What I’m picking up on–and it likely ties in with what you’re talking about–is his age and/or his health issues have combined to rob him of his lung capacity and some of his physical strength. He’s struggling, compared to his former self. Twenty years ago, he could stand there and say the exact same thing and not appear so winded or his voice so wispy. He still can give a great speech, but he struggles some and that can lead him to want to up it a notch or two … which can come off as yelling.
What Bill said here was correct. He was right to say it. That said, he did appear (though I believe unintentionally, mostly) to scold, almost a bit gleeful to have a chance to put them in their place (he’s very likely sick of only hearing one angle from these folks to this issue).
I lived in the mountains out west of D.C. in the '70s and '80s – and, yes, D.C. was a very dangerous place back then. I stand with the Black Lives Matters folks, but they really do themselves a disservice to attack Clinton over this. The city governments of D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and others were begging the feds to get off their asses and help do something about the inner-city crime rates, the crack epidemic, etc. There’s a lot more to this story than just the white president and the feds coming down hard to ruin black lives.
i wish bill would stfu. as much as i hate this current focus on the crime bill, after two decades and from a lot of people that wouldn’t give a shit except to use it as a way to prop up their candidate (as if he didn’t vote for it, smdh), it was a fucked up bill. and the subsequent state ‘tough on crime’ bills added more shit to the pile.
Which bothers the hell out of me. I’m trying to remember a time in my lifetime where the FLOTUS didn’t enthusiastically support her husband’s initiatives and I just can’t think of one. That was her job as FLOTUS. Did she take it too far with the “superpredators” and “bring them to heel” comments? Oh, absolutely, but at that time supporting this bill was essentially supporting ending the carnage that was killing black folks, that’s why people like one Bernard Sanders voted for it. The thing was replete with unintended consequences revealed in hindsight, there’s no question about that. But when I see these kinds of attacks on the Clintons I like to remind people that Bill Clinton didn’t dub himself “the first black president”, black people did. We claimed him, and we wouldn’t have done that if we thought that the Clintons had a racist bone in their bodies.
This is the exact opposite of what Newt Gingrich, Joe Scarborough and many other Republicans have been doing for the last two decades. Clinton’s fantastic economy and everything else he did that was good is solely because of the Republican Congress, but everything bad, especially the government shutdowns, were all his fault and his fault alone. It never ceases to me amaze me how many long running Republicans hits on the Clintons that Sanders and his supporters have adopted. Next they’ll be talking about cigars and blue dresses.
the record needs to be corrected. morrison dubbed him the first black president not because she thought he had didn’t have a racist bone in his body, but because of the way he was being attacked and hounded by the repubs and press. basically, he was getting just a tidbit of what black folks got on the daily.
he wasn’t made some honorary black dude and no black person with some common sense would honestly think that he, or anybody else, didn’t have a racist bone in his body.
Well, also, he grew up butt poor in the Deep South, which stoked the sneering class animus of the entire white national political class, Northern and Southern alike. I can’t remember if Toni said it like that in her essay but I believe it was implied
Good. While I have always and will continue to be fully on board with fixing the blatant injustices and inequities of “tough on crime” idiocy like mandatory sentencing, draconian three-strikes rules and privatizing the prison systems to make them, and the process of filling them, profit oriented, the lack of introspection sometimes exhibited by activists can be fucking bothersome.
Plus, you gotta feel bad for folks like Bubba and Obama. Being the smartest person in the stadium/auditorium full of people every time they give a speech has got to be hard.
The problem with Clinton’s response - we were always placing heavy duty drug dealers and gang killers in prison. We didn’t need him to compete with Republicans to see who could put the most minorities in jail and the totally stupid 3 strikes and your out law.
The war on drugs and Clinton’s changes to that program and laws have been a miserable failure. It has placed hundreds of thousands of minorities in prison and mostly African-Americans.
If Clinton doesn’t know that his laws have done a lot more harm than good, then he and his wife Hillary are so far out of touch it isn’t funny!
Bill and Hillary sound and act like Republicans…throw them all in jail regardless of whether that is really how you solve our nation’s inner city trouble. How white Republican of them.
Spend some time working and trying to help families in the ghetto and the 1st thing one realizes - there are so few options for putting food on the table and paying rent that dealing drugs becomes almost a necessary evil to just survive. When the 7 heirs to Walton estate (Wal-Mart) have more accumulated wealth than the bottom 75 Million Americans, then there is no way the ghettos won’t just be a human tragedy but they will be reaching a tipping point if we don’t stop being a police state and start being a state of TOTAL EQUALITY!
But Omar was a seriously lovable bad ass, you have to admit that.
@tflick point is extremely valid. Bill has a certain blind spot to his wife. Despite his dalliances, she IS the one he sees as his life time partner. And he tends to get obsessively defensive because of that, or he oscillates too far the opposite way try to correct.
As a Democrat, its an incredibly frustrating phenomenon to experience. The most gifted politician of our time is laid low by his love of the candidate that he most wants to extend those efforts.
We don’t need to say anything stupid, just the truth: one of these candidates is taking a pile of money from the prison lobby and supports private prisons. The other candidate will get rid of the private prisons. You have a choice on this issue, like most issues; make a wise choice.
