Former President Bill Clinton was campaigning for Democrats in Florida on Tuesday night when he issued a warning against politicians who try to win elections by demonizing their opponents.
Clinton criticized what he characterized as negative campaign tactics by Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds.
"If you think you can get elected on the cheap, you do it by demonizing whoever you’re running against — putting a label on them and trying to make them unacceptable," Clinton told the audience.
A clip of Clinton's remarks circulated Wednesday on X, where conservative commentator Western Lensman pointed out the irony of a member of the Clinton political dynasty warning against labeling political opponents.
"This is hilarious. Has Bill met his wife?" the account remarked.
Let's take a brief walk through the grooveyard of forgotten favorites when it comes to the incivility of his wife Hillary Clinton.
At an LGBT fundraiser in New York, Clinton said:
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. … Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
In the final 2016 presidential debate, after Trump said Putin had no respect for her or Obama, Clinton replied: "Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president."
In a 2019 CBS interview, she called Trump an "illegitimate president" and said he knew it because of "voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories." She added that she knew "he knows that this wasn’t on the level."
In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour during the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, she said:
"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength."
"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."
This is at the heart of our political disputes. If conservatives, by nature, want to preserve America as a freedom-loving, God-fearing, and Constitution-respecting nation, then what, pray tell, are they trying to "destroy"?
Round and round we go, and Bill Clinton's remarks are neither intellectually honest, nor helpful. They are merely political cover for leftists like Democrat gubernatorial nominee David Jolly and his running mate, Gwen Graham, who are running for office in the State of Florida.
Meanwhile, we have former Democrat presidents stumping for partisan leftists, and former Republican presidents' families cutting checks for left-wing Democrats. Because of course they do. Apparently, common sense needed a permission slip.
As RedState Ward Clark put it: Will Bill and Hillary Clinton please just go away?
What does it say about the Democrats' perception of their own prospects, by the way, if they are dragging out these fossils? Oh, Bill may bring in a few middle-of-the-road types who remember his moderate (by today's standards) presidency. Just to give the devil his due, Bill was, back in the day, a serious campaigner. He was glib, could speak contemporaneously at length on a variety of topics, he was charismatic and could be charming if he put his mind to it. He was also sleazy and corrupt, but those are things Democrats tend to overlook as long as one is ideologically pure.
Hillary, though, is everything Bill doesn't appear to be. She is strident, shrill, nasty, abrasive, and she has a sense of entitlement that is so huge that one has to measure it in parsecs.
Thus, getting a lecture about political civility from a Clinton is kind of like getting a culinary lesson from Jeffrey Dahmer. Or flight instructions from Osama bin Laden's pilots. Or medical advice from Kevorkian.
The message may be adequate. But the messenger? Not so much. And somehow, they still expect Americans not to notice the hypocrisy on full display. This constant double standard is precisely why so many patriotic Americans are rallying behind the America First movement, demanding real accountability and an end to the political games.
