Bill Clinton’s ‘I almost want to apologize’ doesn’t cut it

helped fuel the mass incarceration crisis that has decimated the African-American community.

That’s true, as Clinton himself acknowledged in a speech last summer before the NAACP. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said. “And I want to admit it.”

He should have stuck with that. Thursday’s confrontation was light on contrition and long on finger wagging. Clinton reminded protesters that the bill in question was signed in an era of lurid headlines about gangs shooting children. “You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter,” he shouted.

He credited the bill with dropping the nation’s crime rate to historic lows, which is a dubious claim. As PolitiFact has since observed, the crime rate was already falling when the bill was enacted.

Clinton also noted the bill was passed with the support of at least some African-American leaders. That part, at least, is true. Even so, it would be naive to believe opportunism did not play a part in Clinton’s signing the bill. After all, it gave him the perfect retort to Republicans who accused him of being “soft on crime.”

Now, 22 years later, the bill is back in the news and the ex-president wants to use an argument about it as an example of political incivility? If Clinton thinks it’s the key takeaway from last week’s confrontation, he is missing the point.

Who’s going to apologize for all the nonviolent African-American offenders who have lost decades of their lives behind bars while white offenders who committed the same crimes went free? Or for children sentenced to live in motherless homes and eat at fatherless tables? Or for the fact that the land of the free now has the highest incarceration rate on Earth?

Who will apologize that a community already withstanding high rates of poverty, unemployment and neglect has been hollowed out by an ill-conceived law?

More importantly, who will work to change it?

That’s the question for which all voters who care about justice must demand answers. “I almost want to apologize” doesn’t cut it. It’s not even on topic. If he truly desires to be forthright and to engage the people his crime bill has injured, then what the ex-president needs to say should be obvious:

“I passed a bad law. Here’s how Hillary will fix it.”

When President Obama departs for Saudi Arabia, an incubator of the 9/11 attacks, he will leave behind a dispute about government secrecy. The suppression of 28 pages, first from a public congressional inquiry and then from the 2004 report by the national 9/11 Commission, has spared the Saudis embarrassment, which would be mild punishment for complicity in 2,977 murders. When Obama returns, he should keep his promise to release the pages. Then he should further curtail senseless secrecy by countermanding the CIA’s refusal to release its official history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle.

The nature of the 28