The Fabrication of a New Reality: Willie Horton and Swiftboating, 2008

By Christopher Cook 

The National Campaign Fund has produced a devastating campaign ad exposing Barack Obama's weakness on matters of crime, and positing questions about his potential conduct in waging the War on Terror. The ad can be viewed at the site ExposeObama.com.

After you've watched it, check out these headlines, culled from a single day of reporting on the ad:

How Republicans Plan on Ganging Up on Obama for Being "Weak" on Street Gangs

Obama Gets the Willie Horton Treatment

Breaking... Obama "Swiftboating" Plan Revealed

Conservatives rolling out attack ads aimed at Obama, supporters

Willie Horton Mastermind Takes Aim at Obama

Obama's 'Willie Horton' ad: Soft On Crime, Soft On Terror

An Ersatz Christian Smears Obama with a Willie Horton-type Ad

This is classic headline editorializing, one of the many ways in which the MSM fibricates™ a new reality.

Check out the verbiage...

Republicans are ganging up on Obama for being "weak." Note the "weak" in scare-quotes, and the use of the term "ganging up" to connote unfair bullying

Conservative are rolling out attack ads against Obama AND his supporters. What? Including the word supporters there is a clear appeal to Obama's supporters, many of whom are black: hey guys, Republicans don't just hate Obama, they hate YOU.

The Willie Horton Mastermind... If they could have inserted scary music under the word "Mastermind," they probably would have.

...and don't even ask me where they're going with "Erzatz Christian..."

But the truly insidious aspect of this is found in the use of the terms "Willie Horton-type ad" and "Swiftboat."

Willie Horton

For those of you who don't remember, Willie Horton was a criminal serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for committing murders of unspeakable savagery. Willie Horton was furloughed under a program fought for by Michael Dukakis. While out on one of his furloughs, Willie Horton tortured and man, stabbing him multiple times. He then tied up the man in the basement and waited upstairs for the man's wife to return. When she did, he raped her multiple times while her bleeding husband listened to her screams from the basement.

There were two ads made on the subject, one major ad which effectively damaged Dukakis on the furlough issue but never actually mentioned Horton, and a second made by an independent group that mentioned Horton but was only seen by a few people.

Democrats spent years turning all of this into something it was not. Rather than hanging their heads in shame and saying,

Oh my goodness, I cannot believe our candidate for president let that savage animal out of prison...

...they set about creating a mythology about the ad's racist nature. Now, virtually no one knows how unbelievably brutal Horton was to his victims, both BEFORE he received his LIFE SENTENCE and after he was furloughed IN THE MIDST OF HIS LIFE SENTENCE. However, lots of people have this view that a "Willie Horton-type ad" means some sort of appeal to whites' fear of black men.

As if blacks aren't just as disgusted by and afraid of savage, murderous monsters like Horton.*

But no, the left was not ashamed of Michael Dukakis for letting that monster out of jail. Instead, they cranked up their propaganda machine and created a new reality, one that changed the issue from Democrats' softness on crime and lack of concern for the victims of brutal murderers...to a supposed indication of their apocryphal meme of Republican racism. With their near-hegemony in media and academia, they have been able, quite successfully, to redefine the meaning of "Willie Horton-type ad."

Swiftboat

They did this same thing with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign to expose the lies of John Kerry. These veterans weren't even saying anything that controversial: an observer with even an average intelligence could spot holes in some of Kerry's stories through which one could drive a very large truck. Christmas in Cambodia, the secret mission, the CIA officer with the magic hat...this tale simply did not stand up to even basic scrutiny — on temporal grounds (he couldn't have been there WHEN he said), locative grounds (he couldn't have been WHERE he said he was when he said he was there) and military grounds (HE wouldn't have been sent where he says he was sent).

But the left didn't even try to defend Kerry on the substance; they changed the subject. They attacked the Veterans themselves, and they set about, in true Orwellian fashion, creating a new verb: "swiftboating," their definition of which is as follows:

Swiftboat
verb [trans.]
1 - When a Republican makes up and then widely disseminates effective-sounding but false charges against an innocent Democrat.

In fact, the actual definition is...

Swiftboat
verb [trans.]
1 - When a Republican totally nails one of ours and we need to change the subject, fast.

Good conservative ideas and the inherent common sense (and general personal conservatism) of the American people have allowed us to hold our own politically. But understand this. The left controls information flow, and they are able to inject their toxicity and falsehoods into the stream of public and cultural discourse in any amounts they want, at any time of their choosing. Until we begin to make a dent in that ability, until we expand our ability to bypass the mechanisms under their control and reach people more directly with the truth, we will always be at a disadvantage.

And from an experience I had yesterday, we have a long way to go...

I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office conversing with a few of my fellow citizens. They were smart. They were clearly, on some personal level, inherently conservative...just like most Americans. But they were dramatically ill-informed on basic political, social, and economic realities. They were totally receptive when I filled them in on some basic truths, but it was as if they had never heard such things before. We have to change that, if we want to overcome the left's mind-washing tide of propaganda and fibrication™.

Kudos to the makers of this new Obama ad!

Oh, and a big thanks to Ann Coulter for Chapter 3 of her book Godless, in which I learned a great deal about the left's Willie Horton ad propaganda campaign.

*Actually, this shows the racism and quiet hatred of blacks that is apparently innate on the left. They think black people are both more understandably capable of such savagery, and also more tolerant of it. (Democrats still have the same contempt for blacks that they did when they were the party of slavery [thru 1865] and the party of segregation [1865 to 1965]. It just has taken a different form since 1965.)