An angry Corner reader writes:
Are your standards of truth any higher than Michael Moore’s or Ann Coulter’s. Please explain how the following comment of yours is not a lie through misrepresentation:
“Great. First, Clinton (Bill, that is) speaks at Georgetown (where I went undergrad) to blame September 11th on slavery”
You will not find anywhere a statement by Bill Clinton that blames 9-11 on slavery. Nowhere. Why do you believe it’s fine to make up derogatory falsehoods in pursuit of your conservative political agenda? Do you consider this an example of intellectual honesty? If so, then shame on you.
My response:
What Clinton said at GU on November 7, 2001 was:
“Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today. Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.”
I thought it was incredibly inappropriate for a former President to be reminding us of the shortcomings of our country’s history while we were still numb and not even into mourning our losses from the horrible unprovoked attacks on our nation’s civilians and government personnel. To bundle us into the history of terror 57 days after the attacks was plain wrong no matter what he was reaching for. And I resigned from a University committee on which I served the next day because of those remarks