Mr. and Mrs. Clinton: Tear down that library



April 15, 2016

"If the American people do not feel safe on their streets, in their schools, in their homes, in their place of work and worship, then it is difficult to say that the American people are free."



By Cliff Kincaid During Thursday night's Democratic debate , the two candidates tried to outdo each other in terms of being soft on crime and advocating the release of criminals. It was an illustration of how Democratic Party policies have gone from pro-police to anti-police and even pro-criminal.If this is the current trend in the Democratic Party, the Clintons will have to hire some illegal aliens to remodel the "Making Communities Safer" section of the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. I toured the place last Thursday and noticed that the library highlights the tough-on-crime policies of the Clinton administration, including the building of prisons.I took pictures of the exhibit, as anybody from the media can do, and it proclaims, "For eight years, the Clinton Administration pursued the two objectives of tougher punishment and smarter prevention – combining stiff penalties and more police with innovative programs for youth and commonsense gun laws."One part of the exhibit highlights how "prison construction" accelerated under President Clinton."In the early 1990s, there were not enough prison cells to house America's expanding population of state and federal prisoners," it says. However, "With the passage of the 1994 crime bill, for the first time in history the federal government helped states build the prison space they needed."It sounds like "mass incarceration" to me.All of this is now supposed to be disavowed, as the Democratic Party and its presidential candidates become adjuncts of the criminals lobby known as "Black Lives Matter."At the debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "I want white people to recognize that there is systemic racism. It's also in employment, it's in housing, but it is in the criminal justice system, as well."The other white person on the stage, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), countered that Mrs. Clinton's one-time use of the term "superpredator" to describe black criminals was "a racist term, and everybody knew it was a racist term." She used that term when the 1994 crime bill, sponsored by then-Senator, and now Obama Vice President, Joe Biden (D-DE), was passed.Sanders and Clinton now favor releasing hundreds of thousands of criminals in the name of "criminal justice reform." Clinton has apologized for using the term "superpredators."In order to fulfill his campaign promise to "Black Lives Matter," Sanders "would have to release roughly half a million prisoners," noted Errol Louis of NY1 Time Warner Cable News, during the debate. He asked, "How are you going to do that, since the vast majority of American prisoners are not under federal jurisdiction?" Incredibly, Sanders said he would work with state governments and conservatives to release the criminals. Sanders said the criminals would be given "the kind of job training and education they need so they can return to their communities."It appears that the law-abiding citizens in those communities would have to fend for themselves, since the "Ferguson effect" has caused the police to pull back from confronting criminals. As a result, homicides are already rising in major cities.It is apparent that the Democratic candidates for president are falling all over themselves in an effort to appear soft on crime and tough on white racism.Both seem to believe that highlighting black crime is now considered racist, and that white racism is actually the real problem in black communities that have been devastated by black criminals.By contrast, the webpage for the Clinton Presidential Library notes the importance of the 1994 crime bill, which was actually effective.The idea of "community policing" was "important to the bill," the exhibit says. "It called for police to be present and recognizable within higher-crime areas of towns in order to gain the trust and respect of local residents. As a result of this emphasis on public safety, crime rates fell every year that President Clinton was in office, eventually reaching a 27-year low by the end of his administration."In this current campaign, of course, the terms "tougher punishment" and "stiff penalties" would be considered racist."Black Lives Matter" wants people to believe these are terms that justify racism against minorities and lead to "mass incarceration."Will this section of the Clinton Presidential Library have to be remodeled or torn down to accommodate the language that is now popular in the Democratic Party?In contrast to the Clinton policies of the 1990s, today's Democratic Party wants to release black criminals from prison because they have allegedly been singled out by white racists.But the Clinton Presidential Library says the results of Clinton's tough-on-crime policies were "dramatic," and it features this quotation by President Clinton on September 13, 1994:Today, however, this is not something to be applauded. We are led to believe it was a terrible time for America because black criminals went to prison as a result of racism, not because of their criminal behavior.The exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Library says, "In the 30 years before President Clinton took office, violent crime in America had more than tripled." It says President Clinton "sought to restore a sense of responsibility both to government and to the people who lived in troubled communities."By today's Democratic Party standards, the term "troubled communities" is racist.The library exhibit even features pictures of police patrolling those troubled communities. Indeed, I counted four different photos of police in the "Making Communities Safer" section of the library.Sanders is right, however, that there are some conservatives who want to empty the prisons.The bipartisan so-called "criminal justice reform" bill moving through the Congress would go a long way toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of criminals promised by Sanders during the debate. This is why Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is opposing it.The Numbers USA group comments that "the legislation being considered by Congress in response to concerns about overly-long prison sentences for Americans has been crafted to primarily benefit criminal aliens.""As currently written," notes Chris Chmielenski, Director of Content and Activism at Numbers USA, "the legislation would result in the massive release of criminal aliens from federal prisons into the streets. It could alternatively be called the Criminal Alien Prison Release Act of 2016, but that bill title probably wouldn't garner many votes in Congress."He warns that so-called criminal justice reform constitutes "a Trojan horse for yet another kind of amnesty."Numbers USA points out that local American communities, most of them black and Hispanic, will bear the brunt of the release of these criminals back into their neighborhoods.But "Black Lives Matters" and their puppets running for the Democratic presidential nomination don't seem to be too concerned about this.After all, the new push is to empty the prisons and put criminals back into black and Hispanic communities in the name of teaching America a lesson about white racism.© Cliff Kincaid