Trump may have sunk to a new low of brazen, vulgar, disgusting lying with his defensive attack on Democrats for his own vicious policy of tearing children away from their parents- parents who are would-be immigrants either seeking political asylum (meaning they are refugees, NOT "illegal immigrants" as the U.S. media- and BBC too- has it, or "criminals" as Grand Inquisitor Attorney General of the U.S. and head of the "Justice" Department Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his boss, president Donald J. "Jackass" Trump, have it) or are forced to try and sneak across the Mexican U.S. border to save their own lives to survive economically inside a ruthless empire.
Trump displaced responsibility for his own acts onto Democrats, an act of demagogic dishonesty and evasion that rivals the "stab in the back" propaganda of World War I German generals, Nazis, and other "nationalists" which blamed "politicians" "defeatists" and "Jews" for Germany's defeat in that war. In fact, the top Field Marshall, Hindenberg, told the government to sue for peace after the U.S. entered the war and Germany was facing imminent military defeat.
Here is what Trump said a few days ago:
"The Democrats forced that law [sic] on the country! I hate it, I hate to see separation of parents and children!" [1] Trump pretends he is being forced to do something by "law," and further that it is "the Democrats" law. A double lie. Since this cruel tactic of turning migrant children and babies into de facto orphans held in prisons (not "shelters," another lie by the Trump regime, since they are imprisoned there and cannot leave, and their parents are kept in the dark as to their whereabouts) is something that was never done before, it is spurious in the extreme to pretend it is required by law.
He is also lying when he pretends to "hate it." He wouldn't be DOING it if he "hated" it!! Someone get a fire extinguisher to put out the blazing inferno on that guy's pants!
Apparently pleased with the additional outrage he provoked by his original libelous, demagogue smear, he kept it up in the following days, repeating his canard: "The Democrats have to change their law." Now there's a mind-twisting act of displacement of responsibility. Trump is acting as if HE is outraged by what HE is doing, and it is the Democratic Party doing it!!
Like all demagogues, Trump's irrationality has emotional logic for those attracted to him. The hate object, the scapegoat, is blamed for one's own sins. Since Trump is always blameless in all things, and his opponents guilty of all that is wrong in the world, it follows that the policy of Trump and Sessions and ICE to rip children away from their parents as a "deterrent" to "illegal" border crossing is the fault of the Democratic Party.
No matter that there is no basis in fact for his smears. Like Ronald Reagan, he knows that "facts are stupid things" is an effective operating principle for demagogues. Especially when "the" media is muted or silent in rebuttal. His target audience, the racists, xenophobes, nationalists, reactionaries, will hear him and not the feeble response. ("The" media, that is, the corporate propaganda system, hasn't broadcast LOUD Democratic rebuttals that I have heard.)
Trump has conditioned his followers not to believe news reports that contradict his outrageous lies. Such facts are "fake news," as he has repeatedly insisted. (A standard propaganda technique is to repeat and repeat a lie, to get people to believe it. All demagogues do it.)
Adolf Hitler was a believer in the Big Lie. He thought big lies were actually MORE credible than small ones, because the average person tells small lies all the time but not big ones, and assumes that since he or she wouldn't tell a big one, neither would the demagogue. On the other hand, since they themselves tell small ones, small lies are paradoxically less credible than big ones.
Trump however tells all sizes. Medium-sized ones too, for that matter.
Trump's minions, as well as various stone-hearted sadists who are Border Patrol and ICE agents, are carrying out the cruelty with vigor. (Ward Churchill's phrase "little Eichmanns" comes to mind.) Agents snicker at crying children ("All we need is a conductor," one snidely sneered in the presence of distraught young children) and the more openly thuggish GOP politicians are similarly callous. Michael Grimm, who once threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony for asking him a question he didn't like, and who went to prison for tax evasion, which doesn't stop him for running right now for his former seat in the U.S. House representing the reactionary New York City borough of Staten Island, and he's ahead of his primary opponent, said crying babies in U.S. prison camps is no different from babies crying at day care centers after being dropped off by their mothers. [Except, it seems needless to point out, it is only for the day, and the mothers know where their children are, and the children aren't prisoners, and the parents aren't prisoners, and oh what's the point of applying reason to the arguments of these cruel creeps!]
Trump's Grand Inquisitor, the unreconstructed Confederate racist and arch-reactionary Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, continually spews execrable lies and dishonest statements. His parents named him after the arch-traitor Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, a fact "the" media hides by referring to him ONLY as "Jeff," as if his name is Jeffrey. And Beauregard is honor of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who kicked off the U.S. Civil War or War Between the States by ordering the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. (However, it is claimed that after the war, he advocated for Black civil rights and Black suffrage. But Sessions hates black suffrage and has prosecuted blacks for registering blacks to vote when he was a U.S. Attorney for Alabama and Alabama state attorney general at different times. His victims were acquitted after enduring a legal ordeal, which still had the desired chilling effect on other blacks who might be so bold as to become politically active in Alabama.)
And twin Trump harridans Kellyanne Conway, an indefatigable spewer of bullshit as a television spokeswoman for Trump, and Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of "Homeland Security," which includes ICE and its Border Patrol, have been relentless in their lying, seeming to try and outdo their boss Trump in mendacity. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattering the boss is a condition of employment by Trump.) Both inhabit alternate universes from the one we are actually living in. You can do a search for their despicable statements on the scandal of the ripping of children from their parents. I'm not going to reprint all their grotesques crap here.
After weeks of media coverage (actually the "alternative" media started it, and the "mainstream" media tardily picked it up, while still misrepresenting things, watering down the cruel treatment, pretending it is only affecting "illegal immigrants" when in fact asylum seekers, who are NOT "illegal" but are being treated as such by the outlaw Trump regime, which cloaks its crimes against humanity in "law," standing reality on its head, are also having their children forcibly taken or taken by subterfuge.
The best ongoing coverage I'm aware of has been by democracynow.org.
With polls safely showing a two-thirds majority of the public disgusted by the "policy," Democratic politicians have duly noted the direction of the political winds and have gotten involved. To be fair, some did so sooner than others. Democracynow.org has interviews with some. [However 55% of Republicans approve of the vicious "separation" policy, falsely claimed by Trump and his henchmen and women to be required by law, while all but officially announcing the fact that the goal is "deterrence," i.e. make Hispanics fleeing violence stop coming to the U.S. Come here and we'll take your children away from you is the "message" they want to "send."]
Congressman Frank Palone described one example of how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which goes by the chillingly apt acronym ICE) and its thuggish arm, the "Border Patrol," "separates" children from their parents. The governments' goons snuck into a cell at 3 AM and snatched a child from her father while they slept. Many similar stories have been aired in the past few weeks. There are other such stories. (This one came via WNYC radio in New York City.)
But contrary to the squeals of outrage, cruelty is nothing new as a U.S. practice. It is as old as the nation itself. Furthermore, it cannot be otherwise, as the U.S. is an empire. And empires are based on force, violence, coercion. And the U.S. is an empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery.
That all sounds like rhetoric to most Americans. The facts proving it fill numerous books, so I cannot prove the case in a short essay. Nor should I have to, given the massive amount of documentation that is openly available. People who don't know these very obvious truths by now are either willfully ignorant, hopelessly brainwashed, and/or fanatical nationalists.
1] "The Democrats forced that law upon our nation. I hate it. I hate to see separation of parents and children. The Democrats can come to us as they actually are in all fairness, we are talking to them, and they can change the whole border security. We need a wall. We need border security. We've got to get rid of catch and release." Trump to reporters at the White House, June 15, 2018. Yes, the fractured syntax is accurate. From CNN and other sources.
Trump displaced responsibility for his own acts onto Democrats, an act of demagogic dishonesty and evasion that rivals the "stab in the back" propaganda of World War I German generals, Nazis, and other "nationalists" which blamed "politicians" "defeatists" and "Jews" for Germany's defeat in that war. In fact, the top Field Marshall, Hindenberg, told the government to sue for peace after the U.S. entered the war and Germany was facing imminent military defeat.
Here is what Trump said a few days ago:
"The Democrats forced that law [sic] on the country! I hate it, I hate to see separation of parents and children!" [1] Trump pretends he is being forced to do something by "law," and further that it is "the Democrats" law. A double lie. Since this cruel tactic of turning migrant children and babies into de facto orphans held in prisons (not "shelters," another lie by the Trump regime, since they are imprisoned there and cannot leave, and their parents are kept in the dark as to their whereabouts) is something that was never done before, it is spurious in the extreme to pretend it is required by law.
He is also lying when he pretends to "hate it." He wouldn't be DOING it if he "hated" it!! Someone get a fire extinguisher to put out the blazing inferno on that guy's pants!
Apparently pleased with the additional outrage he provoked by his original libelous, demagogue smear, he kept it up in the following days, repeating his canard: "The Democrats have to change their law." Now there's a mind-twisting act of displacement of responsibility. Trump is acting as if HE is outraged by what HE is doing, and it is the Democratic Party doing it!!
Like all demagogues, Trump's irrationality has emotional logic for those attracted to him. The hate object, the scapegoat, is blamed for one's own sins. Since Trump is always blameless in all things, and his opponents guilty of all that is wrong in the world, it follows that the policy of Trump and Sessions and ICE to rip children away from their parents as a "deterrent" to "illegal" border crossing is the fault of the Democratic Party.
No matter that there is no basis in fact for his smears. Like Ronald Reagan, he knows that "facts are stupid things" is an effective operating principle for demagogues. Especially when "the" media is muted or silent in rebuttal. His target audience, the racists, xenophobes, nationalists, reactionaries, will hear him and not the feeble response. ("The" media, that is, the corporate propaganda system, hasn't broadcast LOUD Democratic rebuttals that I have heard.)
Trump has conditioned his followers not to believe news reports that contradict his outrageous lies. Such facts are "fake news," as he has repeatedly insisted. (A standard propaganda technique is to repeat and repeat a lie, to get people to believe it. All demagogues do it.)
Adolf Hitler was a believer in the Big Lie. He thought big lies were actually MORE credible than small ones, because the average person tells small lies all the time but not big ones, and assumes that since he or she wouldn't tell a big one, neither would the demagogue. On the other hand, since they themselves tell small ones, small lies are paradoxically less credible than big ones.
Trump however tells all sizes. Medium-sized ones too, for that matter.
Trump's minions, as well as various stone-hearted sadists who are Border Patrol and ICE agents, are carrying out the cruelty with vigor. (Ward Churchill's phrase "little Eichmanns" comes to mind.) Agents snicker at crying children ("All we need is a conductor," one snidely sneered in the presence of distraught young children) and the more openly thuggish GOP politicians are similarly callous. Michael Grimm, who once threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony for asking him a question he didn't like, and who went to prison for tax evasion, which doesn't stop him for running right now for his former seat in the U.S. House representing the reactionary New York City borough of Staten Island, and he's ahead of his primary opponent, said crying babies in U.S. prison camps is no different from babies crying at day care centers after being dropped off by their mothers. [Except, it seems needless to point out, it is only for the day, and the mothers know where their children are, and the children aren't prisoners, and the parents aren't prisoners, and oh what's the point of applying reason to the arguments of these cruel creeps!]
Trump's Grand Inquisitor, the unreconstructed Confederate racist and arch-reactionary Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, continually spews execrable lies and dishonest statements. His parents named him after the arch-traitor Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, a fact "the" media hides by referring to him ONLY as "Jeff," as if his name is Jeffrey. And Beauregard is honor of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who kicked off the U.S. Civil War or War Between the States by ordering the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. (However, it is claimed that after the war, he advocated for Black civil rights and Black suffrage. But Sessions hates black suffrage and has prosecuted blacks for registering blacks to vote when he was a U.S. Attorney for Alabama and Alabama state attorney general at different times. His victims were acquitted after enduring a legal ordeal, which still had the desired chilling effect on other blacks who might be so bold as to become politically active in Alabama.)
And twin Trump harridans Kellyanne Conway, an indefatigable spewer of bullshit as a television spokeswoman for Trump, and Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of "Homeland Security," which includes ICE and its Border Patrol, have been relentless in their lying, seeming to try and outdo their boss Trump in mendacity. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattering the boss is a condition of employment by Trump.) Both inhabit alternate universes from the one we are actually living in. You can do a search for their despicable statements on the scandal of the ripping of children from their parents. I'm not going to reprint all their grotesques crap here.
After weeks of media coverage (actually the "alternative" media started it, and the "mainstream" media tardily picked it up, while still misrepresenting things, watering down the cruel treatment, pretending it is only affecting "illegal immigrants" when in fact asylum seekers, who are NOT "illegal" but are being treated as such by the outlaw Trump regime, which cloaks its crimes against humanity in "law," standing reality on its head, are also having their children forcibly taken or taken by subterfuge.
The best ongoing coverage I'm aware of has been by democracynow.org.
With polls safely showing a two-thirds majority of the public disgusted by the "policy," Democratic politicians have duly noted the direction of the political winds and have gotten involved. To be fair, some did so sooner than others. Democracynow.org has interviews with some. [However 55% of Republicans approve of the vicious "separation" policy, falsely claimed by Trump and his henchmen and women to be required by law, while all but officially announcing the fact that the goal is "deterrence," i.e. make Hispanics fleeing violence stop coming to the U.S. Come here and we'll take your children away from you is the "message" they want to "send."]
Congressman Frank Palone described one example of how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which goes by the chillingly apt acronym ICE) and its thuggish arm, the "Border Patrol," "separates" children from their parents. The governments' goons snuck into a cell at 3 AM and snatched a child from her father while they slept. Many similar stories have been aired in the past few weeks. There are other such stories. (This one came via WNYC radio in New York City.)
But contrary to the squeals of outrage, cruelty is nothing new as a U.S. practice. It is as old as the nation itself. Furthermore, it cannot be otherwise, as the U.S. is an empire. And empires are based on force, violence, coercion. And the U.S. is an empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery.
That all sounds like rhetoric to most Americans. The facts proving it fill numerous books, so I cannot prove the case in a short essay. Nor should I have to, given the massive amount of documentation that is openly available. People who don't know these very obvious truths by now are either willfully ignorant, hopelessly brainwashed, and/or fanatical nationalists.
1] "The Democrats forced that law upon our nation. I hate it. I hate to see separation of parents and children. The Democrats can come to us as they actually are in all fairness, we are talking to them, and they can change the whole border security. We need a wall. We need border security. We've got to get rid of catch and release." Trump to reporters at the White House, June 15, 2018. Yes, the fractured syntax is accurate. From CNN and other sources.
Detention center? What detention center? This is just a nice cozy shelter for kids!
Oh stop being such a little crybaby!
(Republican advice for little brats who come here uninvited.)
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