by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
With that out of the way, here is what Hillary said (read beyond the “deplorable” stuff to where she gets to her actual point):
“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, 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 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
“But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
For that, Hillary got hammered by the media (who conveniently left out the context of the “other basket of people who feel that government has let them down,” etc.).
Well, the media were wrong to hammer her. And she herself was wrong, too. Because ALL Republicans are in a basket of deplorables (a felicitious coinage, BTW: Hillary is one nifty language slinger).
Here's why:
Burning fossil fuels threatens to destroy the planet, but Republicans believe climate change is a hoax.
That is deplorable.
Obamacare, based on a Republican idea successfully introduced to Massachusetts and signed into law by Republican governor Mitt Romney, has expanded subsidized healthcare to millions of Americans. Yet the GOP wants to repeal it.
That is deplorable.
Republican governors have chosen to opt out of expanding Medicaid, thereby killing 17,000 Americans a year.
That is deplorable.
Republicans want to loosen restraints on our banks when Wells Fargo has just paid $185 million in fines for its fraudulent practices, proving that bank cultures remain as crooked as they were in 2008.
That is deplorable.
Paul Ryan comes up with ridiculous GOP budget plans all the time, in which his numbers never add up.
That is deplorable.
Senate Republicans refuse to hold hearings about confirming Obama's appointee to the Supreme Court.
That is deplorable.
The GOP Congress has done nothing besides repealing Obamacare more than 50 times. They've done nothing about funding our crumbling infrastructure, or doing any tax reform, or immigration reform, etc. etc. The GOP Congress is the biggest do-nothing Congress in history.
That is deplorable.
GOP Governor Brownback has turned Kansas into a experiment in Republican policies, which has ruined his state.
That is deplorable.
According to Eric Levitz in New York magazine, these are the facts:
“In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State's governor's mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement's blueprint for Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we've got a different way, and it works.'
“As you've probably guessed, that model collapsed. Like the budget plans of every Republican presidential candidate, Brownback's “real live experiment” proceeded from the hypothesis that tax cuts for the wealthy are such a boon to economic growth, they actually end up paying for themselves (so long as you kick the undeserving poor out of their welfare hammocks). Backers of the budget touted projections from the Kansas Policy Institute, which predicted it would generate $323 million in new local revenues by 2018. But marginal gains at the municipal level were dwarfed by the $688 million loss that Brownback's budget wrought in its first year of operation.* Meanwhile, Kansas's job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri's 1.5 percent and Colorado's 3.3.
“Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state's public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback's inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off. Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state's university system. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback's approval rating was 26%, the lowest of any governor in the US.
“Louisiana has replicated these results. When Bobby Jindal moved into the governor's mansion in 2008, he inherited a $1 billion surplus. When he moved out last year, Louisiana faced a $1.6 billion projected deficit. Part of that budgetary collapse can be put on the past year's plummeting oil prices. The rest should be placed on Jindal passing the largest tax cut in the state's history and then refusing to reverse course when the state's biggest industry started tanking. Jindal's giveaway to the wealthiest citizens in the country's second-poorest state cost Louisiana roughly $800 million every year. To make up that gap, Jindal slashed social services, raided the state's rainy-day funds, and papered over the rest with reckless borrowing. Today, the state is scrambling to resolve a $940 million budget gap for this fiscal year, with a $2 billion shortfall projected for 2017.”
Yet Republicans continue to favor trickle-down supply-side economics, despite the real-life proof of its failures in Kansas and Louisiana staring them right in the face (policies that lift only yachts and sinks most boats, which may be exactly what they want anyway).
That is deplorable.
Republican have made a politically inexperienced businessman their standard bearer. A man who discriminated against blacks as a landlord; lies 72% of the time; stiffed his suppliers regularly; won't release his tax returns (because they'll show he's nowhere near as rich as he says he is); wants to ban Muslims from American when our constitution guarantees freedom of religion; wants to round up eleven million Mexicans and deport them; calls women “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” and “disgusting animals;” says Megyn Kelly was “bleeding from her wherever” when she asked him tough questions; does not think John McCain is a war hero; attacks a Muslim Gold Star family whose soldier son died a hero in Iraq; presides over supporters who yell “lock her up” and “kill the bitch” about Hillary at his rallies; encourages his supporters to beat up protesters; admires foreign dictators; mocks a disabled reporter; said for many years our president wasn't born in the US; calls Mexicans rapists and drug dealers; insults his opponents; retweets white nationalist dogma — in other words, a man who runs on outright sexist, racist bigotry and lies, and is surrounded by extreme far-right bigots campaign managers (mostly because he was turned down by all the actual professionals). Moreover, he's being advised by serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes, who has cost his former TV network $20 million in a settlement with a woman he harassed.
That is deplorable.
ALL Republicans are deplorable, and our media are too, for being enthusiastic Trump enablers. They continue to give him tons of free and soft publicity. They should be forced to drink many basketsful of deplorable liquor themselves. They attack Clinton for her ties to the Clinton Foundation, one of the greatest charities in the world, and downplay the scandal of Trump sending $25,000 from his charity (an illegal act for which he was fined) to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi's PAC in Florida, after which she did not join New York's investigation into his Trump University scam.
Why is Clinton not crushing Trump by double digits in the polls? Simple: because Trump gets a break from the media, and Clinton is attacked for absolute BS, like not telling the media she has pneumonia soon enough, or her emails, or Benghazi, or god knows what else. (The GOP wasted $500 million of our tax money on their anti-Hillary “investigations.”) The woman is called a liar, when the facts show that she lies less than all other politicians. Here is the truth about Hillary, spoken by President Obama at a rally this past Tuesday:
“And, yes, she's got her share of critics. And she's been caricatured by the right and sometimes by the left. And she's been accused of everything you can imagine, and has been subjected to more scrutiny and what I believe is more unfair criticism than anybody out here. And she doesn't complain about it. And you know what, that's what happens when you're under the microscope for 40 years. But what sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying, and she never stops fighting for us — even if we haven't always appreciated it. And look, I understand we're a young country, we are a restless country. We always like the new, shiny thing. I benefitted from that when I was a candidate. And we take for granted sometimes what is steady and true. And Hillary Clinton is steady, and she is true. And the young people who are here, who — all you've been seeing is just the nonsense that's been on TV. You maybe don't remember all the work that she has had to do, and all the things she has had to overcome, and all the good that has happened because of her efforts. But you need to remember. You need to understand this. If you're serious about our democracy, then you've got to be with her. She's in the arena, and you can't leave her in there by herself.”
Against this truth stands the vast rightwing conspiracy of truckloads of deplorables, who have been smearing Hillary for years. And our media swallow their lies about Hillary and pass them on wholesale to the public. America's mistrust of Hillary is based on rightwing lies.
All this proves one thing: our media is misogynist to the core, as is Trump.
And that, finally, is utterly deplorable.