Hillary Has Some Chutzpah Ripping Trump For Saying He Might Not 'Respect' Fraudulent Vote

Election 2016: Donald Trump has been roundly rebuked and openly reviled for saying during Wednesday night's debate that he might not "respect" the results of the election if it is fraudulent. But Hillary Clinton is the last person who should be criticizing him.

Real or not, Trump seems to have a major grievance. "Remember, we are competing in a rigged election," Trump told a Wisconsin rally Monday night. "They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common."

Then, when Trump suggested he might not accept the election results on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton was ready to strike back. "We've been around for 240 years," Hillary said, punching hard. "We've had free and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them."

She called Trump's response "horrifying" and castigated him for "denigrating our democracy." Imagine!

This was almost universally applauded, even by some Republicans. But the idea that we've always had "free and fair" elections isn't entirely true. More to the point, our presidential elections haven't always been pristine. Far from it.

As historian and author Stephen L. Carter notes, the 1800 election that gave us Thomas Jefferson as president was marred by claims from supporters of Aaron Burr that Jefferson had cheated. At the time, the person who finished second in the balloting became vice president. In 1804, Burr's final year as vice president, things became so fraught between the two sides of the political debate that Burr killed his main political antagonist, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel.

In 1824, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson fought bitterly to win the White House, and after a deadlock, the election became the first to be thrown into the House of Representatives. Jackson won the presidency four years later, after decrying the "corrupt bargain" that Adams made with House Speaker Henry Clay in 1824 to gain the presidency.

And there were other elections. Read the rest of this IBD editorial HERE.

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