Were you as baffled as I was by Bill Clinton’s angry exchange with a #BlackLivesMatter protester yesterday? The stuff Bill was saying actually made sense. It was true. You were probably thinking the same thing I was thinking: “Who is this man, and what has he done with Slick Willie?”

So it’s a bit of a relief that he’s taking it back now. Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News:

Bill Clinton issued a near-apology Friday for his role in a lengthy and heated exchange with Black Lives Matters protesters a day earlier in Philadelphia.

“Now I like and believe in protests. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t cause I engaged in some when I was a kid,” Clinton told a crowd of more than 1,000 on the campus of Penn State Behrend. “But I never thought I should drown anybody else out. And I confess, maybe it’s just a sign of old age, but it bothers me now when that happens…”

“I rather vigorously defended my wife, as I am wont to do, and I realized, finally, I was talking past [the protester] the way she was talking past me. We gotta stop that in this country. We gotta listen to each other again,” the former president said.

He wasn’t talking past anybody, of course. He was directly addressing the protester, and paying her the compliment of treating her like an adult. He called out her cynical racebaiting for exactly what it was.

That simply won’t do. That’s why he’s now walking it back. He’s not going to win any votes for Hillary by telling people the truth. He has to tell them what they want to hear. And if he slips up for a minute and forgets to lie, he has to patch things up.

Don’t be mad at Hillary, #BLM. She’s very sorry for hurting your feelings. That’s what this is about, what everything is about: your precious feelings. Your problems are always somebody else’s fault, and anybody who disagrees must be brought to heel.

God bless America.

(Hat tip: Ben Shapiro)