Much more effective for Ms. Clinton to allow the fat fuck M. Penn to poll-test a phrase that doesn’t mean anything — “slum landlord business” in this case — and then store it up for use as a spontaneous debate one-liner.
She shouted that line with emphasis and with feeling, waving her arm and pounding the air to underline the words “slum,” “inner-city,” and “Chicago,” after which she exited rehearsed-line-delivery mode, smiling in that way she smiles when she’s just accomplished something and is proud of herself.
I’ve polled only myself on the “slumlord” vs. “slum landlord business” question, and thus have no data to support my thesis that “slumlord,” for most people, is likely to connote something like this: white man, property owner, lives not in “inner-city Chicago” or any other kind of Chicago.
No, the slumlord can be found in a boring, constipated, dirtball suburb like Park Ridge, close enough to “inner-city Chicago” to ensure the continuing stream of extortionate monthly rent payments, which income he can enjoy at a comfortable enough remove from the crumbling, roofless, feculent properties and his poor, non-white tenants. When there exists a slumlord, then by definition there exists a slum, and its status as a slum is the fault of our slumlord, not the tenants. See the problem?
The phrase “slum landlord business” doesn’t appear to mean anything at all, which is a clever way to get the word “slum” to do all the connoting. How do white South Carolinians react when they hear of a “slum”? And not just any slum, but it’s a SLUM in the INNER-CITY — (for a lot of easily terrified white people, “CITY” is quite enough on its own) — well, the inner-city of CHICAGO is someplace these people have never set foot, and really, how thoughtful of Hillary to remind them of that fact, and for her to validate their fear of SLUMS, CITIES, INNER-CITY CHICAGO… and by the way, adds HRC, how wonderful to “honor Dr. King” by sharing the stage with an actual real live “African-American” who is being allowed to run for president of “our” country.
I don’t know how much more of these disgusting people I can endure. I would be overjoyed if Bill Clinton were to have a massive stroke right about now. Is that just me?
