Word: furlough
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Vice President George Bush suggested yesterday that Gov. Michael S. Dukakis apologize to a couple that was brutally attacked by an escapee from a Massachusetts prison furlough program, while Democrats tried to squeeze every last ounce of political gain from Wednesday night's vice president debate...
Bush campaigned in the swing states of Ohio and Missouri, where he referred to the attack that furlough escapee Willie Horton committed on a Maryland couple last year. He criticized Dukakis for having "an astounding lack of sensitivity for crime victims...
...with which they have adapted to the discipline of send-them-a-simple-message politics. It was the Vice President who dominated the airwaves and lowered the level of the debate with a series of irrelevant and inflammatory issues, ranging from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Few, however, would describe Dukakis as waging a campaign of ideas, despite a recent laudable flurry of substantive speeches on defense policy and health issues. Within a week, the Massachusetts Governor both posed in an M-1 tank and flew halfway across the country for a photo opportunity...
...fact, much of what Dukakis has been doing lately on the campaign trail has been an attempt to counter the I'm-more-of-a-populist attacks Bush has levelled against him. This includes everything from trying to list all the other states that have prison furlough systems ("I'm not outside the American political mainstream") to riding around in an M-1 tank...
That's fair enough. Emotions are a valid part of a presidential campaign. (So, for that matter, are personalities.) But the emotions Bush is stirring up in the name of American patriotism are ugly and -- dare I say it -- un- American. What unites the pledge nonsense, the furlough business, the attacks on the American Civil Liberties Union, the scare stories about a race of mythic bogeymen called liberals is an effort to induce a fever of "us" vs. "them" majoritarianism...