Mugged (25 page)

By the time Al Sharpton ran for president in the 2004 election, well after OJ, he didn’t win a single state in the Democratic primaries. He had only “single-digit showings in contests from coast to coast,” as the
New York Times
put it. Sharpton couldn’t even get a majority of black votes in his home state of New York. Twenty years earlier, Jesse Jackson had won 85 percent of the black vote in New York and 25 percent of the vote overall.
³

The only fun Sharpton has anymore is tormenting Howard Dean.

In 2004, presidential candidate Vermont governor Howard Dean, never having met a black person, cowered before Sharpton during a Democratic presidential debate when Sharpton demanded to know if Dean had a “black or brown” person on his cabinet. Dean said he had “a senior member” of his staff who was black. Toying with a terrified Dean like a cat with a mouse, Sharpton summarily dismissed the staff member as irrelevant.

Throughout the rest of the debate, Dean burbled and apologized to Sharpton for not having enough brothers on his staff. At some point, Dean announced that he had more endorsements from the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus than any other candidate on the stage. Trying again, he said, “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to civil rights in the United States of America.” Still later in the debate, Dean apologized to John Edwards for saying he wanted to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags” in their pickup trucks.
⁴

Days after the debate, Dean announced that he had requested a black roommate at Yale and even produced the roommate to attest to his racial broadmindedness.
⁵
As soon as the other black candidate, Carol Moseley Braun, dropped out of the race, Dean hired her for his campaign.

It apparently never occurred to Dean to mention that blacks account for 0.5 percent of Vermont’s population, making it extremely difficult for any Vermont governor to put blacks in his cabinet. Nor did it occur to him that he was talking to Al Sharpton. Dean’s epitaph should read: “Al Sharpton’s Last Lickspittle.”

Except for the occasional Vermont governor, no longer do we have to endure pompous whites treating blacks like children: “Do you like your ice cream? Is that good?” Now everyone laughs at Jackson and Sharpton, and other black people will laugh with you. These days, people roll their eyes when Janeane Garofalo says criticism of half-black Obama is “racism,
straight-up.” With the OJ verdict, blacks had finally triumphed over liberals’ condescension.

In 1984, CBS’s Dan Rather gushed that Jesse Jackson’s address to the Democratic National Convention was “one for the history books”—and that was before Jackson gave his speech. Similarly, on ABC, David Brinkley said, “We are seeing something truly historic” while waiting for Jackson to take the stage. NBC’s Tom Brokaw called Jackson’s execrable speech “splendid and memorable.” The Democratic governor of Florida, Bob Graham, said of the speech: “America is never going to be the same after tonight.”
⁶

Flash-forward through the eighties, through the OJ verdict, to Jackson’s speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. We find NBC’s Tom Brokaw sharing a laugh with author Bill Bennett about Jackson’s usual rhymes.

Even Steve Pagones, the falsely accused prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley case, finally got paid after the OJ verdict. In the middle of that hootenanny, Sharpton had said “If we’re lying, sue us. Sue us right now.”
⁸
Steve Pagones, named by these charlatans as one of Brawley’s rapists, did just that, in October 1988, just weeks after the grand jury reported its findings. About a year and a half later, he won his defamation suit against Brawley, which was meaningless because she had no assets. But then nothing happened with his lawsuit against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason for years. And years.

No one had an appetite for stirring up the racial hatred crew, so one judge after another recused himself from the case, depriving Pagones of his day in court for nearly a decade.

Everyone just moved on, and to hell with Pagones. Sharpton ran for mayor of New York. He marched in Howard Beach and Crown Heights,
protested outside Freddy’s in Harlem, defended MOVE in Philadelphia. After a Central Park jogger was viciously beaten by a mob of black teenagers, he showed up at the trial, claiming he was there to “observe how differently a white victim was treated and how the accused in this case have been mishandled [sic] a lot differently from the people she [Brawley] accused.”
⁹

Pagones’s life was ruined, a sacrifice to the race hustlers. White America’s eternal hope was:
Maybe this will finally satiate them…As long as it’s not me being accused of racism, please God, don’t let it be me.
But the racial hatred machine could never be satisfied. Every sacrificial lamb just made the hucksters hungry for more.

It took the race-based acquittal of a double murderer in the trial of the century for Pagones to finally get his day in court. Less than six months after the OJ verdict, an amazing thing occurred: A judge was at last assigned to Pagones’s case.
¹⁰
Two years later—a full decade after the grand jury declared Brawley’s accusations false—Pagones won his defamation suit and was awarded damages of $185,000 from Mr. Mason, $95,000 from Mr. Maddox, $65,000 from Mr. Sharpton and $187,000 from Ms. Brawley.

By January 2001, black leaders and businessmen had paid off Sharpton and Maddox’s debt to Pagones. The disbarred Mason was having his wages garnished.
¹¹

Pagones would still be waiting for his day in court, if not for OJ. Ironically, one of the men paying Pagones on Sharpton’s behalf was Johnnie Cochran.

There were other factors tamping down racial hysteria around the time of the OJ trial.

First, the generation that witnessed racial discrimination against blacks is getting old. Anyone who grew up watching
The Brady Bunch
entered a world in which blacks were only the beneficiaries of race discrimination—as Allan Bakke found out in 1974 when he was denied admission to the University of California medical school because he was white. That’s the life experience of anyone who is under fifty years old. Accusations of racism have as much sting for such people as being accused of involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal.

Second, there was Rudy Giuliani’s overturning thirty years of liberal crime policies in New York. Just six months before Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, in January 1994 Giuliani replaced the utterly incompetent David Dinkins as mayor of New York and, over the next
few years, turned the “ungovernable city” into the safest big city in the country. A major part of Giuliani’s success derived from his absolute refusal to be cowed by accusations of racism leveled at him by the likes of Al Sharpton, the
New York Times
and the Clinton Justice Department.

Former mayor Ed Koch had been called a bigot merely for supporting Giuliani. The head of a black police organization, Eric Adams, promised racial violence if Giuliani beat the city’s first black mayor, saying blacks would arm themselves with bullets.
¹²

A little more than a week after Giuliani’s inauguration—and hours before the new police commissioner was sworn in—there was a melee in Harlem. A 911 call had come in claiming there was an armed robbery in progress on the third floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street—which happened to be Louis Farrakhan’s mosque, though the police didn’t know it. It was an ambush, eerily similar to the one in 1972. Two police officers arrived at the nondescript building and ran to the location of the alleged holdup, completely unaware that the third floor was a mosque. They were met by Farrakhan’s “Fruit of Islam” guards, roughed up and thrown down the stairs after having a gun and police radio stolen from them.

A standoff ensued with the police outside and the Fruit of Islam guards inside. To the alarm of liberals, the mayor was demanding arrests. “You have officers injured,” Giuliani told his negotiating team over the phone. “You have stolen police property. Why aren’t you going in?”
¹³
As the new police commissioner, William Bratton, said: “For twenty-five years, [African Americans] and other groups in the city had been treated gingerly by City Hall. Now Giuliani had come in and said, ‘Everybody’s going to be treated the same.’”
¹⁴

Giuliani didn’t get arrests that night, but the police were allowed to enter and search the mosque, retrieving the stolen gun and radio.

Afterward, racial healer Al Sharpton tried to butt into a meeting of mosque leaders with Bratton and Giuliani, but the mayor refused to meet with an “outside agitator” like Sharpton, and cancelled the meeting. Shock waves shot through all of Charlie Rose-New York. Sharpton was in such a tizzy, he vowed that Giuliani would be impeached by spring.
¹⁵

But then guess what happened? Nothing. The mosque leaders came back the next day for the meeting without Sharpton. While Sharpton gassed on about Giuliani’s “arrogance” in choosing whom to meet with, the mosque’s leader, Don Muhammad, came out of the meeting saying,
“We do not wish to be viewed as persons disrespectful to the law.”
¹⁶
Sharpton can get thirty losers to protest, but if you just ignore him, he’ll eventually go home.

With all the usual proponents of racial reconciliation turning out to denounce Giuliani—Rangel, protector of cop killers; C. Vernon Mason, counsel to hate-crime hoaxer Tawana Brawley; the Reverend Wyatt T. Walker, who called Giuliani a “fascist”; and Sharpton—Giuliani made a big point of ignoring them and allying himself with respectable black leaders. He particularly incensed the race hustlers by attending the Martin Luther King Day dinner held by Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality. It was the biggest event of its kind in the city, with more than fifteen hundred people attending, including Richard Pryor.
¹⁷
The self-appointed Spokesmen for All Black People didn’t want fair dealing for black people, they wanted their butts kissed.

The
New York Times
issued a patronizing editorial after Giuliani cancelled the meeting with Sharpton, informing the mayor that “[g]overning is messy, unpredictable and raw, especially in this inherently fractious city.” The
Times
patiently explained that “presiding over New York City demands flexibility, and above all a willingness to reach out to alienated communities.” David Dinkins had lost an election and the
Times
acted like it was 9/11 and we all needed “healing.” The paper actually called on Giuliani “to lead the healing process.”
¹⁸

Of course, a lot less “healing” would be necessary under Giuliani because the policies he implemented (over the hot indignation of liberals) cut the city’s murder rate from about 2,000 a year to 714 the year Giuliani left office. By studiously ignoring the advice of the
Times
, Giuliani reduced the murder rate by 20 percent in just his first year in office—an accomplishment celebrated in the
Times
with an article titled: “New York City Crime Falls But Just Why Is a Mystery.”
¹⁹

This is how miraculous Giuliani’s transformation of New York was: The
Times
endorsed his reelection and mocked his opponent Ruth Messinger for denying that he had improved the city’s “quality of life,” citing—as the first example—the dramatic reduction in crime. Messinger, the
Times
said, “was arguing against the voters’ own sense of reality.”
²⁰

(That’s with the exception of voter Richard Goldstein of the
Village Voice
, who claimed on MSNBC’S
Hardball
that he felt “less safe” in Giuliani’s New York City than he did twenty years earlier.
²¹
This was a position Goldstein developed after taking a vow to never leave his apartment, never read a newspaper, never watch TV and never allow visitors.)

By the end of Giuliani’s two terms in office, the Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who “brought order, peace, the law back to the land.” Without Giuliani, he said, “we would have been overrun.”
²²

The third factor lessening the grip of the race hucksters in the 1990s was Bill O’Reilly’s relentless pursuit of Jesse Jackson, which began a few years after the OJ verdict.

Starting in 1999 and continuing for years thereafter, O’Reilly bird-dogged Jackson on his nightly Fox News show, persistently inviting Jackson to come on the show and answer questions about his funding.

Until then, multinational corporations had quaked at phone calls from Jackson. But O’Reilly turned the tables, shining a floodlight on Jackson’s operation. That’s when the marks stopped paying up and then it was the minister’s turn to sweat and curse. Until O’Reilly’s brave campaign, anyone who asked about Jackson’s finances would be told:
We don’t keep those records. How’d you like to be called a racist on national TV?

All it took was a single television host standing up to the class bully to prove that the racial scam artists were always paper tigers. O’Reilly’s dogged reports on Jackson can fairly be credited with driving him from public life.

But if the world were still the kind of place where a cop who used the N-word was more despised than a double murderer, would anyone have risked being turned into the next Mark Fuhrman, despised from coast to coast? A few years after the OJ verdict, even Mark Furhman wasn’t Mark Fuhrman, but rather a bestselling author and sought-after television guest.