Hillary Clinton Condemned By New York Times

The Black Star News has been in the forefront of condemning the Clintons’ ugly race-baiting and religious bigotry; we published one of the earliest editorials attacking the Clintons’ divisive tactics as early as December 2007; The Washington Post took note and mentioned one of our editorials. Unlike The New York Times, the Washington Post has been more critical about the Clintons’ apartheid strategies.

[Black Star News Editorial]

 

The New York Times in an editorial today, “The Low Road to Victory,” condemns Senator Hillary Clinton for her ugly campaign tactics.
 

It’s spot on. It may have come a day late and a dollar short.


The Black Star News
has excoriated Senator Clinton due to her ugly tactics for months.

For several months now, since the very beginning of this presidential campaign, Senator Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill Clinton have used the most despicable, reprehensible, crude, ugly and dishonest tactics: The Clintons used race-baiting, by appealing to some white peoples’ fears about Black people, to tarnish Senator Barack Obama; the Clintons used religious bigotry, when they sent a photo of Senator Barack Obama showing him in the ceremonial Somali turban, which he donned when he visited Kenya, to falsely imply that he was a Muslim and possibly a terrorist sympathizer; Senator Clinton’s acolyte insinuated that Obama might have been a drug dealer in his youth; the Clintons questioned Obama’s allegiance, as when Bill Clinton said only his wife and Republican candidate John McCain were true patriots; the Clintons undermined Obama’s campaign in a most treasonous manner, as when Senator Clinton said Republican opponent McCain would be a better commander in chief, making it clear to voters that she and McCain were the only white candidates remaining in the race, although she disguised this race-baiting with the rubric of “experience”; and, most recently, they turned a careless wording of facts about how people who lost their jobs felt resentful to mischaracterize Obama as an “elitist” Black man who looked down upon the white working class—-or as we say in the ‘hood, “an uppity nigger.”

Where was The New York Times all these months?

The Black Star News has been in the forefront of condemning the Clintons’ ugly race-baiting and religious bigotry; we published one of the earliest editorials attacking the Clintons’ divisive tactics as early as December 2007; The Washington Post took note and mentioned one of our editorials. Unlike The New York Times, The Washington Post has been more critical about the Clintons’ apartheid strategies. The Washington Post is clearly a quality newspaper; maybe that’s why it earned six Pulitzers at this year’s awards compared to the Times two. 

Where was The New York Times all these months?


The New York Times
had been seduced by Senator Hillary Clinton’s smooth talk. The newspaper did not want to believe that someone who had devoted 35 years to public service, mostly as a liberal progressive politics, could turn into a political monster when the ultimate goal became the quest for ultimate power–the White House.

Yet, the newspaper recognized that Clinton was dangerous and that’s why it condemned her for campaign’s race baiting, in an editorial on January 17, long after ours was published and mentioned in The Washington Post.

“By the time the campaigns got to New Hampshire, the Clinton team was panicking. Mrs. Clinton had to win or risk being out of the primaries entirely,” the Times wrote, in its January 17 editorial, criticizing Clinton’s race-baiting. “It was clearly her side that first stoked the race and gender issue. Mrs. Clinton mentioned in a debate in New Hampshire that a woman president would be a change for America. It was an offhand comment, and obviously true. But the next day, at events we attended, Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates were pushing hard the line that a woman president would be ‘the real’ change. Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.”

This editorial was quickly nullified on January 25, before The New York primaries, when the Times suffered journalistic amnesia, turned around and endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton. At that time, we published a front-page editorial criticizing the Times for its cowardice and lack of principle; we asked how racism and race-baiting could be rewarded with an endorsement.

What was the Times thinking? That someone who had employed race-baiting, would suddenly change after she was rewarded with an editorial? And what was the Times message to America and the rest of the world? That someone who may be racist, and had definitely employed race-baiting for political gains, may not necessarily be a “bad” person and was still worthy of a Times editorial?

Quite naturally, Clinton became more vicious, especially after she had lost 11 contests in a row to Obama, heading into Ohio and Texas.

That’s when she escalated her vicious attacks against Obama, and his message of hope. She deployed a lowly fear-mongering commercial–the so called “red phone” advertisement: whom would you trust to pick up the phone at 3 AM? The fear-mongering won her Ohio; she also won the Texas primary component of the Texas vote, although when all the ballots were counted later, including the caucuses, Obama did win more delegates.

Now this past week, in Pennsylvania, Clinton shocked observers by managing to introduce by far the ugliest commercial of the campaign. After Clinton saw her 20-point lead disappear into thin air, as Obama pulled within five points in the polls, she employed her own version of the “nuclear” ad. The Clinton commercial used images from the Pearl Harbor attack, 9/11 and Osama bin Laden.

Not even Rudolph Giuliani, who was regarded as the most hawkish of all the Republican candidates and had mentioned his alleged 9/11 heroism at any given opportunity, to his credit, used such a desperate commercial, when he realized that his opponents, including McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee, were going to defeat him.

 

So was the ugliness and politics of win-at-any-cost worth the “victory” in Pennsylvania?

We are happy to our larger sized “colleagues” in media, The York Times, finally come to its senses today.

“The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it,” the Times declares in its editorial.

“Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.”

The newspaper added: “On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,’ the narrator intoned.’”

“If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: ‘We would be able to totally obliterate them.’”

Not even Ronald Reagan, widely derided as a clueless president who believed in cowboy diplomacy –much like George Bush to an extent– had ever made such a reckless statement.

It is bitterly disappointing that it took The New York Times so long to publish this editorial. Should McCain win in the fall, he should send a box of expensive wine to the Clintons and to the Times’ editorial writers.

There are nine contests left; 2,025 delegates are required for nomination and Senator Clinton can’t surpass Obama’s insurmontable lead in delegates of 1,681 to 1,544.

We have one more advice for Senator Clinton: Please pack it.

 

 

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