Posted on
September 30, 2022
Hillary The Healer?
HRC belatedly damns division
by
Daniel
Clark
In a CNN interview marking the anniversary of the 9/11
attacks, former first lady and senator Hillary Clinton said, "We were able to
come together as a country at that terrible time. We put aside differences. I wish we could find ways of doing that
again." If you are thinking that she
can't possibly have meant this, you are correct, which is why she quickly added
that, "we have also, I think, been reminded about how important it is to try to
deal with extremism of any kind."
Well, maybe not of any kind. During Bill Clinton's administration, he
repeatedly averted his eyes from Islamic extremism, to the point of warning us
not to overreact to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a plot that, if
successful, could have been many times deadlier than 9/11, in that it would
have caused the towers to fall across Manhattan instead of straight down. The Clintons have never second-guessed their
decision not to deal with that extremism (it was a "co-presidency," remember),
but now Mrs. Clinton warns that we must root out the dangerous zealots who walk
among us as Americans. Not a very
unifying theme, that.
In
truth, this much talked about post-9/11 unity never existed. On the very next day after the attacks, the New
York Times, Washington Post and other major liberal media suggested
cowardice on the part of President Bush for not returning directly to
Washington on Air Force One, which in hindsight would have been a foolhardy
thing to do. American leftists formed
the anti-American organization International ANSWER just a few days later, and
held its first "anti-war" demonstration within the month.
By the following spring, they had produced a document
called, "Not In Our Name: A Statement of Conscience," which was signed by such
liberal opinion leaders as Ed Asner, Noam Chomsky, Ossie Davis, Gloria Steinem
and Howard Zinn. In it, they rejected
the "simplistic script of 'good vs. evil,'" and instead morally equated 9/11
with various American military actions.
They went on to say, "We extend a hand to those around the world
suffering from these policies," meaning the enemy, of course.
It was on November 10, 2011, not quite two months
after the Twin Towers were destroyed, while the fires at Ground Zero were still
burning, that then-Senator Hillary Clinton absurdly blamed the events on
President Bush's tax cuts. "If we
[meaning those other than herself] hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring,
that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal
with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today."
So, first of all, the threat of terrorism was "new,"
meaning that her husband can't be responsible for malnourishing the military
budget, even as he whimsically ordered deployments without regard to our
national interests. No, terrorism had
suddenly become an issue sometime between the Bush inauguration and his signing
of the tax cut bill that June. The WTC
bombing doesn't figure into it, and neither do the bombings at our embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, or the USS Cole.
Terrorism, during the Clinton presidency, was not a thing. Got that?
The tax cuts, whose impact had not yet been realized, had
somehow hindered our ability to defend ourselves, even though defense spending
as a percentage of the GDP had ticked upward for the first time since Bush's
dad was in office. The sharp decline
during the Clinton years did not leave us vulnerable. No, it was only during the first eight months
of the Bush administration, before his first budget had even taken effect, that
our defenses atrophied from a lack of funding.
There's no reason to believe that the unconventional
attack, using hijacked civilian aircraft, could potentially have been thwarted
by more federal spending anyway. Nothing
about the accusation made sense, except that Mrs. Clinton saw an opportunity to
exploit the victims in order to smear her political opponents. So much for coming together as a country at
that terrible time.
It's
not as if we need to go back to 2001 in order to tell that she's lying to us
now. In a 2016 presidential campaign
speech, she famously remarked that, "you could put half of Trump's supporters
into what I call the basket of deplorables.
They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name
it." Really? Half of Donald Trump's supporters? That's roughly 25 percent of the
electorate. Even CNN's Anderson Cooper
called her on this while moderating a debate, asking, "How can you unite a
country if you've written off tens of millions of Americans?"
Candidate Hillary gave a typically Clintonian
response, which is to say, she lied. "My
argument is not with his supporters," she said, "It's with him and the hateful,
divisive campaign he has run." As her
previous remarks made clear, her argument was not with Trump alone, but with a
very large segment of the American population.
Not that there's anything divisive about that.
As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton served the administration
of Barack Obama, who once said of small town Pennsylvanians, "It's not
surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward
people who aren't like them." Here we
have another Democrat presidential candidate slandering an entire demographic
category as bigoted zealots. Hillary criticized these remarks as elitist at the time, but her
basket of deplorables is nothing more than Barack's bitter clingers 2.0.
Whereas conservatives see people as individuals, liberals
see them as members of groups.
Conservatives may use divisive language in relation to lawmakers of the
opposing party, but it is liberals who routinely isolate groups within the
general population to identify as the enemy.
Just look at the recent "Remarks by President Biden on the Continued
Battle for the Soul of the Nation."
Granted, he did call for unity, but only in opposition to "MAGA
Republicans," whom he identified primarily by their opposition to
abortion. But half of the population opposes
abortion, which means that this unity of his turns out to be pretty exclusive. Yet it is not Biden's speech that Mrs. Clinton
is bemoaning.
Democrats and their friends in social media now seek
to punish a new crime called "disinformation," which they define as any
disagreement with one of their presumptions.
Liberals often muse about putting "climate change deniers" on trial for
their thought crimes against humanity, and they do not always do so
hypothetically. In 2016, Democrat Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Attorney General Loretta Lynch that she
needed to prosecute oil executives who say manmade global warming doesn't
exist. The Obama-appointed AG agreed.
Is this how the Hillary Party intends to "deal with
extremism?" By punishing those who
refuse to think mandatory thoughts? It
seems it isn't differences that they wish to put aside, but those of us who
differ.
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