Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables"

Hillary Clinton had her 47% moment yesterday. Apparently, she and her advisors believe that the polls are not going in the right direction. So, the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua has chosen to lash out, mindlessly and ineptly, at “half” of Trump’s supporters. I trust that the other half will not feel overly neglected.

One can find much to criticize in her juvenile rant, but did you notice how badly she mangled the English language.

For the record, here are her remarks:

"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," Clinton said. "Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it."

She added, "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."

Let’s see: she misused the clunky word “generalistic.” She might have wanted to say something about generalizing or about mindless generalities or even about being a generalist, but her capacious intellect was apparently overwhelmed by her emotions.

The expression “basket of deplorables” is agrammatical. People Hillary meant that they are deplorable people. But why does that imply that they belong in a basket. Was she suggesting that they are basket cases? Speaking of the agrammatical, the word “deplorable” does not have a plural form.

As for the charge of giving voice to their websites, the phrase is semantic hash. You might draw attention to a website, but you do not give voice to it. You might say that she was using a metaphor, but, if so, then she has merely demonstrated that she does not know how to construct a metaphor. As for Trump's ability to lift people up, this has never been considered a fault or a flaw.

And finally, you do not tweet and retweet rhetoric. You might use certain rhetorical tropes in your tweets, or in any other message, but you do not tweet rhetoric.

Does it matter that Hillary is barely literate? Does it matter that she cannot construct a coherent sentence when she is speaking off the cuff—though some have suggested that she was reading from a teleprompter? If you want to sell her candidacy in terms of the rule of the best and the brightest, you are not feeling very good today.

Keep in mind, our current president wrote a best-selling book called “the audacity of hope.” Strictly speaking—actually you do not even have to be very strict about it—the phrase is grammatically incorrect.  Unless, of course, you are referring to your audacious neighbor, Hope. In that case it is merely pretentious.

As it  happened, no one-- yours truly excepted-- much cared that Obama got the grammar wrong. And no one dared to correct him—because no one dared threaten his fragile self-esteem. And no one paid too much attention to the fact that the phrase originated with Obama’s mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who once delivered a sermon called: the audacity to hope.

At least, the Rev. Wright got the grammar right. But, isn’t it worth noting, yet again that Obama comes to us straight from the pulpits of a hate-monger, a man who hates Americans, white people, Jews and Israel. And Rev. Wright is also, by the by, a close personal friend of that notable hate monger, Rev. Louis Farrakhan. As Obama's potential successor and the nominee from his party, Hillary is standing in quicksand. It's no wonder she can't even get the grammar right.