Proud To Be a Moral Anti-Deplorable

 I finally figured out why I've been so bothered by Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" speech last week. I also figured out why her cavalier lumping of non-deplorable Trump supporters into their separate category of neediness deserves its own special basket of cloying Clintonoid condescension.

What bothered me perhaps more than her words was the braying, approving reaction to them from the crowd of celebrities and plutocrats who'd paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to gain admission to her event. In deploring the Trumpenproletariat, Clinton also effectively absolved her wealthy liberal donors of their own latent racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, ignorance, neediness... you name it.

They were implicitly dubbed the virtuous anti-deplorable moral majority of the moneyed minority. (Say three times fast.)

Whether you despise Trump or only pretend to loathe him in order to fit in with the in-crowd, then it naturally follows that you are a good liberal. You try to keep your classism to yourself. Ditto for your colorblind racism. After all, if you voted for Barack Obama, you are absolved of racism, then and now and forever. A whole country full of deplorables might not be smart and post-racial, but you most certainly are. After all, you just gave the black maid a quarter an hour raise to help pay for her hour-long subway or bus ride to your Manhattan high-rise.

 You're all for immigration reform, too. As Obama himself said in a recent anti-Trump address to his upper middle class base, we must always welcome new "talent" to our shores, regardless of their ethnicity.

 Because it’s our diversity, our welcoming of all talent, our treating of everybody fairly—no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, or faith—that’s part of what makes our country great. It’s what makes us resilient. And if we stay true to those values, we’ll uphold the legacy of those we’ve lost, and keep our nation strong and free. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

 As long as refugees have a skill-set, they can come right on in. Tired, poor and huddled no longer cuts it. But hey, this is the "real world" we're living in. Medical benefits and social services only go so far when funds are limited. They're deliberately and artificially limited by spending an estimated $5 trillion on wars of aggression in the last 15 years. And who needs a stupid Trump wall when Homeland Security and ICE have already deported more people under Obama than they did under any previous administration? Why wear your xenophobia on your sleeve when you can imprison hundreds of Central American refugee mothers and children in substandard privatized prisons before you send them back to certain death in their CIA-destabilized home countries?

If you are a moral anti-deplorable who hates Trump's hateful rhetoric and loves Hillary's identity politics, there is no need to worry your expensively coiffed heads over the institutional racism being conducted in your names every single day of every single year, both here and abroad.

Since you elected and you love Barack Obama, you can scoff with utter impunity at the Black Lives Matter movement. After all, Obama himself has regularly lectured young black activists with his own brand of "respectability politics" and chided them for their rudeness to powerful politicians at rallies and fund-raisers.

If you are a proud anti-deplorable, you can ignore the global racist imperialism exported by the United States and propagandized as liberal democracy-sharing or defense of our national security. No need to worry and wonder that the millions of innocents displaced, maimed and killed by our CIA coups and our wars and our drone strikes have mostly been of the darker-skinned variety.

 No need to ask yourselves why American Muslims have been burdened with a special duty to "disown" terrorism, while white Christians are given immunity from responsibility for homegrown terror attacks.

After all, you don't wear any incipient Trumpism you might possess right on your sleeve. That would be illiberal.

  Hillary's grating mixture of disdain and condescension was rendered all the more hypocritical by where it occurred: the Cipriani Club, Wall Street, USA.

It was from the balcony of that bastion of plutocratic excess that young Champagne-sipping financiers yelled their epithets down to the Zuccotti Park Occupy campers in 2011, as raucously as they yelled their contempt at the Trumpenproletariat five years later. They see no difference between bottom-up, left wing democratic socialism and elite co-opted right wing populism. Both types threaten their bottom lines.

As I wrote way back when,

The Cipriani Club, for those of you not in the know (and I was among the unknowing myself until earlier today) was constructed during the Gilded Age of  Wall Street's glorious heyday  and comprises an entire city block. (the better to view the hoi polloi).  It now houses restaurants, condos selling in the mid to high seven figures, spas, bars. The restaurant has the dubious distinction of being home to a $32 hamburger. It's gotten many a lousy review in the New York Times, for its terrible food, tiny chairs and conspicuous consumption.  As far as I know, the Cipriani is not among the financial district eateries donating food to the Zuccotti Park campers.  But we can always call and ask!  Here is their number: 212-699-4096.
And speaking of reviews: Ginia Bellafante, the Times columnist who made fun of the Wall Street protesters and their regalia last weekend, should have gone into Cipriani instead.  According to the Indagare travel site, the uber-wealthy Cipriani crowd " truly verges on Fellini-esque with extreme hairdos, face-lifts and implants on parade."  And all Bellafante could come up with was a topless dancer and some cheap masks?  What has journalism come to? 

"What has journalism come to?" is now the ironic and constant refrain of liberal pundits bemoaning a mass outbreak of unfairness and "false equivalency" regarding the allegedly disparate coverage of the ruling class racketeers named Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Paul Krugman, who contributes to the mass hysteria over Neoliberal Death Match 2016 by pronouncing his own elite self terrified by the smears and innuendoes against Clinton, apparently forgets that he himself once led the fear-mongering pack with his own smears against Bernie Sanders and his progressive supporters.

It's unfair, Krugman says without one smidgen of hard evidence, that the pristine Clinton Foundation is getting trashed while Trump's bogus charity is not: 

And I don’t see how the huffing and puffing about the foundation — which “raised questions”, but where the media were completely unwilling to accept the answers they found — fits into this at all.

No, it’s something special about Clinton Rules. I don’t really understand it. But it has the feeling of a high school clique bullying a nerdy classmate because it’s the cool thing to do.

And as I feared, it looks as if people who cried wolf about non-scandals are now engaged in an all-out effort to dig up or invent dirt to justify their previous Clinton hostility.

Hard to believe that such pettiness could have horrifying consequences. But I am very scared.

My suggestion to Petrified Paul would be that he construct a panic room in his fortified $2 million Manhattan condo if he has not already done so. Maybe such a safe space would protect him against the journalistic micro-aggressions of his own employer, and who knows, maybe even allow the irony of his own Berniebro bullying to sink into his steel-reinforced mind. That bullying had the distinct feel of a high school clique, given that Krugman enlisted the aid of a clique of neoliberal establishment economists-for-hire to make his case against single payer health care.

Here's my published comment to his latest deplorable disingenuousness:

The reason the Clintons are held to a higher standard is because they were lifetime putative public servants who then proceeded to cash in, big-time, on that public service.

Trump, never having been a public servant, is given a comparative free pass for a whole lifetime of private chicanery. He's also a fixture on the social scene in New York, the media capital of the world. He schmoozes with such media stars as Matt Lauer and Maureen Dowd and media mogul Barry Diller, who also hangs out with BFFs Chelsea and Ivanka.

So why the sudden shock that media stars and media conglomerates don't act like old-school muckrakers and hold Donald Trump's feet to the fire? A presidential candidate he may be, but he is still a private citizen of the all-American huckster type. In our culture, we tend to grudgingly admire these types for their amorality and outsize egos. Trump is lovable the way Tony Soprano was lovable. Because he gets away with stuff. If we lived in a society where criminal justice rules applied to the wealthy, he would have been moldering in prison with Bernie Madoff by now.

Read David Cay Johnston's book on how Trump came to be, and you'll see that there's plenty of blame to go around for his perfidious rise. He knows how to co-opt fellow greedsters and needy sycophants.

And speaking of the Bushies, the fact that they were never prosecuted themselves speaks even more ugly volumes about America the Exceptional.

Only the poor get punished. It's pretty deplorable.