Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer The Sun-Sentinel

August 29, 2010

Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: “Fearmongering” – Is it as American as apple pie? Some comments on your column about the reality of being perpetually outraged in America or so you say this morning.

Mr. Lyons,

This morning’s tutorial will consist of two separate but somehow related themes. I will draw them together with an astronomical codicil.

#1 – It is true that not all Muslims are 21st century anti-American terrorists. It is also true that all 21st century anti-American terrorists have been Muslim. There is a hint of traditional Logic there that all senior editorial writers should know.

Jesse Jackson once said that if see some young men walking towards him on a dark street at night he hopes that they are White. Since he said that in the “pre post-racial society” he gets a pass, right?

If I am in line at an airport ticket counter and I see five young men with an air of Whirling Dervish about them wearing the unisex version of a burqa using cash to buy one way tickets to the same place I am bound for am I allowed to gulp and ask myself if I really have to go to Chicago today? Would that make me a profiler? Worse, would it make me a stereotypical American profiler? If we meet at the airport answer me before I get my boarding pass, OK?

Let me add, for the record, that I am a White man.

#2 – “Will no one rid me of that troublesome recidivist Black jailbird?” with apologies to any offended Plantagenet but how is Willie Horton doing these days? Is he still in jail? Have any of his convictions been overturned? “Did the constable err” on any of his arrests? Why didn’t an earlier version of Johnny Cochrane show up in his hour of need? Can we stipulate that at one point Willie Horton gave feral Black youth a bad name?

All of this is prelude to the fact, a hard edged fact as real as your boot, an inconvenient truth of a fact, that it was Senator Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. [D-TN] who introduced the sad tale of Willie Horton to the American public. He did this before he became Vice President Alpha Gump, before he became an Academy Award & Nobel Prize winner, before he became a “sex crazed poodle” whose “shakra”, while in a state of perpetual priapristic tumescence, was trained over the years to leave no carbon footprint when it suffered a sudden release.

He did it New York in March and April of the 1988 Presidential primary. He did it repeatedly. He did it while street campaigning and on TV. He used it to stereotype Massachusetts Governor Wee Mikey Dukakis as being soft on crime.

That this fact has gone down the modern American Liberal memory hole is because Progressive columnists, ink stained dudes like you, put it on the slippery slope of collective forgetfulness.

Let me know if Willie Boy has become Barack Hussein Horton or if he still is taking the Reverend Wright prison lecture course.

Now that would be a stereotypical American fearmongering profile, wouldn’t it?


Kevin Smith


PS – What time do you go to work in the morning? I saw the Moon/Mars show early this AM. The Moon with Mars looming large at its side during this holy season of Ramadan makes me want to fly a plane into a building. Almost. That’s it for now; It’s time for the Glenn Beck rally.