Hillary's RFK Comments

There is a lot of press coverage over a statement that Hillary Clinton made about RFK's assassination to justify her staying in a race that is still not over.

Is her resistance to bowing out a commitment to be admired or an unrealistic stubbornness to be reviled?

I played hockey growing up.  My last shift of a game was ALWAYS as intense as my first.  Even if the score was 8 - 1 against us.  That is the one aspect of my game that my teammates would tell you they appreciated the most.

I'm forced to wonder if this controversy is more about the reporters than the reports.  I suspect there is an attitude among a certain percentage of reporters that to do their job they must destroy some politicians.  Take some down like Woodward and Bernstein.  But those two had strong evidence of illegal activities by Pres. Richard Nixon's reelection campaign and his cover-up of those crimes.  I personally detested all the hoopla surrounding this episode until I saw a 'simple country lawyer' named Sam Ervin chair the Senate Committee that navigated the world through this sordid mess.  It seems the best protection for the country from political criminals, such as Nixon, is the political system engendered by the Constitution and administered by more honest men, such as Ervin.

Woodward's and Bernstein's reports did provide the public with the information to fuel the investigation.  It was NOT the reporters who undid Nixon.  It was the Separation of Powers provisions in the Constitution that charged the Senate with oversight of the Administrations's activities that did it.  

But Woodward and Bernstein are famous now.  And rightly so.  They showed a commitment to what they believed and that is to be admired.  But until Sam Ervin, to very many Americans it was viewed as unrealistic stubbornness to be reviled.

I have read commentary that Hillary's RFK comments were a mistake, ill-timed, cavalier, or careless.  But if you think about it, all she was really saying was that there is a process in place to determine who the Democratic Party's nominee will be and that process is still not finished.  She is committed to seeing it through to the end.  The reports of this situation are almost universal and overly energetic about defiling her unrealistic stubbornness.

I have NOT decided to vote for Hillary Clinton, nor any one else as yet, but what I hear from her are the comments of someone whose last shift of the game is going to be as intense as her first shift.

A commitment to be admired.