Skip to main content

Talk to the hand

By



We haven't heard much from Big Bill on the campaign trail, but he ran into a little war of words with Black Lives Matter in Philly last night.  The guy is sadly a shadow of his former self, no longer able to make the stirring pitches that were his hallmark on the campaign trail in '92 and '96.  The guy could promise you the moon and make you believe it.  Now, he is just a hoarse cheerleader for his wife.

Surprisingly, there hasn't been much talk of Bill as "First Lady."  You figure he will have an influential role in the White House if Hillary is elected, something that eluded him 8 years ago.  The two have had plenty of time to go over what their roles would be if they got the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. again.  Would Hillary give him a cabinet position or make him Secretary to the United Nations, as Frank did Claire in House of Cards?  We can only speculate.

Bill seems to have had a change of heart on many issues, but not his signature crime bill.  This was what BLM protesters were trying to call his attention to before he compared them to thugs and basically said they weren't worthy enough to be named in the same breath as John Lewis.  Funny thing is that Lewis himself has been supportive of Black Lives Matter, although he has questioned their tactics at times, preferring they not act like firecrackers.

It was the 1994 crime bill that led to massive incarceration like we had never seen before in this country.  Clinton claimed at the time there wasn't much he could do to soften it, as the Republicans had made it one of the major points of their Contract with America.  He strong-armed the Congressional Black Caucus, including John Lewis, into accepting his lesser-of-two-evils version, saying the alternative was much more draconian.  Maybe so, but when Democrats elected him in 1992 they expected him to fight for Democratic principles, not blithely abandon them as he did throughout his tenure.

Any study of the crime bill notes the terrible mistakes that were made, particularly when it came to mandatory sentencing.  Obama has insisted on the end to mandatory sentences as part of a major overhaul of our penal system, but that is not likely to be accomplished this year.  That leaves it up to the next President to address the issue.  We certainly can't expect a Republican president to take on the penal system.  They seem to think everything is hunky dory the way it is, so that leaves it up to Hillary or Bernie to tackle this thorny issue.

Hillary has said she would dismantle parts of the crime bill, ending private prisons and incarceration for low-level offenders.  But, she really hasn't addressed the systemic racism that exists in our law enforcement system, which is the prime motivating issue that drives Black Lives Matter.  Bill didn't answer this question either, preferring to talk over his protesters rather than listen to them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more