She laughed: Remembering Hillary's original sin

Much focus of late has been on Bill Clinton's decades of alleged sexual predations and claims that Hillary enabled them by attacking victims and engineering cover ups.

Donald Trump cited these to cast doubts on Hillary's "woman card" campaign-trail playing. Bill did pay a settlement, and admit to a White House affair with 23 year-old intern Monica Lewinsky

Hillary quickly fell silent on the women matter, following Trump's words. And the recent reemergence of rape-accuser Juanita Broaddrick as a public voice ensures the subject continued visibility.

But I believe attention should also be accorded an incident that flickered briefly in the media, but was wrongly forgotten.

In 1975, the same year she was to marry Bill, 27 year-old Hillary Clinton was running the University of Arkansas legal aid clinic. In that capacity, she defended Thomas Alfred Taylor; the 41 year-old factory worker was accused of luring a 12 year-old girl into his car and raping her.

According to reports by the Washington Free Beacon, Clinton attacked the girl as regularly "looking for older men." fantasizing, and being emotionally unstable.

Hillary's was the usual 'slut, nut' courtroom character assassination tactic feminists and victims' advocates usually decry. 

I don't dispute that defense attorneys are obligated to provide the best cases for their clients without regard for personal opinions of actual guilt. The burden is rightly on the state to prove its allegation.

Hillary ultimately won Taylor a brief sentence, using a technicality to avoid admittance of bloody underwear of his that police had uncovered subsequent to the alleged crime. (She was personally convinced of Taylor's guilt, though he did pass a pre-trial lie detector test she'd arranged. She would later laugh that her belief in lie detectors' validity had ended with that.)

Now, if Hillary's campaign-trail claims of sympathy for victims were real, though she would in 1975 have carried out her legal obligation to the best of her ability, she would in later years be ashamed of her role.

But she wasn't.

In a June 2014 report (http://freebeacon.com/politics/the-hillary-tapes/) the Free Beacon told of a previously-unknown audio tape. It dated "from 1983 - 1987" -- years after the Taylor case had gone through trial.

(The Free Beacon advised readers "Her comments on the rape trial are part of more than five hours of unpublished interviews conducted by Arkansas reporter Roy Reed with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife in the mid-80s." The tape is embedded in the link above,)

On it, the site noted, Clinton conceded she had believed Taylor guilty, and admitted using a technicality to aid him in getting a reduced sentence. And, according to the Free Beacon, Hillary laughs at several points, recalling the police lab's inadvertent destruction of DNA evidence.

This, to me, is the important point: Hillary Clinton found her pivotal role in aiding a defendant she herself believed to be guilty of committing a sex crime against a 12 year-old girl to be humorous years after the fact.

She didn't feel remorseful. She didn't express any regret, or sympathy for the child victim.

She laughed.