I love Google. Armed with the right key words, like “Hillary” and “Jew,” you can dredge up a fifteen-year-old article from The U.K. Guardian.
It was July 2000 and Hillary Clinton was running for her first term as a U.S. Senator from New York State. The Guardian article was reporting on a new book about Hillary and her husband, what’s his name. It zeroed in on an anecdote in the book, about W.H.N.’s losing campaign for Congress in Arkansas in 1974. A disappointed Hillary was quoted as blessing out a campaign aide, calling him a “f(bleeping) Jew bastard.”
This old anecdote was given new significance because Jewish voters accounted for 14 percent of the electorate in New York State.
The target of the supposed verbal abuse, one Paul Fray, confirmed that the attack had occurred. So did Mrs. Fray. So did a campaign staffer who said he had heard the indelicate epithet while standing just outside the room.
Hillary denied that she used such indelicate language.
“I have never said anything like that, ever,” she said. “I have in the past certainly, you know maybe, called somebody a name.”
Her husband, still President at the time the article appeared, allowed as how “she might have called him a bastard. I wouldn’t rule that out.”
The Guardian pointed out that Fray was in fact a Southern Baptist, although he acknowledged that he could be considered one-eighth Jewish, which seems to indicate that one of his great-grandparents was a Jew.
What if Hillary had called him a “Baptist bastard”? Doesn’t ring right, does it? Or an “octo-Jew bastard”? I doubt that the phrase even occurred to her.
Believe it or not, President Clinton attributed what he called this false story to the “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”
Well, as we all know, Mrs. Clinton won election to the Senate, where she accomplished nothing, won re-election in 2006, and was tapped by President Obama to be his first-term secretary of state, where she sat at her desk doing nothing but planning Chelsea’s wedding, making funeral arrangements for her mother, scheduling yoga appointments, and deleting 30,000 harmless emails.
I don’t know how Mrs. Clinton, in her darkest moments, feels about Jews nowadays. If she feels anything like what the right-wing conspiracy says she demonstrated in the case of Mr. Fray, then the people who admire Obama’s negligent, disrespectful and seemingly even hateful treatment of our greatest ally in the Middle East will have something to cheer them if she becomes President.
