Howard Epstein – INTO THE BASKET OF THE DEPLORABLES
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” – Hillary Clinton to a friendly crowd of wealthy donors.
“James Comey’s announcement of a new inquiry into my use of email while secretary of state shortly before election day stopped my campaign’s momentum” – Hillary Clinton after her defeat.
“Elevate Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to plot our comeback” – the US Democratic Party after Clinton’s defeat.
“Stand up to Russia” – President Obama’s advice to President-elect Trump.
“If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem…. I can make their lives miserable everyday” – the Palestinian ambassador to the UN.
“I have heard much verbiage recently about my attempts, as it were, to take control of the communications market. The opposite is the truth.” – Israeli Communications Minister (and Prime Minister and Foreign Minister) Binyamin Netanyahu.
~~~~~
Forget for the moment the above comments extracted from last week’s news and consider first this just-leaked email to Shabak:-
Sir
It is time to investigate the self-styled political commentator, Harold Epshteyn, who wrote on Israelseen last week that Bibi Netanyahu is arrogantly controlling three ministries, with one of which – the Communications Ministry – he has a personal conflict of interest.
Could there be a more stark example of why the Prime Minister, who just happens to be in a position to control the media, should not actually do so? Epshteyn will be calling our Dear Leader a megalomaniac next! Anyone who dares utter that word, let alone writes it, should be locked up with Hagai El-Ad, who denounced Israel at the UN. (He was interned for that, wasn’t he?).
What with the unproven lies of the notorious Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite propagandist, so-called journalist, Ilana Dayan, slandering our First Lady, much in the style of her disgruntled former employees, who claimed to have been abused by her (Abused? Fe! When did they last work for Walmart?), and only won their claims because, as everyone one knows, our judiciary are fully signed-up members of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite faction, Epshteyn merely seeks to further his career, and boost his vast earnings from writing, via his BIG LIE machine, with hyperbole and fantasy at the expense of our ingenuous Premier.
Epshteyn should be stopped before he draws conclusions from the alleged protests of the IDF that they have no need of all the U-boats that the PM has been ordering from Deutschland via his lawyer and cousin, whose Hanseatic network coincidentally includes an Israeli with a German dockyard which could maintain the fleet. As if the Navy does not need redundancy in its submarine fleet! As if the general staff would know best what is best for the IDF! As if it is unusual for an Israeli to have a shipyard in Germany! As if Bibi would have a wide choice of lawyers that he can trust with the finer financial detail of a deal such as that! How many Israeli lawyers are there anyway? No. That you can trust? Who would not use a cousin if one were available? Epshteyn will be suggesting potential financial impropriety and demanding complete transparency next.
Sir, the time has come for all this Bibi-baiting to stop. And not least because there is absolutely no-one else in this country of only seven million Jews who could do the job (actually, each of the three of them) with the dynamism, the orderliness and the integrity of Bibi.
Let us resolve to take a leaf out of Erdoghan’s book. If he can dismiss thousands of his detractors in a few weeks, we should be able to manage a few hundred. And give the Netanyahu family a break, perhaps even a tax-break, surely well-deserved after a near record-breaking ten years of service to the nation. Show me one US president since 1948 who can beat that.
Yours in devotion to Eretz Yisrael
A Friend
PS: That Epshteyn. He belongs in the Basket of the Deplorables!!!!
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The basket of the deplorables? Whence sprung this obnoxious term of the artless?
On a mid-September 2016 weekend, Hillary Clinton, the savant of the Democrats, their candidate for the presidency, facing off against the loud-mouthed self-publicist, businessman and reality TV star, non-politician and non-military man, Donald Trump, scored her first and last victory over motor-mouth Trump. She beat him to pulp in the obnoxious stakes:-
“You know,” Clinton said to a friendly crowd of wealthy donors, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
Leaving aside the tortured language (eg generalistic) and the seeking of approbation (right?) before completing the point, the whole approach of the prematurely-anointed successor to the Obama legacy (some have even now not given up seeking it), Hillary Clinton, she who is defined by her success-deficit, not least as a hapless Secretary of State, one of whose diplomats was murdered (in Benghazi) in the line of duty, poured venom on those who might have been, might just, with coaxing and coddling, have been part of her electorate. In a show of hubris, aloofness and contempt, worthy of the lame duck president whom she aspired to succeed, using a mere thirty-two words, secured the presidency for Donald Trump. In a flash, she out‑donald The Donald. For decency in campaigning? Deplorable!
As for Clinton’s heaping blame, post defeat, on the Director of the FBI:-
“James Comey’s announcement of a new inquiry into my use of email while secretary of state shortly before election day stopped my campaign’s momentum”
denial and self-delusion may be her only sanctuary but: (a) imagine if he had kept silent about the extra half a million emails, and they were revealed after she had been elected, and (b) whatever harm he may have done to her campaign eleven days before the election, she should have had such a head of steam by then that, even if she had admitted her negligence (that is apart from her patent insouciance) over Benghazi, she should certainly by then have been unbeatable by an outsider such as Trump. Two things did for her, however: she was NOT an outsider and she abused a sizeable portion of the people. Deplorable!
As for Democrats’:
“Elevate Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to plot our comeback”
from comprehensive defeat, not only for the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW but also on the Hill, control of both houses of Congress going to the GOP, their reaction could have been foretold by any Brit. What did the UK version of the Democrats, the UK Labour Party, do when defeated in 2015 by the UK version of the Republicans, the Conservatives? Labour declared that they had not been sufficiently left-wing and elected as their new leader the Trotskyite, Hamas-cuddling Jeremy Corbyn, thus securing for themselves the future – in the wilderness. Deplorable!
As in London, so it is within the Beltway, with the Democrats choosing the path of such luminaries as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Keith Ellison, US-style socialists in tooth and claw and none recognized cheer-leaders for Israel – or the Jews that traditionally vote Democrat. The conclusion is clear, the more the electorate tell the left-wing that they seek a centrist candidate, the further to the left the Left will lean. Deplorable!
Talking of luminaries, he of the red-line for Assad that shall be ignored, Barak Obama, had some advice for his successor, Trump, via the good offices of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, at week’s end: “Stand up to Putin”. This is a classic case of: Do Not As I Do But As I Say, for it was Obama who created the vacuum in Syria that nature 
abhorred – and Putin filled, with his Middle East airspace-controlling s300/400 missile systems. Whether President Trump cuddles up to Putin or faces him down, actually dislodging the po-faced Russian president, ex-prime minister, and prime minister-to-be, then president to be (etc, etc) is going to take more that the incoming leader of the free world has at his disposal, short of a somewhat pyrrhic victory in a an all-out nuclear exchange. Concluding that that would not be productive, Trump might just (have to) let Putin be. He can justifiably blame his already well-established impotence in the region on his predecessor Obama, who does not know his arts from his blow-hard rhetoric. Deplorable!
Now to the Palestinian ambassador to the UN. Far from finding the time to make threats to the incoming US president, thus:-
“If people attack us by moving the [US] embassy to Jerusalem…. I can make their lives miserable everyday”
he has his work cut out substantiating his deplorable accusations against Israel a year ago. Without presenting a shred of evidence, he wrote in The Palestine Telegraph of 1 February 2010:
“After returning the seized bodies of Palestinians killed by the occupying forces through October, and following medical examinations, it has been reported that the bodies were returned with missing corneas and other organs,”
Ah! The Blood Libel again. We have not had that one since UK political maverick, Jenni Tong, congratulated Israel on being the first effective aid to land in Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, by alleging that our Israid medical distress teams, 220 strong, had gone half-across the world in order to make off with the kishkes of 
Haitian victims. Deplorable! Both of them, Mansour and Tong. Utterly deplorable!
In the end, we must confront the deplorable closer to home. Not content with the Prime Minister’s job alone, apparently unable to find amongst the coalition government of 61 MKs even one who alone could deploy sufficient skills to be foreign minister, let alone another one to take charge of the ministry of communications, Bibi as he is known (once affectionately) affects to perform all three roles – together, contemporaneously, day in and day out. With charges in the (according to him) left-wing media of paranoia, Netanyahu has so far evaded the more obvious allegation of megalomania, but how else should one describe the arrogation of such powers to one man? His reaction?
“I have heard much verbiage recently about my attempts, as it were, to take control of the communications market. The opposite is the truth.”
Absent any sign of this, deplorable!
And then there are the submarines (see above) … one supposes that we shall be told that it is all the fault of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite press: Haaretz, Times of Israel, Ynet and the Jerusalem Post, each of which has raised questions on the subject. Thank heaven for the sanity of Israel Today (funded by Bibi-buddy, Sheldon Adelson – or, according to Adelson, a friend of his), a search of whose website for the word “submarine” draws a blank. At last an Israeli newspaper that can be trusted – by at least three of our ministers: the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Communications Minister. After all, we do not want to see Netanyahu under water, do we?
© Howard Epstein – November 2016
Howard Epstein is a political commentator and the author of Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century, recently published by Amazon and on Kindle. He writes:-
There is no need for me to tell you that the scourge of gun crime is perhaps the most pressing issue in the USA. My book takes a new approach – support failing gun control by viewing gun crime through the prism of gun culture.
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