Washington
The winds of change are blowing, and they are blowing away the politics of the past. Among the casualties are the Clintons and their politics of personal destruction. There is not much the Clintons can do to prevent these winds of change. They have themselves been blown from office forever, and if my sources are accurate, Hillary is preoccupied now with acquiring a presidential pardon for herself and various accomplices in her mishandling of evidence that she amassed on her infamous server. Her server will be for her what Monica’s DNA bespattered dress was for Bill, to wit: incontrovertible evidence of reckless disregard for the law.
Some members of the old order are nonetheless still at it, attempting to practice the politics of personal destruction as if nothing changed on November 8. They have fixed their sights on Senator Jeff Sessions and hope to deny him a cabinet position in President-elect Donald Trump’s government. They have detected “racism” in his past, dating from 30 years ago and based on spurious claims that are, in fact, ancient, flimsy, and, by Sessions, disputed. They think these charges will supersede his spotless career of twenty years in the United States Senate and a record that includes, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, Sessions’ “1981 case [that] broke the Klan in the heart of Dixie.” He was then a U.S. Attorney in Alabama.
As for the charges that Democrats are preparing to bring against Sessions today, they are warmed-over charges that he favored the Ku Klux Klan thirty years ago and calumniated the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as “un-American” and “communist-inspired.” Oh, yes, he is also accused of calling a black assistant United States attorney “boy.” Sessions denies it.
Reviewing the Klan and the NAACP accusations years later I found them both obvious distortions, apparent to anyone who might bother to investigate such serious charges. The first stemmed from an amusing joke Sessions made to friends when he wisecracked that he thought the Klansmen were “okay” guys until he heard that they smoked pot. The NAACP remark was a private expression of concern for the organization’s reputation voiced by Sessions, who at the time was a federal prosecutor. He told two black colleagues, one of whom became a disgruntled employee, that the NAACP’s attacks on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy toward the Sandinistas might be construed as “un-American and “communist-inspired.” He never defamed the organization. Both charges against him were unjustified then and are unjustified now.
In fact, as U.S. Attorney he brought several cases to desegregate Alabama schools. He prosecuted the son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays for the brutal murder of a black teenager. Sessions insisted on the death penalty, and when he became Attorney General of Alabama he insisted that the sentence be carried out. It was this last act that earned him the judgment of the Journal. It “broke” the Klan.
Such canards from the past are not going to work today, and they are an especial disservice to African-Americans, who deserve to know that they are living in a much more tolerant world than the world of years ago. Moreover, they deserve to know that Jeff Sessions is their friend and the friend of all law-abiding Americans. The Democrats who are preparing these false charges think they have to do it to keep Americans divided, blacks against whites. Fortunately, the prevailing winds are against them.
