Wingnuts Find Hillary Clinton's Love Letters To Saul Alinsky, Lenin, David Cassidy

While you were all enjoying your Sabbath day of rest, the Washington Free Beacon -- the digital equivalent of Sunday paper circular ads you toss in the trash without looking at them -- was breaking a HUGE SCOOP!!!!! Are you guys ready for this? The Beacon has found Hillary Clinton’s letters to noted Communist mole Saul Alinsky!

Well, one letter, actually. But Alinsky’s secretary wrote back to Hillary, so we guess technically that justifies using the headline The Hillary Letters. ( Click here for the headline’s musical accompaniment.) What plotting to overthrow capitalism and have the workers seize the means of production does Hillary’s letter reveal? Let’s commiesplore.

Dear Saul,

When is the new book coming out—or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?

Ha ha! Even in 1971, Hillary knew enough to snark at the wingnuts who are now shitting themselves over this letter. If we can think of no other reason to vote for her in 2016, that might do it.

Let’s see, what else? Blah blah, people are realizing that organizing is important, blah blah, I’m surviving law school, the dream of a free and open society is alive, blah blah blah. It’s all fairly anodyne bullshit, the kind of thing a 23-year-old idealist might send to an older person whom she had met many times and who had given her some career advice. Every liberal law student from that era probably has correspondence like this in their files. For that matter, every conservative law student from that era probably has the fangirl love letter he sent to William Buckley.

But to the wingnuts, this letter reveals that ZOMG RADICAL ALINSKY HAD A GREATER INFLUENCE ON HILLARY THAN WE THOUGHT. (Stanley Kurtz at National Review practically has a ragegasm in response.) What’s funny is how the Beacon tries to make this point, and then immediately contradicts itself.

The letters obtained by the Free Beacon suggest that Clinton experimented more with radical politics during her law school years than she has publicly acknowledged.

In Living History, she describes her views during that time as far more pragmatic than leftwing.

She “agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas,” Clinton wrote in her first memoir, but the two had a “fundamental disagreement” over his anti-establishment tactics.

She described how this disagreement led to her parting ways with Alinsky in the summer before law school in 1969.

“He offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school,” she wrote.

“Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.”

Now that sounds like the Hillary Clinton we all know: a liberal as a young woman who, over the 43 years since she wrote this letter, has moved to the center and courted power brokers and money men her 23-year-old self would have likely abhorred. On Planet Wingnut, this just means she has been biding her time and hiding her true self until she can rip off her centrist mask and reveal herself to be a frothing Communist hellbent on destroying America.

The Beacon itself points out that these attacks on Hillary over her relationship with Alinsky go back to the 1990s, so expect at least another two years of wingnuts screaming “ALINSKY! ALINSKY! OOGA BOOGA!” Which will mean nothing to liberals who had never heard of the guy until Barack Obama ran for office. In other words, everyone under the age of 60.

[ Washington Free Beacon ]