Hillary's Asinine-ation Comment and Her Non-Apology Still Burns

I've resisted weighing in on Hillary Clinton's outrageous comment on Friday for several reasons. I was really angry about it and didn't want to say anything brash. Now, after two nights of sleeping on it, I have to say I'm even more pissed about it.

Here's her outrageous comment that started it all:

Here's what the NYT Editorial Board (the same one that endoesed her) calls her "tedious non-apology" apology for it:

And here's Keith Olbermann's must-see response.

Although I do think K.O. went a little overboard, I must say I do agree with almost every word, except for the pretense that it is "unforgivable." If she would have just apologized for it to all those that she so offended instead of offering excuses it would have made the world of difference to me, and I'm sure many others. She owed Obama and his family an apology just as much or more than the Kennedy family, and she needed to actually use the words "I'm sorry" or at least an "I apologize" without any excuses, not an "I regret if ..." That was just simply pathetic, and made me even more offended than before.

I'm not even going to get into the ramifications of her invoking "assassination" into this race except to say that since she had repeated the "assassination" comment more than a month earlier, her excuse that she said it this time because the "Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy" is yet another lie from her. She was saying it long before. That and I'll say that THE most important context that Hillary and her supporters obviously fail to grasp is the fact that Barack Obama is the most popular black leader this country has ever had who has not (I'm tempted to add a 'yet.' ugh.) been assassinated, and on that matter Keith Olbermann totally speaks for me. Please watch it if you already haven't.

I still have plenty to say about it though. I think it was hands down the most damaging campaign gaffe ever in our country's history, not just to her campaign but to the entire Democratic Party. It's her macaca moment only worse. Just her using 1968, the year of the riots in Chicago as an example for staying in, is telling.

Hillary Clinton was still a Goldwater Republican in 1968. Her own campaign website says she was "a Goldwater Girl." She interned for the war-hawk Republican congressman Melvin Laird that year and attended the Republican National Convention in Miami. She also claims to have been present in Chicago during the Democratic convention that year, saw the riots and 'smelled the teargas.' She wasn't inside the convention (back then even party officials couldn't necessarily get inside the convention, thus why they created the superdelegates, not to overturn the will of the voters, but to get party officials and Dem insiders into the convention), but somehow watching the riots helped turn her from a Republican into a Democrat.

So, no doubt she remembers full well the affect all that had on party unity. Of course, that year the Dems lost.

If she takes this all the way to the convention I seriously doubt there will be any unity, and that will be all her fault, not mine and everyone else who doesn't support her's. It will be the fault of Hillary Clinton and her doomsday-cult of supporters that seem hellbent on following her all the way to Jonestown Denver instead of doing what every other remotely sensible Democrat like I had to do when my candidate, John Edwards, had the decency to bow out as soon as it became apparent he couldn't win.

I can't wait to see what, if anything, the Sunday morning talkingheads have to say about it.

Update: Jake Tapper has more: The Fallacy of Clinton's 1968 Analogy