Via the Weekly Standard, where were you the day Hillary’s campaign imploded?

No, I kid. Drudge was pushing this earlier because the idea of lefty infighting over whether their nominee-in-waiting is a racist or not is simply delicious. Spoiler: She is racist, or at least the left used to think so. (A few of them still do.) Now that their hold on power depends upon her being absolved, though, absolution is freely granted via the memory hole. She’ll be given a pass on this partly for that reason and partly because her admission about fear of black men in hoodies advances the argument that white America is racist to its core, even within the beacon of towering moral righteousness that is the bien-pensant left. It’s acceptable for a white pol — a white Democratic pol, I should say — to implicitly confess to racism so long as it’s offered in an indictment of white racism more broadly. I can’t find a fuller video of what she said today but Tom Elliott notes that she used the same line in a speech on June 20th:

“And our problem is not all kooks and klanssmen. It’s also the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s the offhand comment about not wanting “Those people” in the neighborhood. Let’s be honest. For a lot of well-meaning open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy. But too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege. We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and then change them.”

I’m curious now to see how she’d respond if a reporter decided to press her on the implications of that statement. When was the last time Hillary personally felt a twinge of fear upon encountering a, shall we say, demographic outlier on the streets of Chappaqua? “Oh no,” I’m sure she’d reply. “I meant other well-meaning open-minded white people would feel that way.”

Here’s the clip, followed by a clip of Jeb Bush rolling his eyes at the fact that Martin O’Malley felt compelled by the vanguard of leftist identity politics to apologize for saying “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter.” You can sort of understand why they insist on the latter: The idea is that black lives are treated more cheaply than others’, especially by cops, therefore the fact that they matter needs to be emphasized, not just assumed under the umbrella of “all lives matter.” You can also understand, though, why it would seem insane to an average voter who’s not current on the latest liberal sloganeering to read a headline like, “Democrat sorry for saying ‘all lives matter.'” If Republicans insisted on something like that (imagine a social conservative being pilloried for saying “all lives matter” when discussing abortion instead of “unborn lives matter”), the media would piss itself with laughter at what an unforced communications disaster that was by the right. As it is, they couldn’t be more solemn in relaying the critiques of O’Malley. Keep circulating this Jeb Bush clip, progressives. It’s truly devastating.