LogFAQs > #904045847

HashtagSEP posted...

You know what definitely doesn't help that perspective? When people who know better spread false information by saying dishonest things like "she called half the country deplorable"

The whole election was a big game of gotcha. Finding the one isolated quote that would get people upset, often reducing it to less of a sentence, and raging endlessly about it.

Like...if you talk to diehard Hillary supporters from the Dem primary, they'll often be really bitter about "Bernie called Hillary not qualified".

Yeah...so what actually happened was that first Hillary implied Bernie might not be qualified (which in and of itself is a little ridiculous he has what 40 years of experience). But she's smart and a lawyer, and did so without actually mentioning his name while making it obvious she was talking about him. And then Bernie, attempting to fire back, basically just gave his normal stump speech, but added in "not qualified if" to a bunch of his policy points. Here's the quote:

And she has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote unquote, not qualified to be president. Well let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don't believe that she is qualified if she is, if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don't think you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super PAC.

I don't think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don't think you are qualified if you've supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent-paying jobs. I don't think you are qualified if you supported the Panama free trade agreement, something I very strongly opposed and which, as all of you know, has allowed corporations and wealthy people all over the world to avoid paying their taxes to their countries.

Which...in context this is clearly a disagreement over policy positions. Not over the amount of experience Hillary has.

Somehow this translated to lots of people on the internet suuuper mad thinking Sanders had called Clinton inexperienced.

On the whole I thin Hillary played a clever game of gotcha, where she baited him into using her language, and Sanders fell for the bait like a sucker. And this got spun into "Sanders said mean untrue things about Hillary". When the reality was "Hillary plays Sanders like a fiddle, baits him into using language that will make him look bad."

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The whole deplorables thing feels pretty similar to me, where it somehow got boiled down to "she called us deplorables". (Again, focusing on a single word from the sentence and driving all the media spin around that word. Anyone remember how the actual phrase was "basket of deplorables"? Yeahh...somehow even the basket part got dropped; gotta condense those soundbites down to a single word.
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