Pirate's Cove

Did you see the video of Bill Clinton having one heck of an argument with Black Lives Matters screechers? Slate’s Excitable Michelle Goldberg is incensed over Billy Jeff daring to respond back, and wants the Hillary campaign to fire him

Fire Bill Clinton
No one is doing more damage to Hillary’s campaign than her husband.

I wonder if there’s a part of Bill Clinton that doesn’t really want Hillary Clinton to become president, particularly if she has to distance herself from his legacy to do so. How else to explain why one of the world’s most talented and agile politicians is so consistently flat-footed and destructive when advocating on his wife’s behalf? How else to explain his terrible and destined-to-be-viral confrontation Thursday with Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia?

It started when the demonstrators interrupted Bill Clinton’s speech to protest his draconian 1994 crime bill, which, among other things, expanded the scope of the death penalty, enshrined “three-strikes” provisions into federal law, and allocated almost $10 billion in funding for prison construction. That bill is now widely seen as contributing to the human catastrophe of mass incarceration. Hillary Clinton is proposing a diametrically different approach to criminal justice, and even Bill Clinton renounced the law last year, though today, bafflingly, he went back to defending it.

And how did he defend it?

“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out into the street to murder other African American children,” he shouted at the protesters. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t. She didn’t! You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.” The crowd cheered, but most Hillary supporters who watch it online will be aghast, if only out of political self-interest. Right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller and the Weekly Standard rushed, naturally, to post video of Bill’s hectoring.

So, it’s apparently a horrible thing in Liberal World to want to get the people who feed crack to kids and turn them into members of gangs who go out and kill (much of the law in question was about reducing and cracking down on the growing gang activity). By all the complaints from liberals, one would get the idea that they prefer the young black kids on crack and killing.

At a time when Hillary Clinton is dependent on black voters and campaigning with mothers who’ve lost sons to police violence, Bill Clinton yoked her to his own discredited policies. He reminded everyone that, in defense of his bill, she’d once spoken about underage “superpredators,” language she has since apologized for. Then, Bill Clinton aped the maddening right-wing tendency to derail conversations about criminal justice abuses by invoking black-on-black crime. He might as well have said, “All lives matter!”

Goldberg is referring to this part

The former president noted that Hillary had nothing to do with his reforms, but defended them anyways. “Because of that bill, we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate, and listen to this, because of that and the background check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people of gun violence. And how do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

How horrible! Giving stats of reducing crime, which affected the Black community. For this, Goldberg wants him fired, and ended her missive with that exactly.

Of course, Bill is correct on two points. There is a big problem with what is termed Black In Origin (Black on Black) crime which far outpaces any other same-on-same crime. Of the well over 300 murders in Baltimore in 2015, very few were of any other race, and very few were committed by any other race. The same goes for Chicago and other Democratic Party run cities. BLM doesn’t like to discuss this crime, and also calls it a myth. How do you fix something if you don’t acknowledge the problem?

Bill also characterized BLM as being against free speech. He was entirely correct on that point, as well.

Crossed at Right Wing News.