Too busy to meet with Hillary

Hillary Clinton stopped by Rutgers to get a nice photo op consoling the team about Don Imus's comments, but they were just too tired of the whole subject and preferred to study for their finals to meet with her. So she missed out on the photo op with the members of the women's basketball team where I guess she hoped to drive home the point that they were females and she was female and Don Imus had made fun of both of them so....something that should persuade people to vote for her.

Fortunately, she still was able to appear before Al Sharpton's group later on in the day, as Obama did also, so that Al Sharpton is still someone whose ring gets kissed in the Democratic Party.

And Colbert King implores Hillary to return the money she got from rapper Timbaland who commonly uses the sort of language that Hillary so deplores from Don Imus.

Mrs. Clinton, you may recall, took umbrage at Imus's remarks, branding them "small-minded bigotry and coarse sexism." His words, she said in an e-mail to supporters, "showed a disregard for basic decency and were disrespectful and degrading to African Americans and women everywhere."

Good for her, I say, except it must be asked why she was down in Florida making nice to -- and pocketing big bucks from -- a rapper whose obscenity-laced lyrics praise violence, perpetuate racist stereotypes and demean black women.

(tip via Bruce Kesler)

Of course, hypocrisy is not foreign to most politicians, but Hillary seems especially prone to issuing moralistic messages when she thinks there is some political benefit and ignoring the mote in her own eye. Jim Geraghty points to another example. Hillary is all upset that Circuit City is cutting jobs, but she didn't seem to have any problem with her publisher Simon and Schuster when they laid off workers even though the publisher probably barely broke even on her autobiography because they had given her such a sweet deal. We didn't see her bemoaning corporate practices that sent so much money her way when they were having to lay off workers.