SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 5.9.2024
Disagree with Hillary Clinton if you will. There is no doubt she has something worthwhile to say. Always.
America and the world would have been a better place had the archaic American electoral college not kept her from becoming President in January 2017.
Hillary received nearly 3M more votes than Trump in November 2016. Because the American founding fathers created the Electoral College to protect the wealthy slave owners this anachronism has been with us since 1787.
The Electoral College was settled-on as the means of electing president towards the end of the Constitutional Convention due to pressure from slave states wanting to increase their voting power (since they could count slaves as 3/5 of a person when allocating electors) and by small states who increased their power due to the minimum of three electors per state.[31] The compromise was reached after other proposals, including to get a direct election for president (as proposed by Hamilton among others), failed to get traction among slave states.[31] Levitsky and Ziblatt describe it as “not a product of constitutional theory or farsighted design. Rather, it was adopted by default, after all other alternatives had been rejected.”[31] – Excerpted from Wikipedia
I recently finished the book Hillary wrote in 2017, What Happened. It should be must reading today.
Excerpted from The New York Times 5.9.2024
Hillary Clinton on Thursday criticized campus protesters, saying young people “don’t know very much” about the history of the Middle East.
“I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now,” she said on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
Ms. Clinton then went on to imply that young people “don’t know” that had Yasir Arafat, the former leader of the Palestinian Authority, accepted a deal brokered by her husband, President Bill Clinton, the Palestinians would already have a state of their own. “It’s one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say yes,” she said.
“For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous,” Osamah F. Khalil, a professor of history and Middle East expert at Syracuse University, said in an interview. He noted that in the lead-up to the summit at Camp David in 2000, where negotiations ultimately faltered, Mr. Arafat had warned former president Bill Clinton that “the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added, noting that there had been other missed opportunities for a solution.
“Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale,” Prof. Khalil said.
Ms. Clinton’s comments about the students failed to give them, or the elite institutions at which many are protesting, due credit, he said.
The comments come after students walked out of Ms. Clinton’s class in November to protest what they perceived as the school’s role in publicly shaming students who had signed a statement saying the Israeli government bore responsibility for the war. Last month, others disrupted Ms. Clinton’s visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College.
Top Photo: Undergraduate Hillary Clinton at Wellesley College – 1969
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