Young suckers who think they're hip. Plus: Why did Bill Maher lie his ass off about Bill Clinton?

Is it true, as Perry Bacon of NBC says, that the Clintons are facing a "Liberal war against the 1990s"?

No. It's a war against a fake version of the 1990s. The mainstream and progressive media -- united in its hatred of all things Clinton -- has erected what we might call "a Potemkin '90s."

The myth-makers are portraying the best years of our lives as the worst.

In the afore-linked piece, NBC once more trots out the "Clintons are racists" theme that we heard throughout 2008 (and which nearly everyone, a year later, laughingly admitted was pure bullshit). People forget that a leaked Obama camp memo revealed their disingenuous plan to paint Hillary as a racist. That's when Hillary discovered that she could not make any comment, however innocuous, without David Axelerod's army of troll-commenters snorting in faux-outrage.

Example of an alleged "racist" remark from Hillary: "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964." Remember that one? Remember how Axelrod's troll army pretended that only a KKK leader would say such words?

Jesse Jackson Sr. said of this tactic: "We all know what's going on."

The above-linked NBC piece makes Bill Clinton out to be an opponent of Jesse Jackson, when in fact they were and are friends. Several members of the Jackson family endorsed Hillary, and the elder Jackson defended Bill Clinton against the slurs of 2008.

It is true that Jesse Jackson Jr. continually lied about Hillary. He did so for reasons of personal gain: As we later learned, the corrupt younger Jackson coveted Obama's senate seat so avidly that he was willing to pay for it.

The NBC piece harps on the crime bill of 1994. Predictably, it leaves out the usual three unmentionable facts: 1. The rise in African American incarceration stemmed almost entirely from changes in state law, not the act which Clinton signed, 2. The Congressional Black Caucus strongly supported the 1994 bill, and 3. Bernie Sanders voted for the thing.

What we are seeing now is a deliberate propaganda campaign.

We don't have any leaked memos -- yet -- but it's quite obvious that Bernie Sanders is a witting participant in a deception strategy. Sanders knows that he needs to dampen black support for Hillary Clinton, and he's perfectly willing to fight dirty -- to fight filthy.

The strategy relies on two key factors:

1. The historical ignorance of the young.

2. Compliance from the Clinton-hating mainstream media.

The BernieBots have always taken what I call the "false underdog" position. They pretend that the media is "in the bag" for Hillary and dead-set against the Messiah from Brooklyn. The exact opposite is true.

A newly released media analysis found that the “biggest news outlets have published more negative stories about Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate — including Donald Trump — since January 2015.” The study, conducted by social media software analytics company Crimson Hexagon, also found that “the media also wrote the smallest proportion of positive stories about her.”

Meanwhile, we've seen almost no slam-stories against Bernie Sanders -- even though he has proposed a revision of the tax system in which people scraping by on $20,000 a year would be taxed at a higher rate than is now applied to Bill Gates.

Admit it: In any normal election year, you'd be hearing about that confiscatory tax plan every time you turned on the TV. Yet the media refuses to mention it (for now). That refusal tells us much: The fix is in.

Young people are so fucking arrogant that they cannot admit that they have been brainwashed by a propaganda campaign.

Of course, young people always presume that they know more than they actually do. (God knows that this was true of me, back in the 1970s.) They are convinced that they are incapable of being hornswoggled. In fact, the under-30s are the easiest to fool, precisely because they are so damned full of themselves.

Here's the problem: Young "millennials" are infinitely self-congratulatory, even though our rotten school system has left them clueless about everything that happened before they were born. It flatters their egos to think everyone born before 1990 was hideously racist, and that theirs is the first generation to be cured of the social diseases that plagued their elders.

(This was also a common delusion of the hippies, as some of you may remember.)

These well-meaning-but-ignorant youngsters get an emotional high from believing that Bill Clinton presided over a time of lynchings and Klan robes. If you tell millennials that African Americans gave Bill Clinton an 89 percent approval rating in the year 2000 (higher than the approval rating which black people give to our current president), our smug know-it-all youngsters will fall back on the condescending presumption that black people must have been hypnotized.

Actually, that sky-high approval rating occurred for very good reasons: Bill Clinton did a hell of a lot more for black people than Barack Obama has ever done.

(A question I've asked since 2008: When has Barack Obama ever helped a black person not named Obama? He sure didn't do anything noticeable during his days as a state senator in Illinois, when he ignored the problems of his constituents while holed up in a mansion bought for him by a crook who stole from the poor.)

Allow me to repeat some words I've published earlier:

What Bill Clinton did for the black community is a matter of record -- a record which the smear merchants don't want young people to learn. He preserved Affirmative Action at a time when it was very unpopular. He took on the issue of racial profiling by police. He helped minority and woman-owned businesses via the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Act. He helped minority-owned businesses compete for government contracts.

As I have recounted at length in previous posts, Bill Clinton expended one hell of a lot of political capital when he ended redlining and made it much easier for members of minority groups to get home loans. If you're young and you don't know the meaning of the term "redlining," ask your elders. Or go to my earlier posts (here and here) and read about the battles over the Community Reinvestment Act.

Helping many black Americans get home loans was no token gesture. Enabling minority-owned businesses to get government contracts was not an exercise in symbolism. These things were and are real. Do not use the word "mere": There's nothing "mere" about any of this.

Redlining was a genuine obscenity. Any propagandist who attempts to minimize the profound changes wrought by Bill Clinton is either a blinkered fool or a paid liar.

Sister Souljah:  There has been a lot of lying recently about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah" incident from the 1992 campaign. The myth was repeated on Bill Maher's Real Time last week.

Let's set the record straight.

Rap artist Sister Souljah, decrying black-on-black violence, said these words: "Why not have a week and kill white people?" Her lyrics had included even worse sentiments: "So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?" And: "If there are any good white people, I haven't met them."

Don't pretend that context excuses these undeniable calls for violence. She meant what she said. 

Bill Clinton spoke in front of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition -- at an event that also featured Sister Souljah. The situation forced him to respond; not to respond would have been cowardice. Clinton said: "Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor." By "you" he meant the audience at that Rainbow Coalition gathering. He also said: "If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech."

Well put. Those were precisely the words he should have said. His statement was inarguable. Presidential.

On Maher's show, a false version of history was put on display. A guest claimed that Clinton said these words in front of a white audience. That's a damned lie, and I was stunned to see Maher allow it to go unchallenged.

Maher and his guest refused to let the audience know that Sister Souljah had called for blacks to kill white people. Worse, Maher refused to let the audience know what Bill Clinton actually said: Scurrilously, Maher left that part to the audience's imagination.

By deliberately leaving out all of the key details, Maher allowed the audience to believe that Sister Souljah had said something innocent (or at least defensible), and that Bill Clinton had responded with words deeply insulting to all black people.

In short: Maher pretended that Clinton had offered a racist shout out in order to win the white racist vote.

In front of the Rainbow Coalition? Ridiculous!

Maher's narrative is worse than false -- it's ludicrous. No Democratic politician in his right mind is going to insult black people. Even in the 1940s, any politician speaking in New York would have known better. African Americans have been an important voting bloc for a long, long time.

Let me give you a further example of the way political sharpies have revised history: The vile Dick Morris once wrote that Clinton rebuked Sister Souljah in order to embarrass Jesse Jackson -- because, said Morris, Clinton was running against Jackson in the New York primary in 1992. In fact, Jackson did not run at all in that year. (And only an idiot would argue that a Democrat might benefit from making a racist statement in New York in 1992.) Morris isn't stupid: He knew full well that he was being deceptive.

At that time, black people not only understood what Clinton said, they agreed with it: They voted for him in overwhelming numbers, in the primaries and in the general. And at the end of his presidency, they gave Clinton a higher approval rating than they now bestow on Barack Obama.

In later years, the history of the "Sister Souljah" encounter was completely rewritten by Clinton's enemies. The fictionalized version of the story became one of those unkillable zombie lies, like Ronald Reagan's welfare-queen-in-a-Cadillac story.

This Big Lie is directed at voters too young to have any direct memories of 1992. Of course, there's no point in telling them the facts of the matter. The young are too damned arrogant to admit that they've been played for suckers.