Ignorance Or Ignorance?

By Kleinheider Posted on May 23, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Both Aunt B. and Sean Braisted remark on a recent statement by Hillary Clinton on why she remains in the race for President:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing the idea of dropping out.

Braisted points out the historical inaccuracies implicit in the statement. Aunt B. thinks that the implication was something else entirely.

Personally, I’m not seeing what a whole lot of others are seeing. If you watch the whole tape and imagine yourself in the Q&A, I don’t see how you can think Clinton is saying, “I’m staying in ’cause, well, you never know.”

It’s inane. I’m not saying she’s never had the thought. I’m not saying she’s never prayed to the eight pound, six ounce, newborn baby Jesus that it happen. But she was not making that reference here, she was simply saying that Bobby Kennedy was still in it in June when he got shot, which she remembers and many remember because he got shot.

You can hate on Hillary for a lot of things and there are plenty of examples of her campaign race-baiting. On this one, she’s clean.

The fact that she is apologizing, however, makes her look guilty. Yes, she is apologizing to the Kennedys, not Obama, but that will make no difference. The talk will be that she implied she was waiting for someone to ice Obama and then apologized.

One should be quick to apologize when one does something wrong or hurtful but this is just silly. If she was stupid for saying something, it wasn’t for what she said above, it was for saying she was sorry for explaining her decision in the context of history (as she understands it).

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Tags: Barack Obama, Bobby Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, James Earl Ray, parsing languague, Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Kennedy