SO NOT A DUNCE, A WIMP NOR A RACIST?:

Amid the coverage and commentary commemorating the passing of George H.W. Bush, it was nice of the media to debunk the 1992 New York Times front page story characterizing the 41st president as being flummoxed by a supermarket scanner. Written by a reporter who wasn't present at the event, it was -- in today's parlance -- fake news.

It was even classier for former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas to reiterate his mea culpa for his magazine's bizarre 1987 cover story calling an acclaimed war hero a "wimp."

It would have been far better, however, had the record finally been corrected about the Bush campaign's much-maligned "Willie Horton ad." Instead, the nation's most prominent news outlets doubled-down on a slander that is now 30 years old: namely, that under the spell of Rasputin-like political operative Lee Atwater, Bush ran a dirty campaign with racist overtones to get elected president. [...]

The Bush campaign entered the fray in June after an authoritative piece on Dukakis' furlough program, "Getting Away With Murder," ran in Reader's Digest. Atwater and Roger Ailes, who ran the media operation for Bush, knew it was an explosive issue. They also knew it was delicate: Horton is African-American and his victims were white.

Ailes forbade the campaign from releasing Horton's photograph. When the campaign produced its now-famous Massachusetts prison "revolving door" ad, it was filmed in Utah, in sepia tones, and the inmates appeared to be white, black, and Hispanic. Earlier, two conservative provocateurs, Larry McCarthy and Floyd Brown, produced a low-budget ad showing Horton's picture and mentioning his name. Democrats pounced. This is racist, they said. Some of the media followed suit and some didn't, although with each passing year, the "vile" Willie Horton ad narrative entrenched itself more deeply in the collective memories of Democrats and the media.

Those closest to the case were the most nonplussed by this characterization. Dane Strother, a former Eagle-Tribune reporter who became a Democratic political consultant, told me race was never an issue when Dukakis' furlough program came under scrutiny. "It wasn't about racism," he said. "That didn't come up. Not ever."

One reason was that as the paper dug deeper into the story, they found other victims of crimes, not all of them white, and other furloughed prisoners who'd committed violent crimes, not all of them black.

Among the details unearthed by the Eagle-Tribune was that of the 80 prisoners listed as "escaped" by the state, all but four were on furlough when they disappeared.

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