“I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”
-- Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY), a supporter of Hillary Clinton's Democratic presidential nomination bid until now on the New York senator's statement that "hard-working Americans, white Americans" support her candidacy as opposed to Barack Obama's.
New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, who is Black, has apparently had it with both Clintons.
"Seeds of Destruction," Herbert's most recent column, is a scathing indictment of "the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now" - a reference to Hillary's recent statement that “hard-working Americans, white Americans” are flocking to her candidacy. Herbert's response is right on the money.
I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
Herbert then unloads on the Clintons, Hillary in particular, regarding how they squandered the fresh start they got after the Lewinsky scandal.
Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.
Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.
Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.
Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.
Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”
It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.
So class is not a Clinton forte.
Herbert ends the column/indictment with the following jewel of enlightened punditry:
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
Ya think? We "Clinton haters" told you so back then, Bob. You weren't listening, were you?
I can't help but wonder if Herbert was one of those MSM types who ran cover for the Clintons at the time but feign outrage over Bill and Hillary's known and well-documented wrongdoing now that the former first couple find itself at odds with the Black establishment.
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