On Tuesday, Hillary gave a breakfast talk at the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp., where she blasted the Bush administration for cutting community development programs and criticized school vouchers. Hillary is a longtime foe of vouchers (although she paid big bucks to send her daughter to attend the elite and exclusive Sidwell Friends school, proving that the public school system that is good enough for everyone else's kids isn't quite good enough for hers), and is strongly supported by the teachers unions.
The senator told her audience that if school vouchers were acceptable, then a Holy War would erupt, or something like that: "First family that comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher.’ Next parent that comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist ...' The parent says, 'The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy…You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me…' So what if the next parent comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad?...' I won't stand for it."
However, Andrew Coulson, an education expert for the Cato Institute, notes that Hillary is being "misleading because under federal law no one would be permitted to open a school that advocates violence against the country."
It was also interesting that Mrs. Clinton would choose Harlem to rail against vouchers, because in January 2005, Geoffrey Canada, president of Harlem’s Children Zone, the black community's largest children's-advocacy group, declared that Harlem's public schools "are producing children for jail," and "They're only good at producing children who have no chance at all."
