| At least you could print what John Rocker said. The latest in a long list of "false" (subject to later revision) stories circulated about the Clintons comes from Jerry Oppenheimer's excellent little page-turner, "State of a Union," in which he reports that Hillary called one of the people working for Bill Clinton a "f-ing Jew bastard."
(That much has been said and shown on prime-time TV. The Clinton era has led to new self-censorship standards in a lot of areas.)
The World's Smartest Woman did NOT respond to the charges by saying: "I might well have said that, but those obviously aren't my feelings. People sometimes use ugly, vicious curses when they're angry. I'm sorry if I used those, but please judge me by my record and not some childish tantrum I threw 26 years ago."
No, what Hillary said was that it was a lie put out by her political opponents -- presumably the dastardly "vast right-wing conspiracy" at work again. I quote:
"You know, there's a history of these kinds of charges coming from the people in question (author's note: all eventually proved true, even if it took a full federal investigation), and they've been false in the past." (Author's note: Only the denials, the excuses and the defamatory charges against the Clintons' accusers have turned out to be "false.") "They're false now." (Author's note: That's what she said the last time.) "And I don't know what the reason behind it is, but it didn't happen."
For the record, I did not go ballistic over some dumb baseball player's printable remarks to Sports Illustrated. I thought that O.J. cutting off Nicole Brown Simpson's head was somewhat more egregious than Mark Fuhrman using the N-word. But even stipulating that the charges aren't that terrible -- Hillary has a potty mouth -- she's the one who has now put the veracity of the charge at issue. Did she or didn't she say it?
The most persuasive evidence that Hillary said it, of course, is that she denies having said it. And if that's not enough for you, America's most famous perjurer, President William Jefferson Clinton, backs her up.
The New York Times ran its lead editorial on Hillary's "current complication" -- as the paper called her anti-Semitic slur -- and titled it, "Mrs. Clinton's Credible Response." The Times cited as evidence in Hillary's favor that she opposed the Vietnam War and tried to get President Nixon impeached. (This is normal NYT logic.)
But even weirder, the editorial sportingly stressed that Ms. Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy gave "a passionate, almost teary response to the allegation of anti-Semitic language." Huh? A Clinton denial is supposed to mean something now? Continued... |