Word: hortons
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Bentsen, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, told a television interviewer he thought the Bush campaign was making a racist appeal by focusing on Willie Horton Jr., a Black convicted murderer who escaped in 1986 from a Massachusetts prison furlough...
...Horton brutally stabbed a white Maryland man and twice raped his fiancee. Horton is currently imprisoned in Maryland...
Asked if use of the Horton case constituted "an element of Republican racist appeal," Bentsen replied: "When you add it up, I think there is, and that's unfortunate, and I just don't want to see this election won on that kind of packaging and that kind of distortions...
...litany of unusually specific proposals in the Republican platform is a plank explicitly opposing prison furloughs for murderers. And in a testament to the Bush campaign's utterly shameless exploitation of the issue, media advisor Roger Ailes joked that he only had to decide whether to portray Horton in television commercials "with or without a knife in his hand...
While it's tragic that Willie Horton committed his heinous crime, it's just as unfortunate that George Bush is exploiting the incident for partisan purposes. And it will be unforgivable if Bush keeps his pledge to abolish furloughs and allows this valuable correctional tool to become a casualty of his campaign demogoguery...