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September 18, 2005
Bill Clinton's racial demagoguery on This Week with George Stephanopoulos
Bill Clinton appeared on ABC's This Week this morning (9-18-05) with George Stephanopoulos, carefully and purposely accusing President Bush of callous indifference to black people.
First off, ABC News is rapidly losing credibility as a news source. Fox News is often accused of being biased in favor of the right, but they're not hiring Karen Hughes or Karl Rove to conduct news interviews with George Bush. That ABC absolutely handed their prime Sunday morning news show to a supposedly retired political operative tells you a lot about their credibility. Monica Lewinsky could not have performed a bigger act of publicly servicing Clinton than did his other former employee George Stephanopoulos.
Most former presidents at least try to put on a minimal facade of class, refraining from overt partisan hackery and at least trying to appear like an elder statesman. Then there's Bill Clinton, who of course was all about how much he's continued to devote himself to just trying to help out society- unlike that President Bush who only cares about the rich people, and certainly doesn't care a thing about poor black people.
I think we did a good job of that. For example, we had the lowest African-American unemployment, the lowest African-American poverty rate ever recorded. We had the highest homeownership, highest business ownership, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty in eight years as had been moved out in the previous 12 years.
This is a matter of public policy, and whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up, and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the eighties; that's what they've done in this decade.
In the middle, we had a different policy. We concentrated tax cuts on lower income working people and benefits to low-income people that helped them move from welfare to work, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty. We know what works, and we had a program that was drastically reducing poverty, and they got rid of it. And they don't believe in it.
And I don't think that it's race-based, but it has a class impact. And in Louisiana, if what you do affects poor people disproportionately, then, it will disproportionately affect black people.
This is cheap, ugly racial demagoguery, and dishonest even before you get to the demagoguery. He says the words "I don't think that it's race-based" as if he's being diplomatic- right after unmistakably saying that it is. Hey, we were helping black folks. We know what will reduce poverty, but "they don't believe in it" because they just want to help the rich folks. Also, there's the casual conflating of black with poor.
Note specifically the twice stated claim that he had "100 times as many people out of poverty." That's absurd on the face of it. How many people is he claiming were in poverty under Reagan and Bush senior, and how many is he claiming to have rescued? If absolutely every person in the country had been in poverty under Reagan/Bush, and only 1% managed to get out from under it in that time, Clinton's 100x number would still have been mathematically impossible.
You could spend all day parsing out the various dishonest and extremely unlikely statements. For example, he claims not to have discussed the upcoming vote on Supreme Court nominee Roberts with Hillary. "I have no idea what she's going to do. I haven't talked to her about it."
But forget the rest of his fraudulence and falsehoods here. They pale next to this purely calculated pouring of salt into our country's racial wounds.
Singer Kanye West got a lot of grief recently for a couple of remarks claiming that Bush doesn't care about black people and such. Now, that was foolishness, but it was just a cheesed off pop singer popping off at the mouth.
Bill Clinton on ABC, on the other hand, knew what he was doing, and did it with malice aforethought. Those are very carefully crafted words obviously engineered to stoke resentment and racial paranoia in the black community.
This is Bill Clinton's idea of being an elder statesman.
posted by Al at 9/18/2005 01:12:00 PM
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