Tuesday, June 26, 2018

The American Inquisition

From the Aspen Times:
"We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country."

So said Sen. Barack Obama in 2005.

For the past 30 years, candidates have campaigned with statements such as this, but now that we have a president who is actually walking the talk that got him elected, all that people writing in and to this paper know how to do is brand him as the new Hitler, Kirstjen Nielsen as the new Himmler, ICE as the new Gestapo, and Melania as the new Marie Antoinette. People like me, of course, constitute a "cult."

Surely some of us are smarter than this. Columnist Alison Margo, for example, regularly writes insightful, self-effacing, and wickedly funny commentary. But then periodically she slips a gear and slides into Trump-is-Hitler mode, claiming that motherhood and her Jewish heritage compel her to this conclusion — history and logic be damned.

Does she not recognize that if there's a new Kristallnacht underway, it's being conducted by throngs who cheer Robert DeNiro and condone Peter Fonda (for whom kidnapping and casting Barron Trump into a pit of pedophiles is the proper response to separating parents from children at the border), who want to see "pigs in a blanket, frying like bacon," who harass Republican officials outside of their homes and restaurants, where owners refuse to serve them?

Do not she and other exemplars of Godwin's Law (concerning the probability that a given discourse will compare someone to Hitler) recognize that Americans are polling as being more upbeat about "the way things are going" than at any time since 2005, when Sen. Obama made the above statement?

Whatever. Now we see Jimmy Fallon apologizing all over himself for having once mussed Donald Trump's hair and made him look human — lest Fallon find himself part of the first auto-da-fe'. Other heretics may not slip the noose or pyre so easily. See you at the Place de la Concorde. (Read more.)
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