One could argue that Bill Clinton’s preferred method for mitigating exposure of his philandering, rapey tendencies was harming black people. Recognizing that using the implacable power of the state to further hundreds of years of violence against our most vulnerable was good optics, before he even ascended to the most lusted after seat of power, he took time out of his busy schedule of dodging accusations of infidelity and sexual assault to pull the lever on Ricky Ray Rector, a man so impaired that he declined to finish his final meal, uttering the infamous phrase that is the genesis for this post title.
Emboldened by the popular response to this act of callous cruelty, we were treated to a decade of truly abhorrent, finely tuned racist proclamations from our ‘first black preznit’ and his lovely wife, the highlights of which included demonizing black children as ‘superpredators’, ignoring the ravages of the crack epidemic (regardless of how you feel about the CIA on this point), a crime bill that will take literally decades to undo the damage of provided we get our shit together enough to acknowledge how awful it was, destroying welfare and unfairly castigating a whole generation of working single mothers as reprobates, and possibly causing the death of thousands of Sudanese children by an eminently preventable disease.
We aren’t talking about feverish Gingrichian Vince Foster fantasies here. We are talking about acts of the United States codified by law, all i’s dotted and tees crossed. Bill Clinton banged an intern, and then bombed a factory making malaria pills to distract the country and he still won’t apologize for either. So next time you feel the need to climb on your high horse about how Bernie Sanders doesn’t deliver the perfect soundbite for your Twitter consumption, maybe take a longer look at how two shitty, opportunistic Yale graduates have spent their entire adult lives shredding whatever institutionalized progressive values we’ve managed to establish so they could fucking look good at a state dinner.