Clinton clemency flap a non-issue in P.R.

Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory scheduled to hold a closely watched Democratic presidential primary June 1, is unaccustomed to cutting such a high-profile role in presidential politics.

Indeed, you have to look back roughly a decade to find the last time Puerto Rico played a starring role in mainland politics — the summer of 1999, when President Bill Clinton drew sharp criticism by offering clemency to 16 imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalists who belonged to an organization responsible for more than 100 bombings in the U.S. and Puerto Rico between 1974 and 1983.

At the time, Clinton was accused of attempting to curry favor with the large Puerto Rican community in New York, where Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing to run for an open Senate seat. In response, the Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating, “President Clinton should not have offered or granted clemency to the FALN terrorists.” The political backlash proved severe enough that Mrs. Clinton, then the first lady, ended up publicly opposing her husband’s offer, saying she had nothing to do with it.

Yet for all the controversy surrounding the episode, nary a word is heard about it as Clinton and Barack Obama battle for the 63 delegates at stake in Puerto Rico’s primary.

“It’s a highly charged issue, but it has not been an issue in Puerto Rico [this year] because it is pretty far back and there has been a desire to get past that conflict,” said Kenneth McClintock, president of the Senate in Puerto Rico and co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign there.

“No one has raised it, and I don’t think it will be raised,” agreed Jean Vidal Font, a lawyer in Puerto Rico and chairman of the local chapter of Generation Obama, a youth volunteer movement for Obama’s campaign. “A lot of people in Puerto Rico do not support what those people did, but they do believe the lengthy sentences were unjust. So they would rather just not talk about it.”

Nor would the Democratic candidates, neither of whom would have much to gain by revisiting the controversy.

In Clinton’s case, it would serve as a reminder of an episode she would rather forget. Back then, she was whipsawed between Puerto Rican leaders who were angered by her opposition to clemency and Republicans who viewed the clemency offer as a crass political maneuver designed to benefit her impending Senate campaign.

Asked to comment on the role the clemency affair might have in the Puerto Rico primary, Clinton spokesman Isaac Baker sidestepped the issue.

“Puerto Ricans share the concerns of all voters — turning this economy around, keeping our neighborhoods safe and providing quality health care to every Puerto Rican,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They know Hillary has the strength and experience to deliver real solutions to the challenges facing Puerto Rico.”

Vidal Font says the clemency issue has no effect on his candidate preference because he does not credit Hillary with her husband’s actions. “I don’t feel any pull to Hillary because of the clemency,” he said. “I do think Bill Clinton did a good thing in granting clemency. But the loyalty would be to him rather than her.

He added that while he disapproved of Hillary Clinton’s clemency opposition, her stance on it was not a decisive factor for him. “It did bother me that she disagreed with him because those people were serving unjustly long sentences, but my mind had already been made up for Obama when I found out that she had come out against it.”

While Puerto Rican surrogates for both candidates downplay the relevance of the clemency issue, President Clinton’s record on Puerto Rico — and Hillary Clinton’s as first lady — still looms large over the primary, where she holds a healthy lead in polls.

“She was here as first lady after Hurricane Georges,” noted Francisco Domenech, Democratic national committeeman for the Young Democrats of America and a Clinton supporter. Domenech praised her “extensive record on Puerto Rico,” adding that as a senator she worked to stop the naval bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

Puerto Rican Clinton supporters also cite Bill Clinton’s creation of the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which provided funding for many new police officers in Puerto Rico. Hillary Clinton has pledged to restore COPS funding cut by President Bush.

But Obama supporters, such as Vidal Font, have turned the Clinton administration record against Hillary Clinton, noting that President Clinton cut tax credits to companies that do business in Puerto Rico — a move that some say hurt the local economy.

"...It did bother me that she disagreed with him because those people were serving unjustly long sentences..."

FALN is scum, as is this person. He might feel differently if one of HIS POS family members were killed by one of the 120 bombs that were set off.

Just because these pardoned scumbags didn't actually light the fuse on the bombs doesn't excuse them or make them any less culpable than Osama Bin Laden was for the World Trade Center bombings.

QUOTES FROM HARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S BOOKS:

From Dreams of My Father, “ I FOUND A SOLACE IN NURSING A PERVASIVE SENSE OF GRIEVANCE AND ANIMOSITY AGAINST MY MOTHER’S RACE”.

From ‘Dreams of my Father’, “THE EMOTION BETWEEN THE RACES COULD NEVER BE PURE...THE OTHER RACE WOULD ALWAYS REMAIN JUST THAT; MENACING, ALIEN AND APART.”

From ‘Dreams of My Father’,
“I CEASED TO ADVERTISE MY MOTHER’S RACE AT THE AGE OF 12 OR 13, WHEN I BEGAN TO SUSPECT THAT BY DOING SO I WAS INGRATIATING MYSELF TO WHITES.”

From Dreams Of My Father, “NEVER EMULATE THE WHITE MEN and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. IT WAS INTO MY FATHER’S IMAGE, THE BLACK MAN, SON OF AFRICA, THAT I’D PACKED ALL THE ATTRIBUTES I SOUGHT IN MYSELF”.

From Dreams Of My Father:
“THAT HATE HADN’T GONE AWAY,” he wrote, BLAMING “WHITE PEOPLE— some cruel, some IGNORANT, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

From Dreams Of My Father;
“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “IT REMAINED NECESSARY TO PROVE WHICH SIDE YOU WERE ON, TO SHOW YOUR LOYALTY TO THE BLACK MASSES, TO STRIKE OUT, AND NAME NAMES. “

From Dreams Of My Father, “I HAD GROWN ACCUSTOMED , everywhere, TO SUSPICIONS BETWEEN THE RACES.”

Quote from Barack Obama’s book, Dreams Of My Father:
“THE PERSON WHO MADE ME PROUDEST OF ALL, though, was [HALF BROTHER ] ROY .. HE CONVERTED TO ISLAM” .

From ‘Dreams of my Father’, “IN INDONESIA, I HAD SPENT TWO YEARS AT A MUSLIM SCHOOL.”
“I STUDIED THE KORAN.”

From ‘Audacity of Hope: “LOLO (Obama’s step father) FOLLOWED .. ISLAM...” “I LOOKED TO LOLO FOR GUIDANCE”.

From ‘The Audacity Of Hope, “I WILL STAND WITH THE MUSLIMS SHOULD THE POLITICAL WINDS SHIFT IN AN UGLY DIRECTION.”

From The Audacity Of Hope, “WE ARE NO LONGER just A CHRISTIAN NATION..We ARE also a Jewish nation, A MUSLIM NATION, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

.Check out this awesome video:
.
The same kind of terrorists who support Obama did this:
http://www.frugalsites.net/911/attack/
Never apologize for them.
Never appease them.
Never forget.

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