Free Republic

In the Washington Post's liberal blog The Plum Line, Paul Waldman last week recycled one of the enduring lies of liberal politics: that "the Willie Horton issue," as Waldman calls it, was a successful appeal by the 1988 Bush for president campaign to American voters' racism. That's a lie and deserves to be exposed as such.

Former Gov. Michael Dukakis says a Cambridge man facing five years in federal prison for repeatedly lying to the FBI about his pal Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is “a fine young man” who “could have a great future in public service.” Dukakis went to bat for Robel Kidane Phillipos, 21, in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock ahead of Phillipos’ sentencing today for making false statements to the FBI in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings. Prosecutors want five years. Phillipos and Tsarnaev, both 21, grew up together in Cambridge and were classmates at the University of...

<p>I wish I could introduce Richard Cohen and Lloyd Green to Antonio Morgan. Cohen of course is my Washington Post colleague and columnist. Green is a former Justice Dept. official and former opposition research counsel for the Republican Party.</p> <p>The two wrote remarkably similar columns this week about Hillary Clinton’s response to the protests and riots in Baltimore. Both compared the civil unrest of 2015 to the civil unrest in 1968. Both cited Nixon’s “tough on crime” campaign, which even members of that campaign team have since admitted was an overt, often racist appeal to white fear of black people.</p>

France, Israel and Saudi Arabia confront an administration conducting a make-believe foreign policy. When the history of the Obama administration's foreign policy is written 20 or so years from now, the career of Wendy Sherman, our chief nuclear negotiator with Iran, will be instructive. In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governor carried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity...

The defense also called former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis to testify for Phillipos. Dukakis, an old family friend of Phillipos' mother, described a phone conversation he had with Phillipos five days after the bombings. Dukakis said Phillipos told him he had been questioned by the FBI for five hours, but was so confused he didn't remember what he said.

Robel Phillipos, a friend of terror suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has been convicted of lying to authorities investigating last year’s Boston Marathon bombings that killed three spectators, including an 8-year-old Dorchester boy. Phillipos was accused of lying about being in Tsarnaev’s dorm room three days after the bombing, when two other friends removed a backpack containing fireworks and other potential evidence, including a laptop. Phillipos' lawyers argued he couldn’t clearly remember what happened because he had smoked marijuana heavily that day. The fate of Phillipos, 19 when he was arrested and who turned 21 this month during his trial at U.S....

BOSTON, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- Former governor of Massacheusetts and 1988 Democratic nominee for president Michael Dukakis took the stand in Boston to testify on behalf of a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Robel Phillipos stands accused of lying to the FBI and local law enforcement about his actions and wherabouts in the three days following the attack that killed three an injured more than 260 people. "[Phillipos] told me he was questioned for five hours by the FBI," Dukakis testified according to the Boston Globe, adding, "he was so confused he didn't know what he said."

Her new messaging strategy is taken straight from the 1988 presidential candidate’s playbook. (snip) For those of you old enough to remember, George H. W. Bush wanted to be president in 1988. Despite Reagan’s popularity, this was still a heavy lift. No sitting vice president had been elected straight to the Oval Office since Martin Van Buren. So, away from the cameras off at Kennebunkport, he sacrificed over 1,000 oxen, bulls, and gnus to Zeus, Crom, Baal, Thor, Moloch, M. C. Hammer and any other deity he could think of. The gods were well-pleased. As a reward for his sacrifice...

During a call-in to the nationally renowned Least Dangerous Podcast with JC King, Former Presidential Candidate and Governor Michael Dukakis cautioned Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her prospects of becoming the Democratic Nominee for President, “Believe me, neither she, nor anyone else can take that for granted.” Using his own experience as a barometer he continued, “I was 40 points ahead with 5 weeks to go when I ran for reelection in 1978 and I got beaten.” He did praise her saying her experience in the Obama administration has made her a primary choice for the party, “She...

Matt Bennett can still hear the reporters laughing, all 90 of them. He can still picture Sam Donaldson doubled over, guffawing, on a riser that looked out over a dusty field in suburban Detroit. Bennett was a 23-year-old political rookie in 1988 when he was sent to a General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., to organize a campaign stop for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: a ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The visit, meant to bolster the candidate’s credibility as a future commander-in-chief, would go down as one of the worst campaign backfires in history....

The last wretched and pathetic week of the Obama campaign reminds me of the final wimpy gasps of the campaign of Michael Dukakis back in 2008 when dwindling numbers of left-wing Democrats gathered around Hollywood actors. In a sort of be-in experience, they could be heard moaning about how "frightened" they were for the future. Now we have Obama's top 1%er friends over at the mega Ad Agency Goodby Silverstein creating a commercial in which they employ children to sing a "We are the World" type ditty asking us to: "Imagine an America Where strip mines are fun and free....

William Bennett, a onetime student of Dr. Silber’s who served as US secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, praised his mentor’s pedagogic style in a 1986 Globe interview. “It wasn’t intimidating; it was quickening,” Bennett said. “Silber is frank and manly and direct. There isn’t enough of that these days. He believes human beings should be spoken to as if they were human beings, not as if they were flowers.”

Please click link to see newspaper article. "Democrat Michael Dukakis, riding a wave of positive publicity from the convention that nominated him for president last week, led Vice-President Bush by 17 points in a Gallup poll released last Tuesday".

I’ve argued many times that the politician Mitt Romney most closely resembles is John Kerry, primarily due to the Mittster’s legendary penchant for flip-flopping, a trait Kerry is also known for. I stand by my Kerry comparison, but Jonah Goldberg has an excellent point when he compares Romney to another Massachusetts politician: Michael Dukakis. Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have become Dukakified. It was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that the election should be entirely about “competence, not ideology.” Romney has avoided saying that in so many words, but it’s certainly how he’s campaigning. After running to the right in...

The media are gushing and fawning over new poll numbers showing Barack Obama getting a bounce from the just ended Democratic National Convention putting him four points ahead of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Before they get too cocky, they might want to recall that after his convention ended in 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points. The New York Times reported July 26, 1988: Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/09/09/flashback-dukakis-led-bush-17-points-after-1988-dnc#ixzz262LPEcZS

Michael Dukakis fanatics at this year’s Democratic National Convention should start getting psyched: The 1988 Democratic presidential nominee is coming to town Tuesday. “We will be flying down [to Charlotte] tomorrow morning and will be there for the balance of the convention talking about [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney’s pathetic economic record as governor of Massachusetts,” Dukakis emailed The Daily Caller on Monday. “Under Romney we were fourth from the bottom in job creation — 47th out of 50,” he continued. “If anybody thinks Romney knows how to turn the economy around, he is kidding himself. And when he left...

Today, on Fox News Sunday: Video at Site

MIAMI — Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. [snip] If Mr. Romney does win here on Tuesday, it will have been through a blistering and unrelenting series of attacks. His campaign has pressed everything at its disposal into service to eviscerate Mr. Gingrich, painting him as an erratic, unreliable Washington insider in mailings and television advertisements, at two critical debates here (where his team made sure Mr. Romney had...

Now rolling out for the voters of New Hampshire:

In a stinging comparison that is sure to leave a mark, on Sunday’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour, George Will said the rise of Herman Cain had a lot to do with Republicans coming to the realization that Mitt Romney is their Michael Dukakis. “A technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology,” Will observed.