant—a simpleton who had stupidly gone along with the others—

sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. There are child-molesters and murderers who serve less time. Eventually, the Clinton Department of Justice agreed with Pickering and requested a sentence of two years in prison. But the Democrats later seized on this case to accuse Pickering of being soft on cross-burners.

Black Mississippians who knew Judge Pickering and had nothing to gain by defending him refused to go along with the smearing of the judge. On 60 Minutes Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers and a Pickering supporter, engaged in this ex-change with the head of a local branch of the NAACP that was opposing Pickering:

CHARLES EVERS: YOU know, maybe you don't know, you know that Charles Pickering is a man who helped us to break the Ku Klux Klan. Did you know that?

CLARENCE McGEE: I heard that statement made.

EVERS: I mean, I know that. Do you know that?

McGEE: I don't know that.

EVERS: I know that. Do you know about the young black man that was accused of robbing the young white woman. You know about that?

McGEE: Nope.

EVERS: So Charles Pickering took the case. Came to trial and won the case and the young man became free.

McGEE: I don't know about that.

EVERS: But did you also know that Charles Pickering is the man who helped integrate his churches. You know about that?

McGEE: No.

EVERS: Well, you don't know a thing about Charles Pickering. 23

As 60 Minutes reported, Judge Pickering "enjoys strong support from the many blacks who know him. In his hometown of Laurel, four of the five black city council members say they back him, because of all he's done to improve race relations. And many black attorneys who practice before him say Pickering is fair and first-rate."24 The Democrats' attack on Judge Pickering was nothing but a kiss-ass, spineless, contemptible suck-up to feminists on abortion.

The day before Kerry won the Democrats' Best Fake Patriot con-test in Iowa, he was on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, calling Judge Pickering "a cross-burning defending judge."25 It had been 24 hours since Kerry had sucked up to the feminists, so he had to get that out of the way by blackening Judge Pickering's name on national TV. While Kerry endlessly bragged about his undaunted valor in Vietnam, it would have been nice if he had ever shown one ounce of courage by standing up to the feminists.

The Democrats will sell out blacks, blue-collar workers, Catholics, Hispanics, and the elderly. But they will never cross NARAL. The most important thing isn't the little guy, the poor, the voiceless, civil rights, or the "other America." The most important value to liberals is destroying human life.

When a political party seeking votes from the American people views nothing as more sacred than ending human life, it has more to worry about than the risks of casual sex. Republicans aren't even sending in their A-team anymore—and the Democrats still can't win. The Democrats are being routed on every issue—gun control, national security, gay marriage, taxes, crime. The abortion ladies are the only ones still to be thrown off the boat. Republicans have won the battle of ideas on abortion, and now it's just a matter of time before the Supreme Court overturns Roe and allows Americans to vote. The death of Roe is going to be like the death of the Soviet Union, and not only because both events make liberals sad. Roe is already dead, we're just waiting for the official proclamation.

Liberals think they can demand a ruling from the Supreme Court that will take all risk out of trysting sex. But the High Court can't do that any more than penicillin can. Liberals seem not to realize their real complaint is with a Law-maker whose judgment cannot be appealed.

5 LIBERALS' DOCTRINE OF

INFALLIBILITY: SOBBING

PERP