Explaining the Republican attacks on Hillary
Newsweek examines the Right's strategy in attacking Clinton's "deplorables" and "putting coal miners out of work" speeches
Neil Buchanan writing in Newsweek on Saturday:
Trump and his people are now rolling out the oldest of Republican campaign themes: Find a statement by a Democrat that can be taken out of context, repeat it endlessly and claim to be horrified that Democrats could be so unfeeling, callous, or unpatriotic. Trump is, finally, a true Republican candidate.
(Looks like Buchanan has also been reading the Wheeling "newspapers.")
The majority of his article deals with Clinton's "deplorables" comment but he also deals with the locals' favorite Clinton quote -- that she will be putting coal miners out of work:
Republicans tried to do the same thing to Hillary Clinton earlier this year when she said that it was important to figure out how to help the economies of coal states to transition out of the era of fossil fuels.
There, the attempt to stoke outrage was based on her saying that "we" will be putting a lot of coal miners out of work, where she was in fact saying that the inexorable forces of the modern economy would result in our economy losing a lot of coal jobs, and we need to have a strategy to help those who will be harmed by those forces.
For Republicans who were hankering for a good freakout, however, it was enough that Clinton had said "we," because they could make it sound as though Clinton actually wanted to destroy jobs. This false claim could then be folded into Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell's specious claim that Democrats were engaged in a "war on coal."
It's a good article.