It's the same thing. Both sides are engaging in this bigotry. You can't write off almost 50% of the electorate (Romney's 47% statement in 2012 and Clinton's deplorables comment) and expect anything but extremes.

Both sides are doing it.

Trump is a cancer of a person and supporting a man and the policies of a man who's openly transitioning our election system to one based on lies and racist demagoguery is simply, demonstrably deplorable. Relative to values like truth and tolerance that that we should share/ostensibly share.

Of course it was careless of Clinton to get caught saying it, but the deplorable behavior had to exist before she had a reason to comment on it.

And she didn't "get caught saying it", that was part of a prepared speech, and one she only later said she "regretted" saying, not that she was wrong about it.

You'll have to forgive me if my response to this is less than completely polite....

I don't think there was anything wrong with that part of that speech per se, though in the context of a political campaign it was absolutely a dumb thing to say, even though the sentiment was both accurate and aimed at encouraging reaching out to the other side. Someone should have known what kind of sound-bite that section of the speech was going to be cut down to and heavily reworded it so that wouldn't happen.

Even if you don't accept my analysis of the coding of her language, how can you tell me with a straight face she was "encouraging reaching out to the" irredeemables? That's very specific religious language, per Merriam Webster "not able to be saved, helped, or made better". What were they supposed to do in this/after this "reaching out"???

And whatever happened to being the President of all Americans? Even Obama shows every sign of believing that, despite his looking down his nose on us bitter clingers, treating us as "enemies" to be defeated and the like.

That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

It seemed pretty clear to me that the "deplorables" were the side of his support that made him "not a nazi, but the first choice of nazis", ya know? Considering what trump was doing with his half-courting but no-I'm-totally-not some fairly disgusting groups and sentiments, and what she actually said in the speech isn't really out there and the qualifiers leave her comments accurate and even generous:

http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorable...

I mean, she enumerated which part of his base she meant to put in that group, and allowed that some portion of even that part could be reached, let alone the ones who were not put in the deplorables "basket" and have legit problems with e.g. how globalization has left them rather screwed or with political corruption or who actually do want stronger borders but not because they dislike Hispanics (putting aside that she was a candidate especially unqualified to reach anyone for whom those and related things are major concerns—which is probably why someone as incredibly unelectable and also not terribly well positioned to credibly claim those sorts of positions as Trump managed to soundly beat her). As for "re-education", the language for the rest was pretty standard "these people aren't awful and have real problems and we haven't done a good enough job of telling them how we'll address those" stuff. "Re-education" is... kinda "we're gonna get herded into FEMA camps! No really, I read it on the Internet!" territory. Reading that "coding" doesn't strike me as reasonable, no.

However, though the speech wasn't inaccurate and the message was a good one to deliver to her base, it was really stupid in the context of this political race, and thinking it'd play well when cut down to a few words could speak to a certain arrogance which I wouldn't be surprised to find was very much present in Clinton and her campaign. Expecting any of the nuance of the speech, so central to its meaning, to be preserved was really, really dumb.

> That's why my family voted for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary (by then McCain had the Republican one locked up and Missouri has open primaries). Obama is no prize, but he's not a fraction as dangerous as Hillary and to a lessor extend Bill. We had lived through and remembered their first co-presidency all too well.

Aside from Greenspan maybe not doing enough to cool off the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market to make the later crash more mild, what were the big errors made by Bill Clinton's administration that made it worse than any other typical 8-year period in recent US history? I'm struggling to think of a recent-ish president who didn't have more serious scandals and blunders than Clinton. Carter—generally ineffective; Reagan—Iran/Contra and related were pretty awful; Bush Sr. wasn't terrible but got screwed by the business cycle and a too-public pledge to stick to excessively limited tax policy, he'd be a good contender for "not worse than Clinton" I guess; W. had Iraq which was ZOMGWTF bad, and his tax cuts were probably not the right call and left a giant shadow on the budget; Obama may or may not have been able to guide or halt the Arab Spring and related events to some better outcome, but I'm leaning toward "may" and will go ahead and call that worse than any blunders of Clinton's that I can recall. I think the jury's still out on things like permanent normalization of trade with China, which was probably going to happen regardless of whether President was D or R at that time, and besides, that was near the end of his second term and not really something you'd "live through" during his presidency, as if it made one's life a struggle at that time.

What was so unusually bad about the presidency '93-'00? Seriously curious, not a rhetorical question.

[EDIT] minor grammar fixes

His murdering a hundred religious dissidents in their home for starters? Their disproportionate viciousness towards anyone who happened to be in their way, e.g. Billy Dale, or committed lèse-majesté? To get on Obama's IRS shit list you have to engage in political activism and it's a nothing personal, just your group thing, it took way way less for the Clintons. There's lots more, which I'm not going to go into, for the simple fact is that I can now relegate the Clinton Crime Family into the ash heap of history.

As for "FEMA camps" et. al., I'm talking about the pre-FEMA period (when we still pretended to care about our civilian population surviving, my mother was in fact a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the metal sign), when re-education was a PRC and Communist Vietnam concept starting in the mid-late '60s (Cultural Revolution).

And if you think that's all horribly irrelevant nowadays, our current President launched his political career in the home of two of the most notorious of those engaging in the Left's beloved Direct Action, who explicitly planned to liquidate the roughly 10% of of the population they guessed couldn't be re-educated.

However, I'd say that especially with your takes on current history, we just aren't living in the same reality, and should keep our discussion narrowly focused.

Or just put it in the ash heap Hillary and Bill are now in ^_^, really, at this point what difference does it make?

Yeah, sure, that's cool. Thanks for keeping things civil despite the topic, nice, interesting exchange (not being sarcastic, I'll add, since it's sometimes hard to tell on the Internet).

And, seriously, thinking about it, after today/right now! I should just steer clear of all things Clinton until the pardons are handed out, or not, and focus on the future. They've been "living rent free in my brain" for ... 24 years now !?!!?!!!!

Another reason I'm happy Trump put two political dynasties in the ash heap of history this year, add 4 to 12 years for the Bushes....

Xenophobia, prejudice, and intolerance aren't what Clinton sees as America. If those things are what you see as America, that's your right. In which case there's an irreconcilable gap between you and Clinton and you need to accept that she's going to consider you as standing outside of those values that she has always taken for granted as broadly accepted.

Be the thing you want others to see you as, or else accept the consequences of being seen a different way. Don't be surprised or complain about it.

Nazi to the Jews: Be Aryan, or face the consequences.