Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps demanding that Hillary apologize for having used the term superpredator on one occasion, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term sociopath in the same way when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal.
And when confronted about his dishonest and hypocritical approach to discussing the crime bill and his own support for it, he lied. He claimed that he supported it because it included an assault weapons ban. This is false. He voted in favor of an earlier version of the bill, which did not include that assault weapons ban. Other Democrats  not Sanders (who never pushes for gun safety legislation)  then insisted on that assault weapons ban and he voted for the new version of bill after that language was added. Its dishonest for him to take other people to task for the consequences of a bill he himself voted for, which was the product of having to compromise with the GOP to get anything done, while blaming Hillary for the GOPs actions, lying about his reasons for voting for it, and refusing to acknowledge or take any responsibility for his own role. It would be so much more productive to have a national dialogue about what we learned as a nation from these mistakes, the role of systemic racism in mass incarceration, and a proposed set of recommendations and legislation to correct it now, instead of disingenuously attacking, blaming, and lying by omission about Hillary, and further erasing the historical reality in which that bill was passed.
