Hillary's Tangle Of Distortions Over Michigan And Florida

The Jed Report keeps doing what it does best, putting together another great video exposing Hillary's hypocrisy and political games:



The Jed Report breaks it down:

Earlier today in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Hillary Clinton endorsed the Republican Party's decision to cut in half the voting power of the Florida delegation to the RNC.

Why should they have been cut in half? "Because it was a Republican decision" to change the primary date, she said.

The problem? Democrats also supported the decision. In fact, it passed the state senate by a 37-2 margin and it passed the state house by a 118-0 margin. Moreover, the state party leadership steadfastly stuck with the January 29 date even though they knew the DNC would not seat the Florida delegations.

Clinton herself supported the DNC's punishment when she signed a pledge to honor the DNC's rules. The key line in that pledge: "the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will strip states of 100% of their delegates and super delegates to the DNC National Convention if they violate the nomination calendar."

And now, even though Clinton is conceding that the Republican Party was correct to penalize its delegation, she is refusing to agree to a compromise that would apply the same exact penalty to the Democratic delegation. The basis of her refusal is a demonstrably false claim.

And that of course leads us right back where we started: for Hillary Clinton, Florida has nothing to do with principle.

It's just another power play.

And here is a closer look at how the DNC's decision was made, and how Hillary's group fully supported it, and could have changed the decision if they had really cared:

On Aug. 25, when the DNC's rules panel declared Florida's primary date out of order, it agreed by a near-unanimous majority to exceed the 50 percent penalty called for under party rules. Instead, the group stripped Florida of all 210 delegates to underscore its displeasure with Florida's defiance and to discourage other states from following suit. In doing so, the DNC essentially committed itself, for fairness' sake, to strip the similarly defiant Michigan of all 156 of its delegates three months later. Clinton held tremendous potential leverage over this decision, and not only because she was then widely judged the likely nominee. Of the committee's 30 members, a near-majority of 12 were Clinton supporters. All of them—most notably strategist Harold Ickes—voted for Florida's full disenfranchisement. (The only dissenting vote was cast by a Tallahassee, Fla., city commissioner who supported Obama.)

And a reporter recently raised this very fact, that Hillary could have influenced the rules if she had actually cared at the time, check out Hillary's response:

Reporter: Some people might say, where were you when we needed you? When the rules and bylaws committee was stripping away our delegates, you were silent, and some of your top advisors, Harold Ickes, Tina Flournoy, were voting for that penalty.

Clinton: Well, I don’t agree with that decision of the Democratic party, and I’ve been pushing for them to rectify that decision, and I hope that they will do so...

She totally avoids the question. She doesn't answer it, which is quite typical of how she responds to reporters when they ask something difficult. Instead, she says that she doesn't agree with "that decision of the Democratic party, ignoring the obvious fact that she was the presumptive nominee at the time and had unparalleled power, and ignoring the fact that many of those involved in the decision, including some of her top advisors, were the ones who voted to strip Florida and Michigan of delegates. So when Hillary is asked a simple question by a reporter, all we get is more disingenuous spin and game playing. She blames it on the Party, even though she 100% supported the rules until she had a reason to want to break them. Then, suddenly, it is a matter of civil rights, an epic struggle for freedom. Right...