Mugged (24 page)

So for a few more years, the race narcissists continued to issue the same hoary platitudes, after normal people had moved on.

Daryl Gates, former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, reacted to the verdict by saying: “I take the responsibility for Mark Fuhrman. The miserable, no-good son of a bitch.”
¹⁷

The
Sun-Sentinel
(Fort Lauderdale, Florida) called the Fuhrman sentence a “powderdpuff sentence” for a crime that “should have brought a term near the maximum.”
¹⁸
The
San Francisco Chronicle
said the Fuhrman plea was further evidence of the Republican attorney general’s “selectivity [in] his tough-on-crime views.” The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
said the plea agreement constituted a “blow to a judicial system.”
¹⁹
The
Florida Times-Union
(Jacksonville) called the punishment “not nearly as severe” as a wrist slap.
²⁰
The
Buffalo News
(New York) said: “He deserved at least some of that jail time.”
²¹
The
Herald-Sun
(Durham, North Carolina) said Fuhrman “should have gone to prison.”
²²
The
South Bend Tribune
(Indiana) belittled the sentence and Fuhrman, saying he not only lacked “credibility, but he also lacked character.”

The prize for Most Outraged naturally went to the newspaper in one of the whitest towns in America (0.3 percent black): the
Lewiston Morning Tribune
(Idaho), which called Fuhrman’s deal “another injustice from O.J. Simpson’s murder trial” and his alleged perjury “one of the most infamous crimes of the decade,” adding, “he has more in common with O.J. than anyone thought.”
²³

Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist—and yet still a Man of the People—William Raspberry dedicated an entire column to quoting a cab driver on how outrageous the Fuhrman sentence was: “‘And the punishment!…It’s nothing. Probation and a small fine.…Perjury is serious stuff, and they treated it like he accidentally misspoke himself or something. What they did is no punishment at all.’”
²⁴
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Carl Rowan said the plea deal had dropped “another barrel of racial poison into the bloodstream of American life,” and this “teensy rebuke of Fuhrman” would “heighten general distrust of and disrespect for the criminal justice system.”
²⁵

Apparently, it’s not enough that every black person with a column wins a Pulitzer Prize except the two who actually deserve it—Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams—Mark Fuhrman should have gone to prison for using the N-word so black people would trust the system.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey once said, clear as a bell, that the two most horrible words are “nigger” and “honky.” (The second two worst were “Lyndon” and “Johnson”). Very soon after that, it got to the point that one couldn’t even say the N-word in order to call it a terrible word. This is how America would make up for slavery!

Most blacks must have been bemused at all this nonsense over a word. How does hearing the N-word measure up to being punched in the face? How about compared to being almost decapitated? The principal way blacks suffer at the hands of white people in America are affronts to their dignity. The principal way whites suffer at the hands of black people are stabbings, shootings and rapes. Even as words go, Fuhrman’s case demonstrates that the worst thing you can be called isn’t the N-word. It’s “racist.”

Americans could not face up to the fact that a mostly black—and all-Democratic—jury would not, under any circumstances, convict a black celebrity like OJ for a double murder. The evidence against OJ might have been discovered by Jesus Christ and the jury would have voted “not guilty.” OJ could have taken the stand and admitted it, and the jury would have voted “not guilty.”

The country got a preview into the thought process of the jurors when Jeanette Harris was dismissed as a juror in early April 1995 and proceeded to give a round of interviews. Glowing with admiration for OJ, Harris said: “Whether he did it or not, he presents this picture of a person handling a great deal.” She was concerned that OJ hadn’t “been allowed to grieve,” but
was unimpressed by the tearful testimony of Nicole Brown’s sister Denise, who she believed was “acting.”

Even if OJ did beat Nicole, Harris said, “that doesn’t make him guilty of murder.” Whereas whether Fuhrman had ever used the N-word was highly probative on the question of whether he planted evidence.

Harris also said that “from day one, I didn’t see it being a fair trial.” According to the
Washington Post
, Harris was “considered one of the jury’s most sober and attentive members.”

Most memorably, Harris described the evidence presented by the prosecution as “a whole lot of nothing.”
²⁶
At this point in the trial, the evidence included drops of blood leading away from the two victims to Simpson’s Ford Bronco, to his driveway, to his front door, into his foyer and then to his bathroom; and a bloody left-hand glove found on the grounds of OJ’s estate the night of the murders that matched a right-hand glove found at the murder scene.

And consider that this was even before evidence had been adduced on the key question of whether Mark Fuhrman had ever used the N-word, throwing the glove evidence into turmoil.

Overall, Harris seemed less concerned with OJ’s guilt than with the racism of some of her fellow jurors and court personnel. She alleged that the deputies had given white jurors more time at the Ross and Target department stores and that a white woman on the jury had kicked her without then saying “excuse me.”
²⁷
As she told Larry King, “growing up in Los Angeles, you’re faced with racism every day.”

Normally, something that happens every day stops being noticeable, like crickets in the country or traffic noises in the city. But with Harris, constancy seemed to have sharpened her racism sensor, perhaps with a little nudge from a media consumed with talking about racist America every single day.

After the trial, two black female jurors quoted in the
Los Angeles Times
said they knew OJ didn’t do it and the evidence didn’t convince them otherwise. One explained: “In plain English, the glove didn’t fit.” The other juror said she thought the glove was planted, but she too acknowledged that she believed OJ was innocent before the trial began.
²⁸

Manifestly, none of the evidence was of the slightest interest to the jurors. But no one dared blame the mostly minority jurors for the “not guilty” verdict. (For my younger readers, blaming black people for anything they did used to be illegal in the United States.)

Inasmuch as the media couldn’t blame the jurors, the prosecutors (one was black) or defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran (also black), there was only one acceptable target for the media’s wrath: Mark Fuhrman. He used the N-word in 1985. Ergo, the jury had no choice but to acquit OJ.

As Geraldo Rivera said of Fuhrman: “History will always say that he is, by far, the single most responsible person for O. J. Simpson walking free.”
²⁹
I would vote for the jurors being a smidgen more responsible, but, then, I don’t get a kick out of patronizing black people.

Ron Goldman’s sister, Kim, called Fuhrman a “despicable human being,” asking: “What if he told the truth? How would that have affected the case? What if he just came clean and it all came right out in the open? How would it have affected the case? And I will never know that.”
³⁰

I know the answer to that, Kim!
It would have made absolutely no difference.

The media were as unanimous as the OJ jury: It was Fuhrman’s fault. The
San Francisco Chronicle
said Fuhrman’s “perjured testimony”—about using the N-word—“helped undercut the prosecution’s case.”
³¹
Yes, in addition to the fact that jurors thought a trail of blood from the crime scene to OJ’s house and a bloody glove in OJ’s yard matching the one at the crime scene was, and I quote, “a whole lot of nothing.”

Calling Fuhrman “a major factor in Simpson’s acquittal,” The
Sun-Sentinel
said the “trial might have had a completely different verdict” if Fuhrman hadn’t lied about using the N-word.
³²

The
Post-Intelligencer
said “documented racism” was “a key element in Simpson’s acquittal by a jury, nine of whose members were African Americans.”
³³
(And that white juror kicking Jeanette Harris didn’t help things either!)

On and on it went. Some newspapers went so far as to endorse the jury’s verdict. The
South Bend Tribune
(Indiana) said the jurors were correct to ignore questions of OJ’s “guilt or innocence” given that Fuhrman was “a racist and a liar.”
³⁴
Durham, North Carolina’s
Herald-Sun
—which a decade later would be championing the false rape claims against Duke lacrosse players by a stripper who is now on trial for murder—said Fuhrman was “so overtly prejudiced against blacks that, yes, it’s reasonable to agree…that Furhman was part of a police conspiracy to frame OJ for the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.”
³⁵

Oh, come on.

Would these holier-than-thou journalists have reacted the same way if a Jewish jury refused to convict Bernie Madoff because one of the Securities
and Exchange investigators had used the H-word word (Hymie)? If anything, an all-Jewish jury might have given him the death penalty. Would they have cheered a jury for letting off Leona Helmsley if an officer with the Internal Revenue Service had used the C-word?

Of course not. But it was the official position of the elites that blacks could not be treated like the rest of us adults.
Well, of course he threw a tantrum! You forgot to give him a cookie.

Even the change in trial venue was premised on the idea that blacks cannot be treated like our fellow citizens. Not enough black people lived near Brentwood, so the OJ trial had to be moved to downtown Los Angeles. If a white person is arrested for committing a murder in Washington, DC, no court would order him tried in some whiter neighborhood, such as western Virginia.

The chattering class may have reprised its role as Chief Patronizers of Black America, but the rest of the country had changed. Thus, while the unanimous legal opinion given in the media was that Furhman’s perjury would cost the Goldman family a win in civil court,
³⁶
that jury ordered OJ to pay the Goldman and Brown families $33 million in damages.

Simpson took the stand in the civil case and, as respected legal reporter Stuart Taylor wrote, there was “ample evidence that Simpson lied rampantly and shamelessly under oath in his civil trial and deposition.”

Guess who wasn’t prosecuted for perjury? Suddenly perjury wasn’t such a terrible crime, after all.

The police officers in the Rodney King case were tried twice. Mark Fuhrman was prosecuted for perjury over whether he had used a word ten years (or only nine and a half years) earlier. But OJ wasn’t tried for perjury for denying, as Taylor notes, “that he ever hit or slapped his former wife, or that he ever received his girlfriend Paula Barbieri’s message breaking up with him the day of the murders, or that he ever owned ‘ugly ass’ Bruno Magli shoes of the type that left bloody footprints at the murder scene.”
³⁷

Still, no matter how much politicians, prosecutors and the media tried to convince Americans that Fuhrman was a greater criminal than OJ, the insanity on race was over. No one was buying it anymore.

The media couldn’t even convince themselves—at least when they were making business decisions in corporate suites and not chitchatting on TV. A few months after the verdict, OJ marketed a video of himself arguing that he was innocent, for $29.95 each. TV stations refused to run commercials advertising the video.
³⁸
The star of the trial of the century sold fewer
than 40,000 copies. Around the same time, a Weather Channel video about storms sold 100,000 copies.
³⁹

OJ’s acquittal and Fuhrman’s conviction was the last gasp of the white racial guilt that had gripped the nation for so long. The blinders were off and, no matter how much pompous liberals tried, blacks would no longer be treated as subhuman beings.

Right up until the OJ verdict, the race hustlers were riding high, to no one’s benefit. It’s hard to believe now, but when Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, he came in third in a field of seven candidates in the Democratic primaries. Jackson received more than 3 million votes, about 20 percent of all votes cast, winning primaries in South Carolina and Louisiana outright—and almost beating the eventual nominee, Walter Mondale, in Virginia. This made Jesse Jackson a major figure in the Democratic Party, ensuring him a speaking spot at the Convention and the right to make demands and impose rules changes.

In the 1988 presidential campaign, Jackson did even better, coming in second in a field of six Democrats, winning nine states, and walloping third-place Al Gore by more than a two to one margin. Jackson ended up with nearly 30 percent of all primary votes cast, not far behind nominee Michael Dukakis’s 43 percent. (In Jackson’s defense, he’d make a better president.) That same year, David Dinkins became both the first black mayor of New York and—judging by the results—the last black mayor of New York.

But after the OJ verdict, the reign of the race hustlers was completely over. Not surprisingly, Democrats were the last to know. Even journalists knew before the Democrats did. (Except at CNN.)

During the 2000 presidential race, all the Democratic candidates flew to New York to kiss Al Sharpton’s ring. Bill Bradley was the first and most ardent of Sharpton’s suitors, attending a public meeting with Sharpton and his National Action Network in New York and absurdly leading the audience in a chant of “No Justice, No Peace!”
¹
Al Gore met with Sharpton on the sly, at first denying that he had done so, but eventually admitting to having bumped into Sharpton at his daughter Karenna’s Upper East Side
apartment.
²
Bradley was slaughtered in the primaries, winning only 2.7 million votes, or 19 percent of the votes cast. Jesse Jackson had done better than that.