CATWISE CLOCK

is a nasty entity, but it's the Democrats who are (ostensibly) responsible for counteracting
the audacious authoritarianism of the GOP, bringing it more to the center, so that then the
Democrats can inhabit the true left, rather than the faux left, as they have been doing for
some time.
It was Bill Clinton who forced the Democrats further right. Jimmy Carter and JFK before
that enacted some right-wing policies, to be sure, and even FDR, iconic New Deal
visionary that he was, was totalitarian in his institution of the Japanese interment camps.
But it was Bill Clinton who, for example, is nearly single-handedly responsible for the
mass incarceration of blacks.
"Lock up mass incarcerate,
the new Jim Crow, the new slave trade;
If Doctor King were here today,
he'd fight for much more than a dream."
Clinton enacted legislation that made it far easier to target black criminals, fulfilling the
wet dreams of bigoted Republicans everywhere. According to Michelle Alexander,
author of the must-read article "Why Hillary Clinton Does Not Deserve the Black Vote,"
Bill Clinton actually "presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison
inmates of any president in American history."
And he did this via imposition of far harsher penalties for crack cocaine, the preferred
drug of blacks, than for powder cocaine, the preferred drug of whites, as well as
unabashedly signing a $30 billion crime bill that engendered new capital crimes, urged
life sentences for three-time offenders, and created a $16 billion budget for state prison
and police force expansions. As Alexander writes, "When Clinton left office in 2001, the
United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Prison admissions for
drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level
in 1983."
And Hillary, as first lady, not only supported Bill, but she aggressively touted his policies