Category Archives: Trump
Children as pawns
We now know that this particular child was not taken from her mother, but it doesn’t really matter. The symbolism of the photo is what matters expressing as it does the harsh cruelty of what Trump is doing with the migrants on the border. The cover should become the premier statement of the Presidency of Trump.
They say that the policy of separating parents and children is no longer in effect. If that is true, why is this 9-year old still in custody while his Mom is free? At least, she was able to locate him, but only from a chance conversation with another parent.
There was a time when the Trump admin incompetence seemed amusing. Not any more. No one, least of a a child, should be put through the terrors that incompetence and confusion have condemned them to.
Confusion
In the New Republic, Jeet Heer says:
If “zero tolerance” was suspended, it is only as a stop-gap measure. It does nothing to address the problem of family reunification for those already separated by the policy. Further, it is a temporary
measure which could be reversed once the administration has more resources in place to enact a renewed “zero tolerance” push. But the
larger story is that the White House has no real policy and different factions are making up rules willy-nilly.
In other words, those children and parents who have already been separated may have little or no chance of being reunited. Trump didn’t really back down. He just tweaked his cruel policy a bit in an effort to get the photos off the TV screens. Maybe Melania can show him that what he sees on Fox News is not true (no child actors).
I hope the photographers and reporters will continue to hunt down the sites where kids are being kept and manage somehow to show us what happens inside. When will we be able to see the inside of the facility those little girls arrived at last night in New York? Are they still there? Or have they been moved again? If so, where are they?
Bret Stephens thinks that Republicans have lost their moral sense (did they ever have one?). He also thinks we need immigrants. The space is waiting. The jobs are waiting. The demographics of an aging population tell us of our need.
If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then opposition to immigration is the conservatism of morons. It mistakes identity for virtue, entitlement for merit, geographic place for moral value.
The Bully Backs Down ?
Finally, Trump has signed an order (according to the Washington Post) to keep border crossing families together – to stop tearing small children and babies from their parents. That takes care of what happens right away. I wonder how they will get the children they’ve detained back together with their parents, for our government is now responsible for seeing to it. What if parents have already been deported? Will DHS search El Salvador for them? Or will they set up some fancy phone system that will not work well and the moms from the highland towns without even spanish won’t understand.
Thank goodness Trump is sensitive to media coverage! But keep the pressure on. We still have the 2,000 or so children who need to be reunited with their parents and who are already scattered over the Texas and Florida landscapes. Did he really think he could trade interned kids for his wall?
Details. Will the kids now be detained by ICE with their parents? And if so how much difference is there? Ice can only detain for 20 days. Are we back to GPS anklets in the surrounding communities? From the New York Times:
“There is no system whatsoever to track these family separations, no
efforts systematically to reunite these families,” Mr. Enriquez said.
“There is no supervisor, there is no database saying, ‘child here,
parent there,’ so they can come back together.”
Where to?
Way back in 2016, before the election, I said something about American’s Common Sense. Somewhere between 2008 and 2016, we lost it, or at least, enough of us lost it to make Trump our President. Since then fear, anxiety and sadness battle for the front of my brain. The latest disaster in Quebec just makes things worse.
We have a madman for President who has turned on our closest friends with a viciousness that’s hard to endure. Trudeau didn’t deserve his Twitter lashing.
I worry about my sons and their families. What will be left of the United States when Trump finally leaves office? Will he give us away to Putin or China or even to Kim because of ignorance or fear or both? If he loses the next mational election, will he accept the results or say he was cheated and it was rigged? What then? How do we remove a President when Congress refuses to do its job? Whatever happened to the spines of those members who cower and refuse to see the destruction of our Rule of Law smacking them in the face?
If Trump can be cruel and vicious toward seekers of asylum and Prime Ministers both, it’s only a short step to cruelty and viciousness toward all of us. The memories of the rise of Hitler have grown too faded. There aren’t enough of us left who grew up dudring WWII and saw and heard all that was awful to sound the warning.
This is inexcusable:
It constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” which I thought somehow was illegal. (See Ammendment 8 to the US Constitution.) How many of those babies is Sessions going to traumatize with his cruel and unusual “solution” to our immigration problems? The last count I saw was near 2,000 children forcibly separated from their parents. Tyranny has indeed reached American shores.
The North Korea Summit: Could it be that Trump did this made-for-TV-event to boost his approval ratings ahead of the November elections? Since it’s hard to see that anything was actually accomplished in the way of nuclear reductions or eliminations on the part of the North Koreans and they are now talking of promises of sanctions reductions, it looks like it might be a typical Trumpian short-term “deal” that does little but generate a small bit good publicity for him and a freebee for the other party. Speaking of “nothing burgers”!
On the Justice Department IG’s report: The lesson to be taken, in my small point of view is that people in civil service and government in general need to get a lot smarter about their use of email and text messaging. Rule No. 1: Don’t ever use private email for government communication. Rule No. 2: Don’t ever use your government issued phone to text personal messages to colleagues and friends. They will come back to haunt you and be used by your enemies to destroy your reputation if not your job prospects.
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