The old joke goes “How do you know when a politician is lying?” “Their lips are moving”. No one exemplifies this statement more than Hillary Clinton. Her most recent promise to the American people can looked upon as a broken promise from the moment it left her lips. Here it is, Hillary has vowed to cut crime in big cities in half as President:

Hillary Clinton on Friday accused President George W. Bush of spending billions of dollars to police Iraq’s “civil war” while cutting crime fighting in dangerous US inner cities.

The Democratic hopeful vowed to cut the murder rate in big cities by half if she becomes president, promised 100,000 new police officers on the streets, and laid out steps to cut America’s huge prison population.

Michelle Malkin reminds us why the promise of 100,000 new police officers sounds vaguely familiar:

The funds come from what may have been Bill Clinton’s most ballyhooed domestic program: Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, which he inaugurated in 1994 with a promise that, through federal grants for hiring recruits and buying equipment, it would put 100,000 new police on the streets.

Since 1994, COPS has doled out cash to more than 12,000 different law enforcement agencies. It has also been a creature of congressional micromanagement. This year’s appropriation bill is long list of small, specific goodies—such as $125,000 for the Green Bay, Wis., police’s GangNet program; $37,000 to the Napoleon, Ohio, police department for “technology upgrades”; and $1.2 million so the Montana Supreme Court can acquire teleconferencing gear. No need is so small or so peripheral that it can be left to local financing. But the idea of targeting money where it can do the most good has no place. NIJ found that on a per-crime basis, big cities get only two-thirds as much money as the rest of the country.

Even assuming Hillary was able to add an additional 100,000 police officers over the course of her first term as President, is it realistic to believe this would cut the already low crime rates in half? And since when was it the job of the Federal Government to fund police forces of local municipalities?

Her recent statement does give me cause for concern however. The last time she made an outrageous promise was during her 2000 Senate campaign where she promised to bring 200,000 jobs to Upstate New York. As Obama pointed out last week, “Upstate New York actually lost 240,000 additional jobs,” and went on to say that Clinton was instrumental in bringing a company called Tata Consulting Services—which specializes in “helping companies identify jobs that could be outsourced overseas” to Buffalo.

Based on Hillary’s track record, should we then be worried that crime would actually double under her administration?

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Barack Obama, Election 2008, Features, Hillary Clinton