At an Iowa town hall event tonight, Hillary Clinton was asked which president most inspired her. She answered Lincoln: “And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly,” Clinton continued. “But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.” That comment is straight-up Dunning School, and it naturally set off a lot […]

…she says this? I am a person of faith. I am a Christian. I am a Methodist. I have been raised Methodist….There is so much more in the Bible about taking care of the poor, visiting the prisoners, taking in the stranger… It’s uncharacteristic of her, journalists note, to talk about her faith on the campaign trail. Is she trying to say, “I’m not an atheist Jew“? Or she is trying to make us forget she once referred to poor people—”these people,” she called them—as “deadbeats”? Or is she trying to make us forget what she said in 2014 about children who are undocumented immigrants? We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t […]

I’ve noticed an interesting line of democratic descent in the last two decades. It used to be that you weren’t allowed to criticize your nation’s leaders during wartime. Then it became, after the Nader fiasco of 2000, that you weren’t allowed to criticize the Democratic Party nominee during a general election. Now it’s become, with the rise of Hillary Clinton and the prospect of candidate Trump, that you aren’t allowed to criticize the likely party nominee during a primary campaign, lest you so tarnish the likely nominee that she becomes, in your eyes, illegitimate. Given the rightward drift of the GOP, which shows no signs of abating, I assume the next step will be that you aren’t allowed to criticize whoever the media anoints as […]

My friend Doug Henwood has refused to sell the translation rights of his book on Hillary Clinton, My Turn, to an Israeli publisher. Because of BDS. Good for him. I believe Doug’s going to be writing something more about this decision in the coming days, so let me focus instead on this comment from the Israeli publisher: Boycotts, silencing people, or refusing to acknowledge different opinions go against the very nature of the publishing world. Freedom of expression trumps everything….In the publishing field, the freedom of speech is the most appreciated value. In this boycott, the author is acting with an hypocritical attitude. He himself is expressing views in the free world, but preventing others from sharing them. Note the irony. Had Doug turned […]

Hillary Clinton in 2010 on the effects of racist colonialism on Africa: For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody. That’s the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa. Antonin Scalia in 1993 on the effects of racist segregation on America: At some time, we must acknowledge that it has become absurd to assume, without any further proof, that violations of the Constitution dating from the days when Lyndon Johnson was President, or earlier, continue to have an appreciable effect upon current operation of schools. We are close to that time. I was going […]