The Patriot Post® · Clinton Faux-Apologizes for Threatening Coal Jobs

Hillary Clinton has a knack for lying to the faces of the people who have been hurt by her policies. She did it with the families of the men killed in Benghazi, and she lied to a man laid off because he worked in the coal industry, an industry the Left considers not only expendable but condemnable. On Monday, the former coal miner accosted Clinton at a West Virginia campaign stop, asking Clinton about her comments in March when she warned, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” The man wanted to know: How could she say something like that and then tell voters in places like West Virginia that she’s their friend?

“What I said was [taken] totally out of context from what I meant,” Clinton backpedaled. “It was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.” But moments after she told the audience in March that coal jobs would be destroyed, she continued, “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels.” So her threat was neither out of context nor a misstatement.

Clinton did apologize to the coal miner — for the way conservatives interpreted her comments. “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason or the excuse to be so upset with me,” Clinton said, “because that is not what I intended at all.”

The day before this confrontation, Clinton told the attendees at an NAACP dinner in Detroit, “We cannot let Barack Obama’s legacy fall into Donald Trump’s hands. We can’t let all the hard work and progress we have achieved over the last seven and a half years be torn away.”

What is that legacy? In 2009, Obama promised the price of electricity “would necessarily skyrocket” thanks to his policies of pursuing “green” energy at the expense of fossil fuels. What followed next was the systematic destruction of the coal industry through regulation. Why do we want four more years of that? Why give Clinton the chance to make good on Obama’s promise to hamstring the energy sector of our nation?