She-Who-Must-Not-Be-President ran into a dust-up in coal country last week. Sitting across a table for a media photo-op, an unemployed coal worker put the former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator from New York and First Lady on the hot seat.
Strange as it might seem, the folks in West Virginia don’t much cotton to politicians intent on tossing them out of work. No matter how many government handouts those politicians promise.
At a CNN town hall in March, Hillary Clinton boasted: “I’m the only candidate which [sic] has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity — using clean renewable energy as the key — into coal country. Because we’re going put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business . . . right Tim?”
Understandably, coal miners and all those who earn their living in “fly-over” places such as West Virginia were focused on their families, their communities, their way of life. And perhaps more than a little uncomfortable that putting people out of work would get such a rah-rah endorsement from Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic Party frontrunner for president.
My mind immediately went to something else, however. What about this fellow named Tim, who, before a national audience, Hillary Clinton had called on to agree with her about killing coal companies and the jobs they provide? Who the heck is he?
What’s Tim’s last name? What does Tim do? Who does Tim work for? Probably not a coal company, eh? The Environmental Defense Fund or the Sierra Club, perhaps?
A contributor? A supporter who favors the Obama Administration policies designed to put coal companies out of business?
I want to know. But for some bizarre reason the media doesn’t want to tell me.
Could Tim What’s-his-name be Hillary’s secret lover? (Just checking your pulse.)
Aren’t you curious? Why isn’t the news media? The answer to who this “Tim” is might provide some helpful context to Mrs. Clinton’s controversial comment.
Right, Tim?
Last Monday, West Virginia coal worker Bo Copley teared-up talking to Hillary about his family and the pain of being out of work. Addressing the protests that greeted Secretary Clinton’s arrival at the event, Copley told her, “The reason you hear those people out there saying some of the things that they say, is because when you make comments like, ‘We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs.’ These are the kind of people that you’re affecting. This is my family.”
“I just want to know,” he pointedly asked, “how you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?”
Added our mild-mannered citizen interrogator, “Because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.”
Hillary Clinton clearly supports the very Obama Administration policies that have been so disastrous for the coal industry. “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels,” she had further clarified back in March.
But last week Hillary told Mr. Copley that her comment was “a misstatement,” that what she had said was “totally out of context” from what she had meant . . . whatever that means.
Of course, at Hotair.com Larry O’Connor noted these are “contradictory excuses. Either the statement was correct, but taken out of context. Or, the statement was incorrect (a misstatement) and therefore, the context is irrelevant.”
The rest of the media was apparently dozing. No journalistic need to ever probe into any statement by Mrs. Clinton.
“[I]t was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs,” she explained. “I didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said was, that is going to happen unless we take action to try to help and prevent it.”
And Hillary has a plan!
But not to help “prevent” the loss of coal jobs and the bankruptcy of coal companies. Her plan is, instead, to spend $30 billion of our tax dollars to supposedly help those thrown out of work and repair some of the collateral damage the war on coal will wreck.
As one West Virginian passionately put it: “We don’t want your handouts; we want work.”
Speaking of work, it’s not too late for folks in the media to do their job. Hint: you could be watchdogs . . . not lapdogs. I don’t get press passes to Hillary Clinton’s occasional press conferences. You folks can ask just who is Hillary’s “Tim.”
And what does he have to do with the war on coal?