This was posted on facebook as a comment to a WSJ piece on her campaign strategy.
Dick Morris, former political adviser to President Bill Clinton: If you happen to see the Bill Clinton five-minute TV ad for Hillary in which he introduces the commercial by saying he wants to share some things we may not know about Hillary’s background, beware as I was there for most of their presidency and know them better than just about anyone. I offer a few corrections:
Bill says: “In law school Hillary worked on legal services for the poor.”
Facts are: Hillary’s main extra-curricular activity in ‘Law School’ was helping the Black Panthers, on trial in Connecticut for torturing and killing a ‘Federal Agent.’ She went to Court every day as part of a Law student monitoring committee trying to spot civil rights violations and develop grounds for appeal.
Was this true ? Snopes has a sort of rebuttal.
Hillary Rodham (as she was known then) wasn’t a lawyer then, either: She was a Yale law student, and like many of her politically-minded fellow law students who saw the latest “trial of the century” taking place just outside the main gate of their school, she took advantage of an opportunity to be involved in the case in a minor, peripheral way by organizing other students to help the American Civil Liberties Union monitor the trials for civil rights violations. Her tangential participation in the trial in no way helped “free” Black Panthers tried for the murder of Alex Rackley
So the description credited to Morris is correct.
Bill says: “Hillary spent a year after graduation working on a Children’s rights project for poor kids.”
Facts are: Hillary interned with Bob Truehaft, the head of the California Communist Party. She met Bob when he represented the Panthers and traveled all the way to San Francisco to take an internship with him.
Another “rebuttal” by the misnamed “Politifact.” They say her past was not so radical.
In 1971, Clinton did spend a summer interning as a law clerk for Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.
And senior partner Treuhaft had once been active in the American Communist Party, though he was not “head of the California Communist Party” as Morris claimed in his article. Investigated and harassed by McCarthyites in 1950s, Treuhaft was listed by the House Un-American Activities Committee as one of the most dangerously subversive lawyers in the country, according to his 2001 obituary in the Times of London. But he became disillusioned with the party and left it in 1958, before Clinton started her internship with the firm.
So, slight exaggeration. Half right.
Bill says: “Hillary could have written her own job ticket, but she turned down all the lucrative job offers.”
Facts are: She flunked the D.C. bar exam, ‘Yes’, flunked it, it is a matter of record, and only passed the Arkansas bar. She had no job offers in Arkansas, ‘None’, and only got hired by the University of Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville because Bill was already teaching there. She did not join the prestigious Rose Law Firm until Bill became Arkansas Attorney General and was made a partner only after he was elected Arkansas Governor.
Snopes, again, is on the case.
As journalist Carl Bernstein chronicled in his Hillary Clinton biography A Woman in Charge, much to Hillary’s disappointment she received the news later that year that although she had passed the Arkansas bar exam, she had failed the one in Washington — a piece of information that wasn’t publicly revealed until thirty years later:
So, TRUE.
Bill says: “President Carter appointed Hillary to the Legal Services Board of Directors and she became its Chairman.”
Facts are: The appointment was in exchange for Bill’s support for Carter in his 1980 primary against Ted Kennedy. Hillary then became chairman in a coup in which she won a majority away from Carter’s choice to be chairman.
Bill says: “She served on the board of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital.”
Facts are: Yes, she did. But her main board activity, not mentioned by Bill, was to sit on the Walmart Board of Directors, for a substantial fee. She was silent about their labor and health care practices.
Bill says: “Hillary didn’t succeed at getting health care for all Americans in 1994 but she kept working at it and helped to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that provides five million children with health insurance.”
Facts are: Hillary had nothing to do with creating CHIP. It was included in the budget deal between Clinton and Republican Majority Leader Senator Trent Lott. I know; I helped to negotiate the deal. The money came half from the budget deal and half from the Attorney Generals’ tobacco settlement. Hillary had nothing to do with either source of funds.
Fact Check says, “Mostly True.”
Bill says: “Hillary was the face of America all over the World.”
Facts are: Her visits were part of a program to get her out of town so that Bill would not appear weak by feeding stories that Hillary was running the White House. Her visits abroad were entirely touristic and symbolic and there was no substantive diplomacy on any of them.
Bill says: “Hillary was an excellent Senator who kept fighting for Children’s and Women’s issues.”
Facts are: Other than totally meaningless legislation like changing the names on courthouses and post offices, she has passed only four substantive pieces of legislation. One set up a national park in Puerto Rico. A second provided respite care for family members helping their relatives through Alzheimer’s or other conditions. And two were routine bills to aid 911 victims and responders which were sponsored by the entire N.Y. delegation. Presently she is trying to have the US memorialize Woodstock.
Here is what bothers me more than anything else about Hillary Clinton. She has done everything possible to weaken the President and our Country (that’s you and me) when it comes to the ‘War on Terror’.
1. She wants to close GITMO and move the combatants to the USA where they would have access to our legal system.
2. She wants to eliminate the monitoring of suspected Al Qaeda phone calls to/from the USA.
3. She wants to grant constitutional rights to enemy combatants captured on the battlefield.
4. She wants to eliminate the monitoring of money transfers between suspected Al Qaeda cells and supporters in the USA.
5. She wants to eliminate the type of interrogation tactics used by the Military & CIA where coercion might be used when questioning known terrorists even though such tactics might save American lives.
One cannot think of a single ‘Bill’, Hillary has introduced or a single comment she has made that would tend to strengthen our Country in the ‘War on Terror’. But, one can think of a lot of comments she has made that weaken our Country and makes it a more dangerous situation for all of us. Bottom line: She goes hand in hand with the ACLU on far too many issues where common sense is abandoned.
Share this with everyone you know, ask them to prove Dick Morris wrong. Think about it – he’s (Dick Morris) said all of this openly, thus if he were not truthful he’d be liable for ‘Defamation of Character’ !
And you better believe Hillary would sue him.
Her winning in 2016 means the final death knell for America! Her whole public life has been a LIE.
By Dick Morris, former political adviser to President Bill Clinton
I pretty much agree with Morris here. He doesn’t even mention her role in the Rose Law Firm billing records matter,
I’m hoping we’ll be hearing a lot more of this in the days and months ahead. Benghazi, Alinsky, Mena, etc. There’s so much, with a bit of luck the vortex will suck some other detritus down the drain as well.
Of note, Clinton ‘evolved’ on her Senate vote for the 2002 AUMF by blatantly misrepresenting the AUMF and the legal-factual basis for Operation Iraqi Freedom: Explanation.
Panic time is here for Democrats.
It’s one thing for a guy like me or Glenn or Don Surber or Even Rush Limbaugh to tell Democrats that they are in trouble it’s another thing to be told this by Nate silver the day after the Democrat convention and a week of the MSM lionizing all they did and said.
(Could someone fix the formatting? At several points, I can’t tell what was written by Michael Kennedy and which parts he’s quoting or from whom.)
Some Republican establishment types continue to play the role of barnacles on Trump’s hull. Powerline used to be a dependable source. Now most posts have some sort of snarky Trump reference. Likewise Mark Levin’s radio show. As a result, I’ve stopped reading Powerline and listening to Levin. It remains to be seen how damaging this will be to Trump and how much it will help Hillary.
The entire comment above is a quote from the link.
Powerline is starting to realize that Trump is for real and could win.
Patterico is hopeless and I am avoiding the blog until after the election. It is usually one of my favorites. Patrick has gone overboard on Cruz and may require an intervention,.
Althouse has lots of lefty commenters who have gotten very personal and nasty lately so I have taken a vacation form commenting there although I read most of her posts.
The text on comments here is very similar to italics, which I use to illustrate long quotes. Short quotes I use ” quotation marks.”