Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was slammed by a coal protester for her comments about putting coal miners out of business, and Clinton offered a lame half-apology in response.
At a campaign event on Monday, Bo Copley, who lost his job as a coal foreman, confronted Clinton with his eyes welling with tears.
“I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of, out of jobs, and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend, because those people out there don’t see you as a friend,” Copley said.
“Those people” is a reference to the protesters who are angry with Clinton over her coal comments.
Naturally, Clinton offered a lame, callous non-apology.
“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton replied. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”
Clinton also said she felt “a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason or the excuse to be so upset with me, because that is not what I intended at all.”
As usual, Clinton is lying. Hot Air‘s Larry O’Connor provides the full context of Clinton’s remarks on coal:
I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
The full context of her comments make it perfectly clear that she intends on smothering the coal industry, just as President Barack Obama has done.
O’Connor also points out that Clinton’s “apology” is anything but.
“Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim?”,
Hillary Clinton
“It’s barely an expression of regret,” writes O’Connor. “Even more, if there is any regret in this statement, it is not over the content of what she said, it is an expression of regret over the consequences of what she said.”
On Monday, former President Bill Clinton was heckled by protesters over his wife’s comments on coal.
(h/t: The Daily Caller)