Hillary Clinton Only Decided Trump was "Offensive" When He Went Republican

This is really about the double standard, in which a Hillary Clinton or Harry Reid can crack racist jokes about Indians, in which it's okay for media figures to claim that Cruz and Rubio aren't Latino (but when Ben Carson mentioned that Obama was raised white, that was an outrage), and in which you generally get a pass for saying offensive and awful things. Cases in point include Al Sharpton and Don Imus.

Is there any universe in which liberal presidential candidates would meet up with people who say things like, "White folks was in caves while we were building empires…. We taught philosophy and astrology [sic] and mathematics before Socrates and those Greek Homos ever got around to it".

Trump wasn't offensive back when he was giving her and other Dems money. Now he's suddenly 'offensive'.

Hillary Clinton says she once considered GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump as a man who was "affable and was good company," and has been surprised to see him as a candidate begin to "traffic in prejudice and paranoia" instead.

"It's been most surprising to me to see somebody who was affable and was good company, who had a reputation of being bigger than life, really traffic in a lot of the prejudice and paranoia and some of the comments that he's made which has been so divisive and mean spirited," Clinton continued.

Those actions, the Democratic front-runner said, don't "quite fit in with what I thought I knew about him. So I think it will be interesting to see what — if he does get the nomination — he decides to do with it, how he presents himself.

"But he has really been offensive and in many respects surprising to those of us who did know him."

Now you might paint this as Hillary subtly, but clumsily, trying to say that this isn't the real Trump, it's just a show he's putting on to win the nomination. I certainly don't know the man as well as she does. But there's certainly plenty of material, and her opposition research people no doubt have even more, which shows that Trump didn't start being offensive last week. He had varying views on illegal immigration and other issues, but this is a guy who was comfortable being on Howard Stern and who had been making tabloid headlines for decades.

We've seen before that when people who are either on the left or on good terms with the Democrats switch sides, suddenly all their flaws, which people know about long beforehand, take on new "significance". Take the attacks on David Mamet or James Woods, for example. If Al Sharpton somehow became a Republican tomorrow, that old "Greek Homos" comment, which no Democrat wants to talk about now, would suddenly take on new significance.

Such hypocrisy is normal enough, but it becomes more problematic since the 'problematic police' have decided that they get to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't, whose speech crimes are not problematic and whose are.