The left seeks to discredit the only person in America standing in the way of Barack Obama and John McCain

In an all-out attack on Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, a reporter by the unlikely name Madonna Lebling claims that Hillary is a hypocrite for criticizing Barack Obama over his association with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. Over and over the article levels the same accusation, derived from interviews with Hillary’s leftist associates in the last 1960s and early 1970s, that Hillary worked for a left-wing law firm, that she was involved in the civil rights and anti-war activism of that time, that as a Yale law student she attended a rally on behalf of Huey Newton. But there’s a little problem here, Miss Lebling: there is nothing in your catalogue of Hillary’s actions and associations circa 1970 that remotely compares with Obama’s starting his political career by giving a speech at the home of the Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, and later serving with him on the board of a left wing foundation, and having a continuous association with him, even after Ayers repeated, in recent years, that he wished he had committed more terrorism back then. So Hillary is not attacking Obama for something Hillary has done, and therefore she is not being a hypocrite. Lebling is either a leftist hit artist, or lacks basic thinking abilities, or both.

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Greco writes:

Didn’t FrontPageMagazine cover this same ground a month ago?

LA replies

Ok, and is there anything in that article that makes Hillary hypocritical for criticizing Obama over the Ayers connection?

Greco replies:

Bill Clinton’s pardoning of two convicted Weather Underground terrorists comes close if you ask me.

LA replies:

Ok. Point taken.

And also pardoning Puerto Rican terrorists.

Iffy questions here, however:

1. Is she fairly considered responsible for her husband’s decisions as president? Notwithstanding her claims to have been major player in that administration, in reality she did not pardon those terrorists. Yet at the same time she was a major player in it and does identify herself with it. Further, given that the pardons were considered improper by every responsible entity in the government, yet Clinton went ahead with them, they were highly problematical at least. Therefore she is not in a strong position for criticizing Obama.

2. However, even if, for the sake of argument, we say that she is tied to the pardons, pardoning terrorists or other criminals from jail who have served long prison terms is not the same as being personally associated with and politically allied with terrorists or criminals.

3. However, with all the above factors considered, the bottom line is that, given those outrageous pardons, she was in a very weak position to criticize Obama.

But this does not let Lebling off the hook, since, as far as I remember, she did not bring out the facts about the pardons in her article. So she did not prove the charge of hypocrisy that she made and quoted others making. It’s surprising that Lebling did not mention the pardons, since that would have made her case. It further supports my statement that she demonstrated poor thinking abilities in this article.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 22, 2008 04:05 PM | Send