Monday, April 28, 2008

Hillary Compares Outsourcing to the Holocaust

That is the title of a post by John Podhoretz at Contentions, in reaction to an article in today's New York Times:
At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”

In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

“So this is not just about steel,” she finished.
Podhoretz intones:
In what may be the most appalling rhetorical gambit of her political career, and perhaps the worst of any candidate this entire campaign season, Hillary Clinton yesterday effectively analogized the loss of American jobs to the destruction of the Jews:
I don't buy it. I have written before that I find Hillary Clinton to be manipulative (see here and comments), but here she is merely using the metaphor that people are not immune from the suffering they ignore in others--at no point does she explicitly compare the workers to Jews.

There's plenty to criticize in Hillary "Sniper Fire" Clinton, in what she claims as well as in the policies she claims to espouse. No need to read into what she says.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad

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