Indeed, what Breitbart understood, what his spiritual heir Donald Trump has banked on, what Hillary Clintons recent pillorying has clarified, is that white grievance, no matter how ill-founded, can never be humiliating nor disqualifying. On the contrary, it is a right to be respected at every level of American society from the beer-hall to the penthouse to the newsroom.
The comment was a self-inflicted wound claimed the Washington Post reporter Dan Balz. It was very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted, asserted John Heilemann. My colleague Ron Fournier and the Posts Aaron Blake were both taken aback by the implicit math of Clintons statement. Clinton appeared to be slapping the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic label on about 20 percent of the country, wrote Blake in a post whose headline echoed that of the Trump campaign managers website. That's no small thing. Whether or not it was a false thing remained uninvestigated.