A week ago, in poling fun at Hillary’s tin-ear Southern accent, I criticized two more serious transgressions: looking out across our country and claiming to see that the right to vote is “under siege,” and then claiming that the country owes the blessing of her current candidacy to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which actually had other things in mind.
Now comes Robert Novak to tell us that in the same speech I criticized above Hillary also engaged in a another bit of mindbendng autobiographical revisionism.
Speaking at Selma’s First Baptist Church on the 42nd anniversary of the “bloody Sunday” freedom march there, Sen. Clinton declared: “As a young girl [age 16], I had the great privilege of hearing Dr. King speak in Chicago. The year was 1963. My youth minister from our church took a few of us down on a cold January night to hear [King]. . . . And he called on us, he challenged us that evening to stay awake during the great revolution that the civil rights pioneers were waging on behalf of a more perfect union.”
Young Hillary Rodham answered that challenge the next year as the 17-year-old class president at Maine East High School in the Chicago suburbs. She described herself in her memoirs as “an active Young Republican” and “a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit.” As a politically attuned honor student, she must have known that Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators who joined Southern Democratic segregationists opposing the historic voting rights act of 1964 inspired by King.
Actually, Novak himself committed a bit of revisionism: the “historic voting rights act of 1964” was really the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 1964 saw the passage of the historic civil rights act, an act that based on both its clear text and intent would have barred the sort of racial preferences Hillary and others now support if it had been properly interpreted by the courts.
Lest a visitor dropping by think I’m taking sides in the competition for the Democratic nomination, let me close by noting that, hard as this is to believe, somehow Barack Obama has been allowed by a docile pack of media acolytes to avoid answering the question I put to him three weeks ago: “whether he believes his daughters deserve preferential treatment because of the color of their (or his) skin.”
This question clearly shows that you are a racist and that you must make abject public apologies around the clock, prior to be sent to re-ed.. er sensitivity training camp.