Hillary Clinton: Half of Trump supporters are in ‘basket of deplorables’, by Dan Merica on CNN (very PC). Hillary Clinton, before introducing Barbra Streisand at an LGBT fundraiser in downtown New York:
To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.
And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. …
Some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America
The crowd laughed and applauded. According to average ticket prices and attendance figures provided by the campaign, Clinton raised around $6 million at the fundraiser (some paid $50,000 to attend).
Hillary the unifier? Divisive and eliminationist more like.
Trump tweets:
Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!
A Trump spokesman said in a statement that Clinton
ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.
About half of Americans support Trump. Do the math. Hillary thinks at least 25 percent of America to be deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, and “not America”. Trump supporters don’t seem to include many recent immigrants — who does Hillary think “is America”?
The CNN article puts the PC spin on similar gaffes in the past:
In 2008, Obama told an audience at a closed fundraiser that decades of lost jobs and unfulfilled promises from Washington had left some Pennsylvanians “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
He later acknowledged that the comment was “boneheaded.”
And late in the 2012 campaign, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was memorably caught in a secretly recorded video telling donors that “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what,” saying they “believe they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.”
Romney later told reporters the comments were “not elegantly stated.”
Romney’s remarks, made in private, were secretly recorded and made public, dooming his presidential campaign against President Barack Obama. You figure out which is fact and which is ignorant prejudicial name calling. Defending western culture in peacetime has rarely been more difficult.
UPDATE: Clinton expresses regret for saying ‘half’ of Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’. Spin control. Hillary:
Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong. … I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign
So the “half” bit was wrong (should it be higher or lower?), but not the rest. Only the size of the basket was wrong? Trump responds:
Isn’t it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her failing campaign? For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans.
In an interview on Channel 2 News Israel that aired Thursday, Hillary said:
If I were to be grossly generalistic, I would say you can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I call the deplorables — the racists, you know, the haters, and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he’s going to restore an America that no longer exists. So just eliminate them from your thinking, because we’ve always had an annoying prejudicial element within our politics.
Bear in mind that anyone, even if perfectly color blind, who disagrees with them on a broad range of issues is called “racist” by the PC. Think “all lives matter” — then they condemn you as racist.
Also note that the PC explicitly support different government rules for different races, and that they divide the electorate along racial lines and encourage divisiveness for minority votes. So who are the racists?
UPDATE: Will “Basket of Deplorables” become the new “47 Percent”? by Ed Morrissey.
Nothing says woman of the people like a political candidate who got filthy rich while serving in the Senate and State Department insulting millions of voters while surrounded by celebrities, right? Hillary Clinton shifted her attack from Donald Trump to his supporters at a fundraiser in New York City, putting “half” of them into “a basket of deplorables.” That’s a memorable turn of phrase, but will Hillary want to forget it?
Is this Hillary’s “let them eat cake” moment?
Later, Hillary campaign flack Nick Merrill tried to backpedal a bit from Hillary’s calculations. She was talking about the “alt-right,” not just reg’lar folks. …
Nice try. Not even the alt-right thinks they’re half of Trump’s supporters. They are a small percentage of voters who happen to be on the same side of millions of voters who also want a disruptor rather than an establishmentarian. Their choice may or may not be wise, but the vast majority of Trump voters have nothing to do with the alt-right, and probably have never heard the term before. …
This sneering, condescending, and insulting stereotyping of millions of voters perfectly encapsulates the Clintonian quarter-century, especially with their above-the-law antics since leaving the White House. And that’s why most candidates stick to insulting each other, and not voters.
Expect to see the Trump team using the word “basket” as much as possible to remind people of Hillary’s comments, while the media does their best to deflect and forget as soon as possible.
