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Look Who's Trashing Hillary Now

By Jeralyn

Barack Obama's liberal supporters are trashing Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post with the most inept comparison yet.

Tom Hayden and other lawyers from the 60's are claimng Hillary has hidden her "radical" ties. What are these ties?

[T]wo retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.

Stupid Comparison #1: Judging lawyers by the clients they represent. Even more stupid, judging a summer law school intern by the firm's clients.

Stupid Comparison #2: Equating the clients of a law school intern's firm with the supporter of a politican who held a fundraiser and sat on boards with the politician. [More...]

I have nothing against William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn and don't agree they are the devil incarnate. But for those who disagree, Barack Obama allowed Ayers to hold a fundraiser for him when running for office and sat on two boards with him, the Woods Fund and the Annenberg Challenge. They had a personal relationship, not a lawyer-cient or employer-employee relationship.

That Hayden and his friends could get this into the Washington Post as a news story is laugh out loud silly.

Here's their "dirt":

• [While an intern] "former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath."

• An 89 year old former partner of the firm says, "She had to know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law, racist problems."

• According to Tom Hayden, her work as a law school intern for the firm means "The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence."

If they want to play that game, why not compare law firm clients to law firm clients: Barack Obama's firm represented Tony Rezko.

Then there's this:

• Clinton had been editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which included articles about Black Panther leader Bobby Seale's murder trial in New Haven, Conn.

• She attended a New Haven fundraiser for Bobby Seale's defense at her law firm bosses' house.

And one final charge: She liked the anti-Vietnam war writings of a former SDS leader, who now, recovering from a stroke says:

"I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."

Hayden thinks this is collateral damage for Hillary. All it does is highlight that Barack Obama's ties to Ayers were not lawyer-client related like Hillary's were, proving that all associations are not equal.

As an added note, if this was so important, why are they bringing it up now when they think their candidate has already won the nomination? Maybe it's not over afterall.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 19, 2008 (boomark / email).