Hillary's non-stop shuck-and-jive

I recall reading that Hillary Rodham Clinton was a graduate of Yale School of Law and a partner in the prestigious Rose Law Firm, in Arkansas.

So, it was a little surprising to see her say this while pandering at a job-training center in California:

Clinton…said she understood borrowers who didn’t read their mortgages. “I’ve got to tell you, I skim my mortgage papers. I didn’t read them. I didn’t know there was all that fine print and those pages and pages of legalese,” she said.

[emphasis mine – admin]

So, after – by her count – 35 years of public life, Hillary has “found her voice,” and her voice is full of shit.

Hillary wants to be president so badly that she’ll even pretend to be stupider than the meanest caricature of George W. Bush if that’s what it takes. I read that quote and wondered if she’d thought to put on buckteeth and her ghastly hillbilly twang while she unloaded that disingenuous bit of horse manure.

The only politician I can think of who is more manure-laden than Hillary is her husband; the amount of it they shoveled this weekend alone could fill a truck.

Couple all that with these racial gaffes. Once upon a time Mrs. Clinton would pander to the African-American voters, declaring “I don’t feel no ways tired” (try listening to that today – it’s shudder-inducing) and “you know what I’m talkin’ about,” Lately, Mrs. Clinton, in her new voice, seemed to minimize the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and ascribe the success of the civil rights movement to President Lyndon Johnson.

Then her husband, in an angry rant, seemed to call Barack Obama’s whole candidacy a “fairy tale”. I don’t really understand how that is racist, unless Clinton is being construed as saying “a black man cannot be president,” but it seems to me you have to want to take it that way. Either way, the “fairy tale” remark was received as “racist” in some quarters.

And then neither Clinton had a problem with Andrew Cuomo using the term “shuck and jive” to describe Obama’s campaign.

[Cuomo] added later, “You have to sit down with 10 people in a living room. You can’t shuck and jive at a news conference; you can’t just put off reporters, because you have real people looking at you, saying ‘answer the question.'”

The 1994 book “Juba to Jive, a Dictionary of African-American Slang,” says “shuck and jive” dates back to the 1870s and was an “originally southern ‘Negro’ expression for clowning, lying, pretense.”

Cuomo has “clarified” his remarks, saying that he was talking about the art of politics within these primaries, and not about any particular candidate.

Okay. I doubt I’m alone in wondering how much sub-conscious bigotry is being unearthed by Obama’s candidacy – but that’s for another post. Certainly, since Obama is a Democrat, we will not see the sort of racist cartoons and offensive photoshopped images the left have offered up to depict Condoleeza Rice or Michael Steele, so that’s a mercy, anyhow.

Note: I do not think Hillary using the term “spadework” in relation to Obama was a conscious or unconscious racial remark. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a spade is just a garden tool. But I can understand why some would wonder about it.

Of course any racial gaffe or percieved gaffe is being explained as the Obama camp picking on Hillary, whose new voice comes with an E-Z Sniffle Victim attachment that really works!

It’s quite possible that the Obama campaign is race baiting – but it seems to me the Clinton camp is making it rather easy for them to do so. For instance, Hillary’s minions minimizing Obama as your imaginary hip black friend, are dancing on a very, very thin wire.

The manure shoveling by Hillary is not limited to mortgage contracts or racial gaffes, either. She continued this weekend on Meet the Press, regarding Iraq. Here’s Mrs. Clinton in her newly modulated tone:

The point of the surge was to quickly move the Iraqi government and Iraqi people. That is only now beginning to happen, and I believe in large measure because the Iraqi government, they watch us, they listen to us. I know very well that they follow everything that I say. And my commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009 is a big factor, as it is with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, those of us on the Democratic side. It is a big factor in pushing the Iraqi government to finally do what they should have been doing all along. [emphasis mine – admin]

So, it’s not possible that the Iraqi people were reassured that President Bush meant what he said – that the US would not abandon them – and began to believe that they might actually hope and work for their own success. Nah. It’s not possible that General Petraeus was actually telling the truth to congress and running the action well. Nah. It’s because the Iraqi leadership follows everything she says. And she says so many things.

Here, for example, she’s telling Code Pink how important it is to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and to go it alone if necessary. Sorry that the video is not embeddable but do watch it; Clinton begins to speak at 6:34).

I wonder how she’s supposed to be a Commander-in-Chief when she publicly doubts General Petraeus’ testimonies and is so quick to ascribe any success there as only coming from a cagey observation of politicians half a world away.

As William Kristol – who notes here that Mrs. Clinton’s surge timeline is off writes:

So the Democratic Party, having proclaimed that the war is lost and having sought to withdraw U.S. troops, deserves credit for any progress that may have been achieved in Iraq.

That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of … George W. Bush. The horror!

In case you missed the consistent re-visionist tendencies: Martin Luther King’s work is minimized in favor of LBJ, and George W. Bush’s (and his troops’) work is minimized in favor of herself and the Democrats.

Actually, this assertion by Hillary is worse than simply her being ungenerous to the president. In making her claim, Hillary helps to obscure the triumph of the human spirit on display in Iraq, and that diminishes all of us.

Really, Iraq is a story about the triumphant resiliency of the human spirit – the spirit of the troops who believed in the mission, the spirit of the Iraqi people to emerge from their decades-long shadowlives, even the spirit of a president and a prime-minister willing to risk careers and legacies in order to keep faith with the Iraqi people, something that used to matter.

With the right leader, the story of Iraq could be one that uplifts and ennobles the nation. Hillary is not that leader. All she manages to do is block out any bright light from Iraq’s successes, like the moon eclipsing the sun.

Oh, and…she shovels and shovels.

And shovels. H/T Gatewaypundit.

Ann Althouse says Obama and Hillary are both playing race games, and points out that – oh, yeah, Hillary said politics isn’t a game; it’s about people.

Gateway Pundit is trying to keep track of who is playing which card.

America Magazine looks at how and why Hillary blundered on Martin Luther King.

Rick Moran examines living and dying by identity politics.

Don Surber is also looking at the unraveling of identity politics, and wonders why Dr. King’s good advice has been ignored. I’ve wondered that too.

Sister Toldjah calls it The Hillary/Obama wars

Tom Elia is hiding under the desk.