Clinton's Recent Basket Case. What Is "Deplorable?"

Belisle, Trump Supporter

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, recently made (what I think she thought was) a 'cute' comment about supporters of her opponent.

Specifically, last week she commented that 

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. 

The comment was met with laughter and giggling in the crowd. 

Maybe it was the basket image, or perhaps people thought of the little yellow minion creatures of Moi, Moche et Mechant .

The comments have created a stir, those for and against tweeting, commenting, and bloviating on television.  I read today the comments of New York Times writer Charles Blow that the comment, whilst impolitic, was not incorrect, and that any supporters who help advance Trump's campaign are deplorable.

To be fair, Blow goes much further in his calumny than Clinton.  But saying that something “is clearly true” doesn’t make it so, 

I am not a Trump supporter, and I have *no* intention of voting for him in November. I think his solutions are far too often wrong, his rhetoric outrageous, and his personality vulgar. I think, based on his experiences, that he is not prepared to carry out *any* of the functions of President of the U.S.

That said, I do not believe that people are over-reacting. Not at all.

Mrs Clinton did not say, “David Duke, and Alex Jones, and people who do things like punch a guy being escorted out of a rally in North Carolina are deplorable.”

She literally said that “half” of the supporters of a candidate who is polling 40 per cent of the general population are deplorable because they are “racist, xenophobic, homophobic…” etc. She did not offer why so many people should be labelled with these -isms, mind you. Other than that she thinks that they are,

I do not share the Republican party views on gay marriage, for example. But how is it any different from her own position of just 8 years ago?

What she has basically done is tar a huge group of people with an ugly brush for which there is really no defence other than “no I am not.”

Being called “racist” is sort of like being called a communist 50 years ago. The attacker can define parameters to suit themselves (David Duke: racist; Al Sharpton: activist). I am not sure that Duke has actually encouraged people to the point that they murdered someone. Can the same be said of Sharpton?

Clinton sought out Sharpton's endorsement. President Obama has had him to the White House on multiple occasions.

Donald Trump, for all his ugliness, has never hosted David Duke.  Not that I am aware of. Maybe we can get Jake Tapper to ask Trump?

To far too many people, if you oppose affirmative action, you are a racist. If you think that one ought to consider the impact of a million immigrants to this country every single year on the current housing costs, wage market, and environmental sustainability of this country, you are a xenophobe.

I was sent an article yesterday from (of all places) “Think Progress”, a web clearing house of progressive thought. Ketchup sandwiches and other things stupid poor people eatdescribes how the working poor deserve not our ridicule or scorn, but our compassion.

Well, a huge number of these folks were just called “deplorable” by Hillary Clinton.

They are ‘deplorable’ because they live in a country where the changes of the past 50 years have not meant fancy brunch spots in the Mission District of San Francisco, or someone to clean their yards so that they can spend Saturday sitting in Starbucks working on their “blog.” Many of them are a group who, almost uniquely in the US, has seen its life expectancy actually decline in recent years.

THESE are the people that entitled Yale students decry as “privileged.”

Some of them who turn blindly to racist vipers like Duke are in a sense deplorable.  Their actions are to be condemned.

But when Hillary Clinton calls such a huge group of people into the same “basket,” so wantonly and clumsily, it in itself is just the sort of “dog whistle” that the Left have been whining about for a decade.

These people, despite the claims of Hillary Clinton "are not America," in fact are our countrymen. And some of their concerns are not fantasies nor imagined, even if Paul Krugman (who lives in the cozy ZIP codes of Princeton, NJ) or Blake Lively (Beverly Hills) think that they are.

THAT is why many of us react.

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