Respectable Past
Hillary Clinton “was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an ‘unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.’ She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
“Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack Obama, after Yale law school Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others ‘tolerated communists.’ Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates.
“All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein‘s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.
“All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?” — from Tom Hayden‘s Nation piece called “Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream.”
Oh yes, we really should pay close attention to anything Tom Hayden says. This is the guy who’s never been anything more politically exalted than a California assemblyman, after all, and even that he owes more to his then-spouse’s free-spending ways (she remarked prominently on his serial adulteries in her own autobiograpjy) back then than to his genuine appeal to a voting populace. (As I recall, Hayden also wasn’t at all slow to smear his opponents in both the primary and the general election during those days.)
That Hayden genuinely imagines he has credibility given his past association with SDS is one of worst remaiining excrescences of the 60′s. That he writes his billingsgate for “The Nation,” however, is only to be expected, since it always happily provides a forum for such other 60s’ retreads as Todd Gitlin. One never looks in “The Nation” for rationality, foresight or even anything approaching love for America even with all her faults.
I keep noting this, you keep ignoring my advice, Jeffrey, but here it is again: stay away from political commentary. On this one you’re generally never much more than about on a par with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. At best.
And one of the most vile assertions Hayden makes in his truly atrocious piece is that ‘She surely agreed with….”
First, Kingman Brewster was a sententious fraud, desperate to establish “street cred” with rebellious students but otherwise way off the mark. He proved disastrous vor Yale and almost for America, too, with his spouting of nonsense which aimed at impeding law enforcement from doing its job throughout America. Second, Hayden has the nerve to assume that Hillary Clinton (and I’m no fan of hers) would then have “shared” his and Brewster’s curiously blinkered view of the Black Panthers/ Long ago, however, and I expect Hillary realized this even if Hayden’s own decrept mind will never similarly do so, the Panthers were exposed by many (including such insiders at the time of their greatest populairity as David Horowitz and even the gleefully gun-happy himself Earl Anthony) in the years afterward as merel murderous, drug-dealing, weapons-toting thugs. Who, as it turns out, were almost invariably really guilty of the things law enforcers had accused them of, including (but hardly liimited to) the murder of informants within their own ranks which sparked the New Haven trial Hayden references.
That Hayden still apparently embraces the Panthers’ violence and cocaine-fueled nihilism and finds it a logical response to America’s social problems is sad enough. That he takes Senator Clinto to task for lacking in supportive displays of that embrace is outrageous. But hardly surprisiing in the irrelevant, far-left pages of “The Nation,” of course.
Jeffrey, if you meant to offer this crap up in support of your own backing of Obama, you really should be ashamed of your dumb self for this one.
lion: “the Panthers were exposed by many (including such insiders at the time of their greatest populairity as David Horowitz and even the gleefully gun-happy himself Earl Anthony) in the years afterward as merel murderous, drug-dealing, weapons-toting thugs.”
So was the CIA. What’s your point?
“Who, as it turns out, were almost invariably really guilty of the things law enforcers had accused them of,”
Except for that guy who got 16 years for being black…
lionsfan wrote:
I keep noting this, you keep ignoring my advice, Jeffrey, but here it is again: stay away from political commentary. On this one you’re generally never much more than about on a par with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. At best.
Sounds like the scolding Tony Snow gave Taibbi on REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER months back.
“On this one you’re generally never much more than about on a par with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. At best.”
Hey, lionsfan… do you think you could qualify this insult maybe two or three more times? I think there’s still room in it for a “perhaps” and an “I could be wrong, but…”
How can anyone defend that racist Wright?
If a white guy’s pastor was a KKK grand wizard would the press be defending him??
Sigh… this is too much an idealized debate, forgetting the practicalities.
Reality #1:
Any black politician in Chicago, Atlanta, or any other hub needs the backing of the big churches when he’s starting out.
Reality #2:
Hilary is only “attacking” Obama because she wants to win this election. The whole “Hilary is immoral” because she’s capitalizing on a political land mine, is ridiculous. ANY person in any election that is spending $100 Million+ will of course take advantage of these slip-ups
Reality #3:
ALL huge Christian congregations say crazy things… all of them. I grew up in North Carolina and because I had a best friend who was a faithful southern baptist, I went to these several thousand-strong southern baptist churches and revivals.
There are always preachers saying “AIDS is a punishment for homsexuality,” and “the college espousing evolution is God’s enemy” and the like. Hell, I remember going to a post-graduation service, i.e. a gathering of local Christian teens who had just graduated high school and were going on to college, and it was essentially an “avoid the evils of liberal colleges” day, with people getting worked up about all the “enemies of god” to be found in colleges.
Look, people who BELIEVE, and I take advantage of the people’s fears related to God and Godlessness, say crazy, “hate-filled” things all the time.
That’s just life, folks. This whole Rev. Wright issue is a dead fish… for both sides. It’s non-issue, as both Obama’s presence in his congregation and Hilary’s attacks for him being there are utterly predictable, utterly irrelevant as to their qualifications in this election.
Spot-on, well-reasoned, correct and not going to make a damn bit of difference.
Hillary’s core fanbase are largely people like her and of her era, who will “forgive” her for a radical youth in the same way – or, rather BECAUSE – they “forgive” THEMSELVES for the mangy hair, the grass and the Viet Cong flags of their distant past. Obama’s radical ties, whatever you may think of them, are contemporary, and Hillary’s Boomer-base is reacting to them in the same way they react to THEIR kids’ radical icons, music and drug experimentation.
Dave: How many times did Republicans defend Rush Limbaugh?
DZ, the Panthers were as I painted them above. There’s very liittle “more” to their story.
And “my elbow,” there’s similarly little need for qualification when taking on Jeffrey Wells’ sad pretensions to being a political commentator.
lionsfan: The panthers are no different than any white militia group.
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