Double Down on the Deplorables

Hillary's "deplorables" comment has been decried by media pundits as a blunder, compared to Mitt Romney's remark about the 47% of Americans who will simply never vote Republican.  NPR's reporters have been saying how bad it looked for Hillary speaking to a well heeled crowd of affluent white women to denigrate Trump supporters and Mr. Trump has had a field day saying Hillary slanders hard working Americans.

Hillary's shrinking response shows she has learned nothing from Donald. When you say something outrageous and steal a few headlines, don't retreat, don't apologize: Double Down.

What I'd have loved to hear Hillary say is this:  "Mr. Trump is trying to define that comment as the opening salvo in a class war. His supporters are white males with no more than high school educations, and he says I look down my nose at those people.

" Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Traditionally, those are the people who built cars on assembly lines, worked the steel mills and built the skyscrapers and the battle ships and the airplanes.  Those are the core of the Democratic party.

"But as he well knows, it's not that demographic, that group I deplore. I deplore those people you see in his crowds who smile and nod and cheer when he says Muslims--and he doesn't qualify that by saying 'some Muslims'--he means all Muslims, hate America and want to destroy it.  He uses that hate and bigotry to attack Mr. and Mrs. Khan who lost a son who serve fighting Islamic fundamentalists, and he says Mrs. Khan stood by her husband silently during the Convention because Muslim women are not allowed to speak in public.  He gets cheers from the crowd when she says Mexican immigrants are rapists and when he says no judge of Mexican ancestry can judge him because no Mexican, even one born in Indiana can judge him. Notice what he says: You're not an American, even if you were born here, if your parents are from Mexico.
"This is a man who believes President Obama was born in Kenya and so cannot be a real American. Well, maybe he was born in Hawaii, but his father was born in Kenya, so like the judge, he cannot be a real American.

And let's not be coy here. What makes Mr. Obama illegitimate in Mr. Trumps eyes is Mr. Obama is Black. It's not that he's Kenyan or Hawaiian or any of the other things, to Mr. Trump, and most importantly to his supporters, Mr. Obama is disqualified because he is Black. And just like the judge who was born in Indiana, well he can't be a real American because his parents speak Spanish and were born in Mexico. Make America Great Again is just a dog whistle. You know the dog whistle: you use the dog whistle so only the one you want to hear it hears it. And Make America Great Again means 'Make America White Again.' And that's what Mr. Trump's most ardent supporters are hearing and that's what they're cheering for. 

"Well, there will always be despots and bigots and hate mongers--nothing can stop those lunatics from existing. But the crowds who support those haters. Those are the real problems. Those are the real deplorables. And those who simply smile through those vile statements, who say, well I don't agree with everything he says, but he's honest, when he has hate dripping from his lips, those people, those deplorable people, those genteel haters, they are the real deplorables."

If she can say that, then she deserves to win. If she cannot, well, we get the leaders we deserve.

The Nervous Mess Minister and Donnie John

when Donald Trump launched into his cant on Crooked Hillary at a Black church in Flint and the Minister got up and cut him off with the words, "We did not invite you here to make a political speech." The Donald retreated, but the next visit to Fox News he bragged about his performance, saying the minister was a nervous mess.

Too bad the minister was not wearing a microphone, and too bad she was not more assertive. She was just a little too polite. Firm, but polite. It would have been nice to see her really launch an assault in the mode Donald launches his, and see how well he can take it.  Looking at his quaking at a mild rebuke, one would think he wouldn't do well with a full blown assault.

The last time anyone challenged him full on was Megan Kelly and we all know how that turned out. Since then from Chris Cuomo to Matt Lauer, nobody has actually got in his face. His poll numbers reflect that.

Pneumonia and a Free Press

Sue Page and Tamara Keith tell us Hillary hid her pneumonia. What a slut!

She got the walking pneumonia and the boogey woogie blues this news cycle.
And now you got people who make their living in makeup on TV sets fluffing their hair and checking their eye make up saying that this pneumonia thing is just part of a bigger story which is Hillary Clinton's secret streak. She had pneumonia on Friday and it was SUNDAY before she told us about it. She is just such a control freak. Paranoid as Richard Nixon. Always hiding something. Always obfuscating. That woman. And you know, maybe it's more than pneumonia. Maybe Donald Trump is right about Hillary. Maybe she's too frail to be President. Maybe she is LOW ENERGY!

Oh, let's all go vote for Donald J. Trump, who after all is the very picture of male vigor and he's big where a man should be big.

Setting aside the nebulous term "pneumonia" and the even more non medical term "walking pneumonia"  let us ask ourselves, each and every one of us a question: When you have a cough, or a urinary tract infection or low back pain because you lifted furniture, do you call up all your friends and relatives to tell them all about it? 

Surely, you call your local newspaper.

You know what's really exasperating about this election, about all elections lately, actually: People who you know are not total idiots start talking like idiots.

That doesn't make them idiots, just fools.

But that Hillary, taking a risk with the public health by spreading her pneumonia germs around.  She does have that kind of pneumonia, right? I mean, she has been shaking hands with people without applying Purell every time. What a typhoid Mary! She's a public health menace! Isn't she? I mean she breathes on people, on crowds of people. 

Now, on the other hand, if you nod your head when Donald John says deplorable things, that does, in fact, make you a Deplorable, ipso facto. 
I mean, haven't you watched those Trump rallies and said to yourself: He's an idiot, but at least he's entertaining, but look at those wackos in the audience! They are scary and he's making them feel NORMAL! Well, don't let us allow them to creep out from under their rocks and whatever greasy holes they came from and shout Zeig Heil! Let's shine a light on these creepy crawlies.

But Hillary, don't apologize for speaking the truth. And put your feet up and chill.

The Deplorables: Martin Shkreli Exhibit A

Birds of a feather, do flock together. 

Martin Shkreli, who bought the drug company which made an anti parasitic  drug, Daraprim, and then raised its price 5000% percent reportedly stood outside Chelsea Clinton's apartment when Hillary retreated there to recover from her very bad day in the heat and Mr. Shkreli shouted that she needed pharma now and other taunts.

The smirking Mr. Shkreli is a Donald Trump supporter.

Why are we not surprised?

The only question now is whether Ms. Clinton underestimated when she said "half" of Mr. Trump's supporters are deplorable. 

Hillary Clinton Playing It As it Lays

Ms. Didion

"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask...You might ask that. I never would, not any more."
--Joan Didion, "Play It As It Lays." 

"The Countess Margit Batthyany, nee Thyssen-Bornemisza, threw a lavish black tie good-bye party fo the SS officers in residence at her castle near the Hungarian border, where she had been reportedly cuckholding her husband with a Gestapo officer. At some point during the evening, the SS men reportedly marched out some Jewish slave laborers. They invited guests to shoot them for a while, then returned to the dance." 
--Ann Marie O'Connor, "The Lady in Gold"

"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. And he has lifted them up...He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric."
--Hillary Clinton



Evil may be an out dated word, but it does have the virtue of clarity. 
But what is evil? If evil has clarity, we should be able to define it pretty easily.

Of course, evil  is in the eye of the beholder.  For Countess Batthyany, those Jews who were shot for sport at her dinner party must have been evil. Shooting them for sport was like shooting rats. Or like shooting that deer like thing at her feet.  Although, one might ask, how much fun is shooting rats or deer in black tie?  (The fact is, having seen rats on city streets, they are not my favorite mammals, but shooting them would not fill me with joy.)
Evil is what we find repellent, although the beggar covered with sores, reaching up pathetically from the street is repellent, he is not evil. You need more than that.

Evil demands a quality of lack of sympathy, often it is wrapped up in aggressiveness, and relishing the misfortune of others. As they say in "Avenue Q" when explaining the word "Schadenfreude" --happiness at the misfortune of others, "Oh, that IS German." 

The Countess with her Trophy

But simply taking pleasure in seeing the demise of someone we do not like is not necessarily evil. If Donald Trump were to lose this election, and all his backers gather in a room to weep and wail, relishing that moment (looking, now increasingly unlikely) would not be evil, but a sign of relief and joy at the ascendancy of virtue.

Hey, let's get this party going: Shoot some Jews

Evil has to do with a willingness to hurt others, perhaps to enjoy the hurting, as a sadist, who is, by definition, evil, would do. Although, one might say the sadist is not so much evil as diseased, but that would be drawing too fine a line. Psychopaths who torture other people may be mentally deranged but they are still evil. 

So evil may involve, but does not always necessarily involve a willingness to harm.
Think of the wives of the commandants of concentrations camps, who raised their children within earshot of the camps, who could smell and see what was happening there,  but ignored what they knew was happening, as they served their children schnitzel on fine china at their carved tables:  They were evil, even though they may not have enjoyed the pain of their fellow human beings. They were willing to support those who did the evil and they were, in their passivity, evil.

The child who throws a kitten into a pond and watches it drown is evil. But what about the adult who watches a child stumble into a river and simply watches rather than attempting to rescue it?  You could say, like Woody Allen, "Well, I don't know how to swim." But not reacting is a form of evil.

The sum total of what Donald John Trump has spewed out over the course of the campaign is evil, for all the reasons Ms. Clinton enumerated. And those who respond to it are just as evil. 

The real problem for Ms. Clinton, and for the rest of us, is that the next day she said she regretted having called  some of his  supporters deplorable. 

If you read more than the sound bite, she went on to remark, "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 the people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

The problem with this, Hillary, is the same problem you run into with the Austrians, post war. The Austrians fashioned themselves as "Hitler's first victims," the first country he invaded. Never mind, Hitler was received ecstatically, and as the German troops retreated at the end of the war, Austrians jeered Jews and cheered as Jews were mowed down by crowds of Austrians.  

No, you cannot have it both ways.  When it comes to despots, you are either with them or you are against  them. You may have your reasons, but if you support evil, if you raise that arm in salute, you are just as evil as the guy you are saluting. 

Epipen's Omar Little Moment ( Courtesy of Gretchen Morgenson)

The Wire's Omar Little 

There is a wonderful moment in "The Wire" when Omar Little, a street thug who robs low level drug dealers for a living confronts the lawyer for a man Omar has identified as the murderer who the lawyer is defending. Trying to discredit Omar's testimony before the jury the lawyer strikes an incredulous tone: "You have just admitted you are a thief. You rob people for a living, at gun point. Why should this jury believe a word you have said?"

Omar smiles and shrugs. "Just like you," Omar remarks, unperturbed. 
The lawyer, who has turned his back to Omar, to face the jury, whirls around, "What?" he asks.
"I do it with a shotgun. You do it with that briefcase," Omar says, pointing to the lawyer's attache case, open on his desk. 
The lawyer looks to the judge and spreads his hands, palms up, in mute protest, tacitly raising the objection, but the judge, (who we know well by now) simply smiles and shrugs and he doesn't even have to say, "You asked the question. He gave you his answer. It's up to the jury who to believe."
It's all over in a flash, but it's a moment which comes back to haunt us as we hear Bernie Sanders talk about a "rigged system." 
Of course, Omar's thefts amount to hundreds of dollars, thousands on a big day. The lawyer deals in exponential amounts of that.

But even the slimeball lawyer is a piker compared to the members of corporate boards and leadership in this country. 

Gretchen Morgenson

As Gretchen Morgenson depicts in her September 4th piece on Heather Bresch, the C.E.O. of Mylan, the company that makes Epipen, the reason Mylan has raised the price of Epipen from $50 in 2004 to $600 in 2013 is to fatten Ms. Bresch's paycheck by a minimum of  $13.2 million on top of her annual salary of $32 million. She is not the only officer or board member of the company to reap these profits, but she is the most visible. Her spokeswoman answered Ms. Morgenson's questions by saying Mylan sells more than 2,700 products in 165 contries and more than 600 products in the US alone, so raising the price of Epipen could hardly enhance Ms. Bresch's personal fortune much. But Morgenson then unravels the byzantine structures within this $9.4 billion dollar company (of which $1 billion comes from Epipen) and the explanation makes it clear, even if you cannot follow all the math and all the accounting tricks Morgenson elaborates, that there was more than enough incentive for Ms. Bresch to hike the price to school kids, if Ms. Bresch still cared about adding $13-20 million to her annual $32 million and, personally, I can believe she does care about that because, well, she wants to make $32 million dollars and anyone who wants to make that much money probably wants to make $52 million.

Heather Bresch needs no shotgun

And that person doesn't give a damn about some poor family trying to buy an Epipen for their kid when the family makes $17,000 a year.

Morgenson writes the New York Times financial column and I often start reading her articles which often expose unfathomable avarice on Wall Street but then I get lost in the complexities of these deliberately complicated financial schemes and give up. When she explains Epipen, however, the complexities fall from the bone and you can see the underlying structure.  

You are left with an Omar moment:  Ms. Bresch and all those who sail with her are thieves, not in the legal sense, but in every other important sense.  And they don't carry shotguns. They keep their hands clean.  They steal big.

The sad thing is that enough (mostly Republican) Congressmen are complicit. Our Tea Party Congress shackles the SEC and every other regulatory agency our government can bring to bear. When an Elizabeth Warren tries to scream bloody murder about all this, they refuse to confirm her, so she has to run for the Senate, where she is still in the minority. The pigs are in cahoots with the people who run things, as George Orwell noted, and you can look from pig to person to pig and not be able to tell one from the other. 

Colin Kaepernick and Phony Patriotism

I loathe the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner before ball games is not far behind on my list of phony patriotic gestures.

So when Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, I thought, "Good for him."  

But thinking more about it, it's not so clear this particular act of protest, at this particular moment, is well chosen.

Public acts of attestation of loyalty have not always been meaningless, phony and anti democratic.  During times when loyalties were clearly divided, like during the American Revolution, when at least half the country remained loyal to the British Crown, standing up in public and being counted as "I am with the Revolution," was not without risk and it was  important to say. During the Civil War, saying publicly, you were for Union and not the Confederacy, was worth doing.

But, in recent times, since Vietnam really, when wars have been fought against insurgencies in distant lands, puffing up your chest before a football game is low risk and the coward's version of patriotism. Easy patriotism, is almost by definition, not real patriotism.

On the other hand, after 9/11 and after all the recent stories of attacks by terrorists, it may be worth saying, publicly, we are one country after all, and having Black men and White Men and Hispanics all singing the same tune is a fairly inoffensive feel good moment of bonding, cheesey as it may be. 

It is hard to forget how such expressions of public enthrallment with a flag have played out in the past, with the Nuremberg rallies, and all those flags and all that staging and orchestration of emotion. This sort of thing is easily twisted into nasty belief.

When the two Black Americans stood on the winners' platform at the 1968 Olympics and raised a Black Power salute, as cities burned and people were dying in the South trying to register voters and men were dying in Vietnam in a corrupt war, that protest made sense. 

But today, the national government and its flag is mostly under benign guidance. It's the state and local police who are racists with badges, terrified bullies with guns.

There is no state anthem for Colin Kaepernick to turn his back against--the San Francisco Forty Niners do not play in Kentucky where they play "My Old Kentucky Home,"  and vote in Mitch McConnell every time. 

The problem of white police murdering Black men is mostly a local one--just as local police murdered Civil Rights workers and it was the federal government which investigated and prosecuted these murders. The flag, the star spangled banner is about the country, and is the wrong target if you are festering over Black Lives Matter.