In the latest round of Bill Clinton playing whack-a-black, I choose to disagree with the assessment of some Hillary supporters who feel Bill Clinton was unfairly treated after his reaction to a few Black Lives Matters (BLM for short) protestors, which included his impassioned defense of the policies he put in place to be “tough on crime” back in the nineties.

I, for one, have a big problem with him defending that record, a record he said last year was a mistake, and I don’t think placing his conduct in the context of the eighties or nineties helps him one iota. In fact, I think it serves only to demonstrate what a truly cynical and heinous person he was back then, and still remains today.

Let’s examine some facts about Bill Clinton when he was Governor of Arkansas, and running for President. In the middle of his campaign, he made a special trip back to his home state to witness the execution of a prisoner on death row. And not just any prisoner, but a severely brain-damaged African American male with the understanding of a toddler. That man’s name was <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21598681-can-you-execute-man-whose-iq-71-death-mentally-disabled"Ricky Ray Rector.

WHEN Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he oversaw the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled that he said he would save the pecan pie from his last meal “for later”.

Now why did Clinton leave the campaign trail to witness, as Governor, his state’s judicially sanctioned murder of a man with the understanding of a small child? As many in the news media pointed out at the time, this was not only legally unnecessary, but it had never occurred before, or at least not that anyone in recent memory could recall. That a candidate running for the highest office in the land chose to interrupt his campaign to witness the execution of someone sentenced to death, a severely cognitively impaired individual for which he personally refused to grant clemency despite the pleas of many of his major supporters, political intimates and friends, was ghoulish, at best. At worst? I leave that for you to decide.

So why did he do it? The explanation can be found in Nathan J. Robinson’s article, “Bill Clinton Has Always Been This Person,” dated April 8th of this year.

As Rector’s execution time drew closer, even the prison warden had become uncomfortable with the idea of executing Rector, with one observer saying the warden “seemed to be coming apart the closer the execution got.” Meanwhile, frantic appeals were being made to Governor Clinton to give Rector clemency. […]

There was no mystery as to why Clinton had refused to grant Rector clemency. Earlier in his political career, Clinton had lost a race against a “law and order” candidate, and those around him said he was determined not to make the same mistake twice. And it worked:

[I]n the following months the political value of Rector’s execution became abundantly clear. It knocked the law-and-order issue out of the campaign. One commentator said it showed Clinton was “a different sort of Democrat.” As another put it, “he had someone put to death who only had half a brain. You don’t find them any tougher than that.” […]

[I]t’s important to be clear about just [what] Clinton did: he deliberately had a hallucinating disabled man killed, in an execution so callous it made even the warden queasy. He personally ensured the execution of a mental child so as not to appear weak. This is an unthinkably monstrous act. As Derrick Jackson wrote in the Boston Globe: “The killing of human vegetables is an exercise for brutes.”

Clinton, in as ugly and pointed a fashion as I can possibly imagine, by that single action told every white voter in 1992 that he would do whatever it took to put black people down and grind them under the boot heel of the Federal Government’s authority. And he lived up to that promise. Let me count the ways, beginning with these reflections by Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matters:

[T]he 1994 crime bill that helped lead to the crisis over hyper-incarceration and the resulting boom of the private prison industry. The crime bill was part of a national effort that resulted in the reality that black people, who comprise approximately 13% of the nation’s population, represent 40% of the people incarcerated in this country. […]

Here’s the contradiction that black voters should pay close attention to: The 1994 crime bill and its resulting policies were supposedly designed to curb violent crime.

Yet the bill itself resulted in the bloating of prisons and jails with nonviolent offenders.

So, number one, that crime bill did very little to curb violent crime, which was already on the decline, but it did result in the mass incarceration of millions of non-violent offenders, of whom a grossly disproportionate number were (and still are) African American.

And then there is the rest of Bill’s controversial record in dealing with the issues facing the black community, including Welfare Reform that Bill Clinton proposed, passed into law and continued to defend at the BLM protest the other day in Philadelphia.

Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” […]

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.” […] The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).

… Extreme poverty doubled to 1.5 million in the decade and a half after the law was passed. What is extreme poverty? US households are considered to be in extreme poverty if they are surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month. […] Currently, the United States, the richest nation on the planet, has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the developed world.

But it was so much worse than just that. Bill Clinton is responsible for any number of racially divisive, discriminatory laws that have devastated African American and minority communities. He got rid of Pell grants for prisoners. He backed laws to deny financial aid to students convicted of drug-related offenses. He signed into law a “lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense.”

And he made it highly problematic for former prisoners, whether convicted of a crime or not, to return to their families, by making it easier for public housing authorities to deny housing through the “one-strike” rule, which meant that an entire family could be evicted from their home if even one member (or even a guest) had an arrest record for the most minor of crimes.

Black men and women upon their release from prison faced challenges thanks to Bill Clinton that Charles Dickens would have railed against. They left prison with “no money, no job,” and they often had no place to live, because their loved ones could not risk losing their own home by taking them in. As The Nation, in its story, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” stated:

By the end of Clinton’s presidency, more than half of working-age African-American men in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and basic public benefits—relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.

It is difficult to overstate the damage that’s been done. Generations have been lost to the prison system; countless families have been torn apart or rendered homeless; and a school-to-prison pipeline has been born that shuttles young people from their decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

This is Bill Clinton’s legacy to Black America, and as long as Hillary Clinton continues to roll him out as her primary spokesperson, fundraiser extraordinaire and unofficial adviser-in chief, she implicitly has adopted his legacy as one she not only values, but for which she assumes some measure of responsibility, as well.