Basement Dwellers

     Remember when Mitt Romney had his 47% moment over four years ago? Remember the outcry that arose from that and why? Let me take you on a little trip down Memory Lane to explain why. This is what Romney said (emphasis mine):

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

     This statement at a Republican fund raiser essentially butt-fucked into the pre-Cambrian Age the campaign of a guy representing the "party of personal responsibility" (a wonderful euphemism for "I got mine, bitches, now try to get your's") and ducked paying his fair share of taxes. It revealed Romney to be neolithically out of touch with the plight of working and elderly Americans, as well as college students, the poor and unemployed.
     Well, Hillary Clinton had her own 47% moment earlier this year (Before you Hillbot deadenders shake your pointy little heads over this, you may want to listen to the audio first). Hacked emails containing an audio of a speech she gave at, again, a fundraiser was released on the 27th of last month. Here's the part that's infuriated Bernie Sanders supporters (again, emphasis mine):

There is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates, And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel... Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future.

    Now, if this incredibly out-of-touch speech doesn't cost this crooked bitch the election, nothing will. To paraphrase Donald Trump, if this doesn't implode her campaign, then she might as well shoot someone on the trading floor of Wall Street without worrying about losing a single vote. There is so much to unpack from this one snippet that I'm at a loss to know where to begin.
     First off, I ignore the 1984 pronouncements from the BLS that always announces after the first of the month, "Obama has created x number of new jobs, comrades!" without giving us the actual news that many of those glorious new jobs are actually minimum wage and/or temp jobs such as the census or tax jobs that always pop up. Many of these jobs are axed, along with those who worked them, and then reinvented and recycled the following month. The job market is still sluggish and that's on her man Obama. Otherwise, there's no reason why a man my age with all my qualifications, training and experience should remain unemployed after so many years and living hand to mouth.
     But my bigger point is that this speech crystallizes every perception and suspicion that we've ever had about this One Percenter since she first threw her "Make Me Great Again!" hat in the ring. Chiefest of these is her insistence that we're political neophytes who still live in Mommy and Daddy's basement, whiny neophytes to the political and electoral process who don't know how Things Really Work, that dreaming is just so impractical when the key to even middling success is to work with Republicans who will obstruct you at every turn in order to get even more middling success, a compromise of a compromise, as it were (See "careObama").
     Well, that sure worked hunkey dorey under Obama these past eight years, didn't it?
     In this brief excerpt from her fundraising speech (and you just know there were quite a few Republicans in the crowd, perhaps even one or two who were there for Romney's infamous 47% moment, perhaps even some that she'd directly reached out to for campaign donations (including professional Republican witch Meg Whitman).
     Note the shocking similarities, especially in the emboldened sections, in what Romney and Clinton had said in these speeches. There's so much overlap it would make a Venn diagram virtually impossible.
     Both Romney and Clinton said or at least broadly hinted that "basement-dwelling" Millennials whined and expected free health care like evil, Socialist Scandinavia (where socialized health care works quite well, thank you very much). The only thing Clinton didn't say was that young Bernie backers (and we're not all millennials nor live in our parent's basement, as per the internet stereotypes) were moochers who couldn't or wouldn't take personal responsibilities for our lives. But the inference was unmistakable.
     It was the tired old grownup argument we give our kids who had gotten sick of it by the first iteration- The argument of "We're older, we know better, stop whining and let us do the thinking and wheeling and dealing."
     Which, under Obama's "grown-up" administration has given us endless war, a crippled labor movement, a sluggish economy, a sluggish job market that doesn't really offer much if any hope and change for kids just graduating and finding just the menial, low-paying jobs they happily worked as students. Clinton's speech was a distillation of the old trope of, "We got here before you, we ate it all and we'll give what we want to give you, you whiny little bitches, and you'll thank me for it" that we heard from so many Republicans over the decades.
     Then there was her proud identification with "the center left to the center right", (accent on the center right, in which she's most comfortable). It was essentially the admission, "Yes, I'm going to be the same neoliberal, regulation-killing, dictator-coddling piece of shit my husband was, minus the blow jobs and countless affairs "
     This speech, delivered to a bunch of political lounge lizards by one, revealed how out of touch Clinton was and always will be, something to which even she had to admit. She's just as stumped by the venom from the Millenials as she is by the right wing that's supposed to love her since there's so much overlap. Even while she's in the act of calling them "basement dwellers" behind their backs.
     And you know she's even more mystified by the far left's vitriol than she is by that of the Far Right. There's essentially now one Overton's Window, one wrapping around the entire house (or basement, as it were) and shared by both Romney and Clinton- And it offers the same bleak landscape in which government shouldn't be reasonably expected to give those who need it the most a helping hand, that dreaming should die at the starting blocks because it's just too hard or too naive or too impractical. Plus, only an out of touch crook like Clinton would dare make a crack about basement dwellers considering her own email problems.

     One question: I wonder if this cynical, miserable bitch includes her IT guy Bryan "Stonetear" Pagliano among that army of basement dwellers?