Smooth-Talking Bill Clinton Just Can’t Seem To Keep His Story Straight (VIDEO)

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Liberal America
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Bill Clinton has apologized for sparring with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia on Thursday. The protesters called out Hillary Clinton on her comments regarding young black men who had joined gangs, referring to them as ‘super predators,’ back in 1996 in defense of the 1994 crime bill signed by Bill Clinton, who was president at the time.

Rather, Bill’s offered a rather backhanded apology that is really more of a non-apology with a demeaning insult thrown in.

“’I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,’ Mr. Clinton said Friday of the Black Lives Matter protesters who had accused him and Hillary Clinton of supporting policies that devastated black communities. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.'”

Clinton defended that bill and Hillary for supporting it while making comments that demonized young black men  – instead of truly addressing the underlying causes of disparate poverty in communities of color – with all the fervor of a man who truly believes it was a great and necessary piece of legislation.

“‘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 street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens; she didn’t. She didn’t! You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.'”

Clinton then went on to rattle off all the wonderful things about the bill that Black Lives Matter protesters were ignoring.

“‘I had an assault weapons ban in it, I had money for inner city kids for out-of-school activities, we had 110,000 police officers so we could put people on the street and not in these military vehicles and the police would look like the people they were policing. We did all that.'”

Here comes the real twist to this story, though. 2015’s Bill Clinton completely disagrees with most of what 2016’s Bill Clinton just said. In fact, 2015’s Bill Clinton admitted that the bill “made mass incarceration worse,” and it’s both common knowledge and statistically proven that communities of color have suffered the worst as a result of mass incarceration.

“‘In that bill, there were longer sentences. And most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend,’ Clinton said. ‘And that was overdone. We were wrong about that. That percentage of it, we were wrong about.’ He added: ‘The good news is we had the biggest drop in crime in history. The bad news is we had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long.'”
That “good news” about a drop in crime as a result of the bill is misleading, as well. The Washington Post explains that:
“If Clinton and Congress reflected the punitive mindset of the American people, what they didn’t know was that soaring murder rates and violent crime had already begun what would become a long downward turn, according to criminologists and policymakers.”
Nicholas Turner, president of the non-profit Vera Group, an organization that researches crime policy, says that:

“‘Criminal justice policy was very much driven by public sentiment and a political instinct to appeal to the more negative punitive elements of public sentiment rather than to be driven by the facts,’ he said.

And that public sentiment called for filling up the nation’s prisons, a key part of the 1994 crime bill.”

Instead of “looking for good television,” maybe those protesters are actually upset about a bill that even Clinton admits went too far and researchers say was useless and devastating to the black lives it affected.
Even 2016’s Hillary Clinton has apologized for those controversial comments made by 1996’s Hillary Clinton, especially since she’s depending on voters of color and echoing Bernie Sanders on criminal justice reform while campaigning in black communities.
“Clinton decided to offer an apology for using that ‘super-predator’ and ‘brought to heel’ language.  In the 1990s both were part of a relatively popular but now largely discredited theory about rising youth crime.”

All of this makes Bill Clinton’s defense of the bill and his wife’s involvement with it that much more confusing. Was the bill well-intentioned, but failed miserably? Were the good parts of the bill so good that we should all just forgive and forget how devastating it has been to communities of color and the perception of young black men as dangerous, soulless thugs?

Clinton blamed Joe Biden, who headed the committee that wrote the bill, for the increased sentencing provisions in it, since Biden insisted that Republicans would never pass it without those provisions. Is Bill Clinton saying that he routinely signed bills he knew would hurt people of color simply to appease the GOP and that Hillary supported that?

None of these explanations bode well for Hillary’s campaign, and these questions are guaranteed to be raised throughout her run for the Democratic nomination.

 

Featured image screengrab via YouTube

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