The hubbub began after Bill Clinton ran into opposition from Black Lives Matter activists at one of his speeches. He proceeded to shred them -- accurately -- for their inane focus on supposed police brutality and criminal justice bias rather than saving actual black lives: "I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the streets to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. ... You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth. You are defending the people who cause young people to go out and take guns. ... They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty. Then why did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty in history when I was president?"
All of this is true.
But for the left, truth must be discarded in favor of the narrative. And so, Clinton was raked over the coals for gainsaying the mythology of the left: that the criminal justice system penalizes innocent young black men disproportionately, that their sentences are longer than whites', and that police enforcement disproportionately targets young black men.
And Hillary Clinton, in order to stave off the onslaught of a 7,000-year-old socialist loonbag, bravely threw Bill onto a political grenade. "I have been consistently speaking out about what I would do as president," she said after Bill's implosion, "And I think it's important for people to recognize we have work to do, that there were a lot of people very scared and concerned about high crime back in the day. And now we've got to say, OK, we have to deal with the consequences. And one of the consequences is, in my view, (the) overincarceration of people who should not have been in the criminal justice system."
Never mind that Bill's decision to fight criminality resulted, at least in part, in the single greatest prolonged reduction in crime in American history. What's important is that Hillary wants to win the nomination. It doesn't matter how many young black people have to die in order for slightly older black people to vote for her.
And die they will. The murder rate is up dramatically over the past two years in cities ranging from Baltimore to New Orleans, from St. Louis to Chicago to New York. This is what happens when the mythology of police as villains destroys their capacity to act as heroes. The high crime neighborhoods are left to those who commit crime.
But Hillary Clinton doesn't care. Neither does Bernie. All that matters is continuing Democratic victory at the expense of truth and American lives.