Hillary Clinton's Bold Statement On Race

Click here for an article by Karoli at Crooks & Liars entitled "Hillary Clinton: America's Long Struggle With Race Is Far From Finished." It's about a speech Clinton gave to the U.S. Conference of Mayors soon after the murders of nine black people in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. There are presently 16 Republican candidates for president: You won't hear a speech remotely like this from any of them. Follow the link to the article, or listen to the speech here:


I decided to check out the right-wing sites to see how they would spin Clinton's speech. First stop, Red State, a blog edited and run by prominent far-right commentator Erick Erickson. I was distracted by the first headline: "Hillary Clinton: Self-aggrandizing Grifter," by the appropriately named Red State front-page blogger, streiff. It was an attack on the Clinton Foundation, making the preposterous claim that 90% of the Foundation's money is spent "on things like salaries, travel, etc. rather than actually doing something useful."

This is a lie, but it has considerable traction with the far right. It is thoroughly debunked by FactCheck.org in this article -- at Newsmax, of all places! This article is a rebuttal of essentially the same anti-Clinton charges made by Republican dark-horse presidential candidate Carly Fiorina. According to the article:

The bottom line, according to the online information watchdog FactCheck.org: "Fiorina is simply wrong."

Fiorina is referring only to the amount of money donated by the Clinton Foundation to outside charities, ignoring the fact that most of the Foundation's charitable work is performed in-house.

The independent philanthropy watchdog CharityWatch analyzed Foundation funding and concluded that about 89 percent of it went to charity — higher than the 75 percent considered the industry standard.

Streiff's article is mostly about how Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton received speaking fees from a particular children's charity; Rice was paid less and donated half back to the charity. He finishes with this delightful paragraph:

This is the irony of how women are viewed and treated in the Democrat party. When you have a truly accomplished woman like a Condoleeza Rice or a Sarah Palin [!] who works hard, often against significant resistance, and succeeds without any federal agency weighing in to smooth the way they are demonized and ridiculed. Then you get a unremarkable, though obvious vicious and grasping, harpy like Hillary Clinton whose position in the world is due solely to having occasional sex with Bill Clinton… which doesn’t differentiate her from a lot of other women… and she is a role model and a spokesman for women’s issues. The woman is an accomplished grifter, we can give her that. Of course, grifting is easy when you are devoid of shame, ethics, or a sense of propriety. But she is an utter failure at every other venture she has attempted in this life."

He seems nice.

Click here for an article by Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic entitled "This Is Not Charity" for some more depth on what the Clinton Foundation actually does.