Setting the Record Straight on 'I don't feel no ways tired'

I may not care for Hillary Clinton, but I'm ethically-bound to speak in her defense.

First of all, Full Disclosure: There are precious few individuals for whom I harbor more pure contempt than I do for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nevertheless, because I also cherish truth, I find myself in the position of having to step up and speak in her defense.

In Monday's American Thinker, in an essay by Brian C. Joondeph (like me, a long-time contributor to AT, and for whom I have a good deal of respect), he wrote:

The socialist/communist theater kids include Hillary Clinton. In 2007, while campaigning for her first failed presidential bid, she spoke to a black church congregation in Selma, Alabama.

Pandering to the Southern black audience, she theatrically adopted a Southern drawl, saying, “I don’t feel no ways tired” in a cringeworthy manner.

But I believe it is a canard, an unfounded rumor accepted as truth, to characterize Queen Hillary as having "theatrically adopted a Southern drawl" in order to shamelessly pander to her audience.

It is as much a canard as the widely-believed but deliberately misreported half-truth that Donald Trump praised Neo-Nazis and Klansmen as "very fine people" at Charlottesville. It simply didn't happen the way we are expected to believe it happened.

Because, when Hillary said, "I don't feel no ways tired," of course it was not her normal manner of speaking; she was quoting from the 1978 spiritual by that name by the Rev. James Cleveland, and she was quoting faithfully the dialect in which it had been written.

If we are going to stand for truth and fairness, she should not be faulted for that.

Would one be condemned for, say, speaking to an Italian-American audience and quoting a poem by T.A. Daly (like "Da Leetla Boy") in the dialect in which it was written?

There have been, I'm sure, many, many occasions on which Queen Hillary has affected an accent (or adopted other mannerisms, like carrying a bottle of hot sauce in her purse) in order to shamelessly pander to her audience (similar to the theatrical ploys, cited by Joondeph, to which other Democrats have cynically resorted), but I don't believe that "I don't feel no ways tired" was one of them.

ST