A tisket, a tasket
By Looking at how people define what is and isn’t bigotry when they are bigots but don’t want to be called bigots is as close as one can get to seeing the raw materials that go into making the dog whistles and other fallacies bigots use to justify their behavior.
And as Trump Remora Bill Mitchell demonstrated last week, these people are clowns.
I’m sure the Mitchell theorum: Physical Proximity to Black Person – Violence Directed at Black Person = Not a Racist, resonated with everyone from the latest generation of supremacists who are shouting about white genocide to the McArgle types who think they’ve earned a civil rights champion cookie for standing at the same bus stop with a black person.
And I can’t be racist I stood next to one of those people and exchanged a few words with him once, is much easier than the black imaginary friend/acquaintance, which is in turn even easier than not being a racist at all.
It’s no wonder then that Clinton’s comment about deplorable baskets has Trump, the Trumpkins & #NeverTrumpists rolling on the floor and shouting No Fair. Clinton’s failure to completely accept the bigot’s definition of bigotry is a threat that calls for reflexive cries of Foul!
It’s also partially to blame for the Bothsidesdoit turn in the article:
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.”What separates Obama and Romney’s comments from Clinton’s, however, is that they believed their comments were private. Clinton’s event on Friday was only the sixth out of the more than 330 fundraisers she’s attended as a candidate that was open to the press.
Of course. Clinton’s statement is true, whereas Romney’s statement was the opposite of true, but they both made the comments by moving their mouths and tongues so they’re essentially the same.
You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They’re 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 their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.
Now some of these 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.
Clinton gave Republicans an out. They could claim they’re in the harmless ickle Just want change basket and want nothing to do with the bigots. (It would be B.S., but when isn’t it?) But they can’t do it.
