Dear Sheriff Dupnik: 

My name is Mike Nifong.  You may not know of me, but I was once was a liberal democrat prosecutor from Raleigh, North Carolina.  I am writing you, because I have seen you on the television over the last few days making serious allegations against people claiming they were, in part, responsible for a hideous crime without a shred of evidence to support such a charge.  I know you would like nothing more than to smear those people in the hopes of advancing a political agenda—and believe me when I tell you, a more understanding supporter of your cause than I, you will not find.

My purpose in writing this letter is to warn you of the possible pitfalls and consequences that could possibly occur for misusing the power of your office for political gain, as well as offer advice in the hopes that you will have greater success in you endeavor than I did when placed in a similar situation. That, and the fact you bear a striking resemblance to my favorite childhood cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

As you may remember, a few years back, I almost pulled off convicting a few white Duke University Lacrosse players for raping a helpless black stripper.  At the time, I was in the midst of campaigning in the Democratic Primary for prosecutor of Durham County, a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state, not unlike Tucson. My decision to indict, arrest, and prosecute those boys was a tremendous help in securing votes within the liberal base of the Democratic Party and the African-American community.  And boy did it work! I easily won the primary, and because there were so few Republicans in the county, I was a shoe-in for prosecutor in the upcoming general election. 

Not only did the accusations help me politically, I became famous! The national media interviewed me daily; just like it interviews you now.  And in those interviews, I slandered them boys. Accused them of all kinds of terrible things; just like you are accusing those rotten conservatives today.  Doesn’t it feel great sheriff, to have the whole country listen to your opinions?  Just as exciting, in my case, were the angry marches and protests by the New Black Panthers and those feminist woman’s groups.  Hell, even the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came to speak to me! I got this county, as well as the entire nation riled up. The media and public hated those boys so badly for what I accused them of doing; we almost had an old-fashion 1960’s race riot on our hands! Good Times.

To be honest Sheriff,  every time I think about how close I to convicting those rich, spoiled, conservative, white boys, it makes me crazier than Crystal Gail Mangum when she’s off her medication and swinging upside down from a stripper pole.  I just hope your exploitation of the psychotic assailant in your case is more helpful to your cause than my sociopathic non-victim was to mine.

I know you may be thinking our two cases are not analogous, because you have not charged those whom you have falsely accused of inciting Jared Loughner to commit mass murder with a crime.  However, the similarity lies in the fact that  we both used our elected office to publicly slander individuals for the exact same motive: to further our own political agenda.

Sheriff, I want to caution you that now you have made those allegations, and have stood by them, even when given several opportunities to clarify or take them back all together, you have to be careful. Believe me when I tell you the media today is not the same as it were fifteen or so years ago when a public official could unjustly smear conservatives or rich white folk; and in the process, not only advance his or her political career, but become a hero to the liberal media. Former news anchor Dan Rather and I are just two examples of how the internet and other mediums have altered the news business.

As both “Gunga Dan” and I painfully discovered there are now a plethora of damn conservative talk radio shows, at least one objective cable news network; and websites whose members wanna get all up in a political player’s “bidness;” if you know what I mean.  They are always poking around asking all these questions about an accuser’s motives and background or demanding actual evidence to support accusations.  It’s enough to make a progressive sick, I tell ya.  Damn idealistic fools. They can’t handle the truth! Can they Sheriff?  I can’t wait for the day, when we criminalize the whole godforsaken conservative/libertarian/tea party ideology, and silence the purveyors of it. Free speech be damned!

Oh, how I pine for the days when there were only the three TV news networks, along with CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times dispensing the news!  In those days, all of them worked together to advance the liberal cause, and there were very view outlets that carried opposing viewpoints.  As such, a democrat or liberal elected official, like the both of us, could use our office to execute political hit jobs on our conservative enemies, without consequence.

I truly believe had it not been for those in the “new media” asking the tough questions; investigating me and my staff; as well as the accuser’s background; and then reporting the actual facts;  I would have convicted those boys (all I had to was get the case heard by a liberal, mostly black jury ala O.J.), and then, quite possibly, have been elected governor of North Carolina.  Further, we would still be watching Dan Rather say “courage” at the end of his CBS Nightly News broadcasts.  Don’t ask me Sheriff; I don’t know what the hell the man was talking about either.

Hopefully, the day comes when we can legally halt the conservative and tea party movements by enacting speech regulation legislation.  However, some liberal prosecutors refuse to wait any longer.  They are taking the initiative and have instituted a de-facto criminalization of conservatism via the court system.  For instance, Tom Delay was, for the most part, prosecuted out of revenge for the crime of being an effective conservative politician.  In that case, charges were brought by the extremely partisan liberal District Attorney of Travis County Ronnie Earle under a very broadly written obscure Texas statute that proscribed the distribution of certain campaign funds.  In truth, if a prosecutor was creative enough, he or she could have indicted almost any Texan elected official under the statute.  Especially, if grand jury members were of the defendant’s opposition party. 

In Delay’s case, the trial was held in one of the most liberal cities in Texas, Austin.  No question the man was railroaded, and the only reason Ronnie Earle got away with it was because the media was basically silent. It knew the whole thing was a political hit job, but the target was a conservative. The poor bastard was found guilty and sentenced to three years.  Good riddance, eh sheriff.

We did the same thing to Scooter Libby.  Now his case was the schizzle.  What American citizen actually gets prosecuted and convicted on a perjury charge for allegedly lying to cover up a non-existent crime? A high-profile republican political operative who was an aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney, that’s who:  the most despised man in Washington D.C. The same city where his trial was held and 94% of the district, and thus the jury pool, voted for the democratic nominee in the 2008 presidential election.

I was in the process of employing the same trial strategy in the prosecution of the Duke boys. All I had to do was get the case in front of a jury made up of a few guilty white liberals; a feminist or two; and some angry African Americans, or at least they would be angry by the end of the trial. However, the Delay and Libby cases had the one thing mine lacked: a minimal amount of evidence in which to at least get to trial.    

The only evidence I had was a junkie stripper’s ever changing series of events.  You know she changed her story twelve times on me sheriff?  Twelve times! By what the crime lab report said about the multiple “DNA deposits” from different male subjects (not a damn one from a Duke player) found on her under garments, that was more times than she changed her panties every month.  Looking back, when I received that particular lab report, I should have dropped the whole charade, with the deepest apologies to the boys, their families, and the whole country.  But a case with an underprivileged black girl, being ganged rape by rich white boys?  The story was better than a god damn John Grisham novel sheriff.  That coupled with my liberal white guilt; I just could not let go of it at that stage.

Anyway, that’s why I support your mission to promote the propaganda linking conservatives in some way to this horrific event.  To shut them right wingers the hell up!  If you succeed in actually duping the public into believing conservative hate speech was culpable in the shooting of a congresswoman; the murder of a federal judge; and five other people, including a nine year-old little girl, maybe we can start the process of enacting legislation to quiet their rhetoric or get them off the airways altogether. 

However, in addition to the new media, there is another group you have to be careful and suspicious is the American people as a whole.  Unfortunately for guys like us sheriff, most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded. So they might get a little upset, if you provide no proof to support your claim that your boy Jared there targeted that congresswoman, because of talk radio or Sarah Palin’s election map. They will become even more outraged, if Loughner’s defense team uses your outspoken public indictments against conservatives that will in some way gain him favor with the courts or a jury as the case moves forward..  If that happens, be prepared to hear and see your name being used as a verb, like the public did to me, after I falsely accused those boys; to wit:

 Nifonged:   a verb that describes the railroading or harming of a person with no justifiable cause to do so, except for one’s own political gain. It can be used as a substitute for unjustly accused and many other similar words and phrases.

Imagine hearing for the first time, “I was dupniked by the local prosecutor” or “we were dupniking this guy even though we know he did not do it,” and “Afterwards, even though there was no proof of a connection between talk radio and the mass murders, the radio host, who had been dupniked by the local sheriff’s office, became a target for violence himself.” 

I tell you what sheriff you never get used to having your name, for the lack of a better word:  nifonged.

To be on the safe side though, I would just stick to being interviewed by MSNBC’S Chris Mathews and Keith Olberman. That way, not only will you get easy questions, it will be a virtual slobbering love fest; and if you are lucky, the three of you may even achieve simultaneous thrills up your legs.

Anyway, my break was over about ten minutes ago, and my eighteen-year old boss Shawneequa will get all ghetto on my ass, if I don’t change the grease in the deep fryer, before the next shift.  And, in this economy, I can’t afford to lose another job. Good luck to you Sheriff Dubnik and be careful out there. 

Yours Truly,

Mike Nifong

Former Durham County Prosecutor

Deep in the hearts and minds of the liberal media and the left lie an unspoken truth: both know that Sarah Palin’s so-called “cross-hair map” nor the “vitriol rhetoric on the radio and television” (and by that they mean the rhetoric emanating from conservative radio and Fox News) in any way contributed to Saturday’s massacre in Tucson. Thus, their repeated attempts to link the two is no more than a cynical, politically motivated exercise meant to marginalize popular conservative voices and halt the growing and, as evidenced by the mid-term elections, politically powerful Tea Party movement.  However, their ultimate goal is to lay the groundwork for enacting legislation that will have a chilling effect on conservative speech; in the desperate hope that by silencing the opposition, their party will achieve better results at the ballot box.

It is obvious from what we have learned about the Tucson shooter over the past few days, is that he is a very troubled and most likely deranged individual.  Does any reasonable person believe that because Sarah Palin displayed a map “targeting” congressional districts for election purposes incited the perpetrator to kill six and maim 13 people?  Of course it doesn’t.  No more than they believe the video games he played, or the music to which he listened sparked his rage. 

If it is even suggested that it could be the games and DVDs in his possession, or the songs contained on his I-Pod that contributed to Loughner’s rampage, he or she would be, and rightly in my opinion, dismissed out of hand by the left and the media.  This is especially true for those in the entertainment industry, who never accept that the violent lyrics contained in the songs it records or the gratuitous violence portrayed in the video games and movies it produces may have caused some maladjusted soul to become unhinged and commit unspeakable acts of horror like the one in Tucson. 

Indeed, it will be interesting to witness how many of those employed  in the entertainment industry will blame their favorite villianess Sarah Palin and her map for the carnage, but those same people will refuse, and even scoff, at the suggestion that their mediums’ products somehow caused young Jared to shoot 19 people.  However, it could be argued that his taste in movies, videos, and music is a far more reasonable proximate cause for his actions than images on an election map; regardless if those images were of cross-hairs, targets, or surveying symbols. 

The truth of the matter is that with the exception of the shooter himself, no person, political party, recording, or video game is culpable in the Tucson shootings–and those in the media and on the left know it full well.  Therefore, the disgusting, vile, slanderous, and downright evil display of an absolute corrupt media and political party attempting to link the Tea Party and conservatives to the carnage in Tuscon over the past few days was simply pretext to their real motive: politics. 

In order for the democrat party to get the maximum political advantage from this tragedy, with the ever reliable aid from the media, it must be repeated over and over that the causal link to Loughner’s provocation was politics. Further, it must be the vitriol politics spoken by Limbaugh and Beck and the election map provided by Palin that sent young Loughner off to a Tucson Safeway with a loaded Glock that Saturday afternoon to slaughter a congresswoman and other innocent bystanders. Are the connections not obvious!

If this event were not such a tragedy and the ramifications of its aftermath not so serious (not only to the victims and their families, but to the nation’s political climate as well) the media and the left’s shameful attempt to assign its causation to anyone other than the depraved shooter would be comical.

Make no mistake, their righteous indignation has absolutely nothing to do with halting violence by urging the toning down of political vitriol (and if it is, it is only the vitriol from conservatives); the primary motive of the media and the left’s attempt to tie what happened in Tucson to the conservative movement is the same reason they did after the 1995 Oklahoma City attack: marginalize popular and effective conservatives, thereby chilling or silencing their political speech. If they can rid the nation of conservatisms most effective voices and their message, liberals will be more successful at the ballot box.

The media and leftists groups such as the ACLU are always in a rush to defend free speech no matter how violent and perverted that speech may be.  From the rap and hip hop music that is laced with violent rhetoric about shooting “bitches” and keeping their “ho’s” in place (When was the last time the left blamed rap for gang violence?  Obama even quotes songs from Jay-Z); to the heavy-metal bands that I listened to and enjoyed in my youth, with their anti-social lyrics that may or may not have contained encrypted messages promoting suicide and rage killings; to the proliferation of obscene and grossly-obscene pornography on the Internet, in magazines, and on DVDs.  

The use of the term “grossly-obscene” is an attempt to make a distinction between pornography that may be considered obscene but is basically consenting adults engaged in normal and consensual sex. The grossly-obscene are those images of rape and torture, bestiality, and “virtual” child pornography, which do not depict actual children engaged in sexual activity, but are images that have been manipulated and digitalized to make them appear to be children—yes, the courts, thanks in part to the ACLU, have found these images to be protected speech— and other repugnant acts that 90% of the American population would consider far removed from containing any social or artistic value.   However, the ACLU and most of those on the left, would agree that even the grossly-obscene is protected speech, and they would defend a person’s right to produce, view, and possess such material.  

Their defense in support of such material and speech is that although the words and images are vile and offensive, and even may quite possibly have a negative effect on the nation’s youth and culture, it is the price society must pay to ensure that every citizen has a voice that can be heard or a thought expressed, without the threat of Government censorship or prosecution. They argue, if the Government can prohibit even the vilest forms of expression, it will have a chilling effect on other types of speech and thought, which could lead to a ban on the more noble and enlightened forms of expression.  Their argument is basically that of the slippery-slope variety, and for the most part, with the exception of the grossly-obscene, I agree with these arguments and the reasoning behind them.  However, the left’s passion for defending freedom of speech ceases when that speech is political discourse in which they don’t agree with. 

Political speech was the single most important form of expression the framers of the 1^st Amendment intended to protect.  Political thought and speech and the free flow of ideas are at the very heart of the amendment’s free speech clause.  Yet, it is political speech of the conservative variety the left desperately wants to regulate—and in some cases ban altogether.  Granted, the left will not come forward and promote an outright ban on conservative political speech: it will do so by advocating innocuous sounding legislation such as anti-hate speech laws, the Fairness Doctrine, and Net-Neutrality.

If enacted, those proposed pieces of legislation would have a chilling effect on conservative speech. It is an outrage that those on the left would support and defend the right of someone to produce and posses virtual child-pornography, but would go to great lengths, even use a tragedy like Tucson, to silence political speech in which it disagrees. 

To counter the left’s politicizing the shootings, our elected Republican leaders must go on the airways and denounce the attempt to link what happened in Tucson to Tea Party members and other conservatives.  He or she must be prepared to cite specific examples and point to the left’s hypocrisy on the issue of vitriolic speech with examples.  There has to be a literal treasure trove of empirical evidence on the Internet of democrat leaders and commentators on the left spouting the most ugly and hateful things about conservatives, especially George W. Bush and Palin.  The burning of her church and the movie based on Bush’s fictional assassination are just two that come to mind. 

For a moment, imagine the outrage from the media and the left, if the place of worship set ablaze was Obama’s and the film depicted his demise at the hands of a make believe assassin.  Both events would be broadcast 24/7 and for days on end to show “the hate on the right.”  However, most Americans are unaware of the Palin church fire or the Bush assassination film.  I wonder why that is?

In addition, they need to be tougher on those in the media who even suggest a tenious link between the shooter and conservatives. This has to be the right’s “Have you no decency Sir? Have you no shame!” moment when “journalists” pose asinine and loaded questions such as, “How much blame should be placed on Rush and Palin for the tragedy and will you appeal to them to tone down their rhetoric?” 

Over the next few weeks, the usual suspects on the left and in the media will be positively giddy in their attempts to link this tragedy to Tea Party members and conservatives. Chris Matthews is no doubt anxiously awaiting an opportunity to cite his factually-flawed and utterly biased documentary, “The New Right,” which portrays the Tea Party and other conservatives as violent thugs, to bolster claims that conservative speech promotes violence.  And while he, and the rest of the liberal media are getting a “thrill up the back of their leg” trying to link conservatives to the Tucson shootings; the thought of them succeeding in making the public believe such a connection exists sends a big chill right down my spine.