Senator Clinton is a racist...NOT!

What do DVRs and headlines have in common? Both are a convenience to the average American who can't seem to find enough hours in a day to do everything. We can't watch all the television we want when we want it (writer's strike notwithstanding), and we can't read all the news that's out there. We can wait for television, so it's recorded for later consumption; news is a different story. Since news develops at such a rapid pace, we need concise headlines that are attention-grabbing and may not necessarily tell the whole truth. While we now have more time to devote to other pursuits, it comes at the expense of reason and deduction. Politicians use this facet of our reliance on instant gratification (whether consciously or not) to twist innocuous statements into something completely different. For example, I can say, "I once volunteered to work at a Boys and Girls club because I enjoyed the company of children," and it can be reported as:

• 32-year-old Man Enjoys Company of Young Boys, or
• Blogger Worked with Girls at Club

Take Senator Hillary Clinton's statement that was blown out of proportion: "I would point to the fact that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done...That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished."

The statement was truncated into various forms, but the most repeated sentences and phrases were the first sentence and "it took a president to get it done." The Obama camp made Clinton out to be a racist for seemingly diminishing the impact that Martin Luther King, Jr. had in the Civil Right Movement. Charles Krauthammer wrote correctly that Clinton's comment was not racist, but erroneously inferred that Clinton was comparing herself to President Johnson and Obama was like Dr. King, a "charismatic dreamer."

Both the Obama camp and Krauthammer are inaccurate. Watching the video and reading the words offers a clear picture of what Senator Clinton was talking about: she was talking about how important it was to have a strong president to carry out the dreams and visions that needed to be realized. The Civil Rights Act was used as an example, and was not the subject of Clinton's statement.

I'm happy that the Obama and Clinton camps are putting this behind them, but this incident will fester in people's minds, because the knee-jerk reaction to truncated statements and headlines is so powerful that it overwhelms our sense of reason. It degenerates (as always) into a "you're a ," "Am not!" "Are, too!" "Am not!" that is easier to absorb and understand the complexity that is life.

And we also don't have the time.