[Aunche]

>Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision.

I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).

https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/10/02/sanders-agrees...

>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.

IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.

[kilna]

> She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be

That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.

CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.

> Why should it be?

Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.

And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.

[Aunche]

>Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.

[kilna]

Bernie's support of Clinton is something that a non-trivial number of his supporters did not agree with him on, I include myself in that number. Regardless, droves of Bernie supporters showed up at the polls to vote for Clinton, at a rate greater than prior Obama voters.

Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.

You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.

[Aunche]

>You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

It's not contextual. It was an entirely separate answer to another question on a matter that has nothing to do with whether Hilary called Bernie supporters basement dwellers. At this rate, you might as well include the entire corpus of everything Hilary ever said.

No matter how you put it, this is a cut and dry fact. Again, the question wasn't whether Hilary is condescending. It was whether she used those particular words which she did not.