August 1-2, 2017: President Trump Launches Assault on Facts and Freedom

 

August 1, 2017: In really “Fake News,” a book by Senator Jeff Flake (R-Az.) is reviewed in the “failing,” faking New York Times. 

“Volatile unpredictability is not a virtue,” Flake asserts, with the president in mind. “We have quite enough volatile actors to deal with internationally as it is without becoming one of them.” He denounces the “embrace of ‘alternative facts’ at the highest levels of American life,” noting that it “creates a state of confusion, dividing us along fissures of truth and falsity and keeping us in a kind of low-level dread.” 

“Under our Constitution,” Flake adds, speaking to colleagues in Congress, 

…there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. Too often we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us.

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8/2/17: In another stunning, xenophobic development, the Trump administration announces plans to cut legal immigration in half. From now on Trump spokesman Stephen Miller tells reporters, the Statue of Liberty is a pigeon roost on an island in New York Harbor. 

 

The Statue of Liberty is a pigeon roost. 

Only those immigrants who have important skills and can speak English fluently are wanted. 

This plan is grotesque for many reasons. For starters, many avid Trump supporters won’t realize, but their own ancestors would have been blocked from immigrating back when America was great. All those millions of starving Irish in the 1840s? Low skill people. Spoke Gaelic.

Who else would have been kept out? How about Friedrich Trump, first of his line to reach these shores. According to his grandson, our president, on arrival Friedrich knew almost no English. 

All his life he spoke German primarily.

 

Know who else wouldn’t have made it, had this new policy been in effect a century ago?  Stephen Miller’s great grandfather, a Jew fleeing pogroms in Russia, and speaking Yiddish, would have been barred. Sam Glosser was his name. He passed beneath Lady Liberty’s torch around 1903. Most East European Jews in those days went straight to work in the sweatshops of the New York City garment industry, low-skilled workers, earning low pay. 

Virulent anti-Semitism was common at the time. A New York newspaper referred to people like Glosser as “slime” being “siphoned upon us from the Continental mud tanks.”

 

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THE WHITE HOUSE finally acknowledges that the president did “weigh in” on the original and completely disingenuous statement issued in Don Jr.’s name, about the meeting he forgot with a Russian lawyer, on a topic he couldn’t remember, with god knows how many participants. 

Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells reporters the president was only helping his son, which “any father would do.” 

That is, any father who might be trying to hide a trail that seems to hint at collusion with agents of a foreign enemy.

 

(Your humble blogger soon learns that “collusion” is not a term found in U.S. legal statutes and therefore has no meaning in this context. The President of the United States, however, never really gets it.)