On Friday, Bill Clinton admitted he was almost sorry about arguing with Black Lives Matter protesters this week over his and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hand in creating America’s mass incarceration problem. However, as Brandy once sang, almost doesn’t count.
During an appearance at Penn State, the former POTUS pulled out his best folksy charm to make up for how racist and condescending he sounded just 24 hours before in Philadelphia. Via NBC News:
“Now I like and believe in protests. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t cause I engaged in some when I was a kid,” Clinton told a crowd of more than 1,000 on the campus of Penn State Behrend. “But I never thought I should drown anybody else out. And I confess, maybe it’s just a sign of old age, but it bothers me now when that happens.”
“So I did something yesterday in Philadelphia. I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as an example of the danger threatening our country,” the former president continued. “I rather vigorously defended my wife, as I am wont to do, and I realized, finally, I was talking past [the protester] the way she was talking past me. We gotta stop that in this country. We gotta listen to each other again.”
Then he intimated that he and the protestors were all in the same gang and once again tried to contextualize why he signed the incarceration-happy crime bill in the first place.
“Danger” is an interesting word for the ex-president to use. What’s really dangerous is a system stacked against people of color, and a country with a history of putting them behind bars at higher rates than their white counterparts for the same crimes. Clinton’s estimation of what’s “dangerous,” though, apparently refers to his inability to be more comfortable when protestors call him on his presidential record.
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