CSotD: die Ratten
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We’ll start at the beginning, with Dick Wright digging into the History Bag for a traditional metaphor in support of Dear Leader’s lies about immigrants.
Certainly you’ve seen similar cartoons, this one coming from a Viennese newspaper in 1938, celebrating Germany getting rid of its rats with a “Germany for Germans” policy, while other, more supposedly democratic nations, were barring them. We know what followed.
Dear Leader told a series of whoppers about immigrants on Meet The Press yesterday, which you can watch here. He repeated the nonsensical lies about gangs tearing apart neighborhoods in Denver and, predictably, claimed that these evil immigrants had all entered the country during the Biden administration.
Kristen Welker found herself in the position of needing to complete the interview without getting hung up on pointless “Is not!” “Is so!” arguments, but she did push back on his ridiculous claim that there are 13,099 murderers among the undocumented immigrants loose in the country.
She pointed out that the number covered 40 years, not just the past four, but he just talked past her. And her correction was accurate but incomplete, because while the number does cover 40 years, it’s not about people running loose but is a factor of people incarcerated for their crimes.
Once an immigrant is in prison, they’re no longer listed by ICE. They are the opposite of loose. And that linked article is from the Cato Institute, which is hardly a collection of libtards.
NBC did its own fact checking on Trump’s absurd flood of what they call “false, misleading or exaggerated claims,” but which you might also call “lies, damn lies and deranged fantasies.”
Welker could have spent the entire time just swatting away at these toxic fairy tales, but he’d have simply denied them and, unlike Jonathan Swan, she hadn’t set it up as a cross-examination.
And besides, she may not have been prepared for such a completely nonsensical, bald-faced lie as his statement that the US is the only country that allows birthright citizenship.
There are 33 countries of which a child is automatically a citizen upon birth, and another 34 in which there are restrictions and qualifications but some form of birthright citizenship.
You would think that anyone who planned to overturn the 14th Amendment over this would, first of all, know that you can’t simply negate an amendment with an executive order — he’s shaky on that issue — but, second, would have some idea of how other nations handle the matter.
It’s as ignorant and foolish as some jackass appointed to cut government costs announcing that he wants to defund the ACLU, which doesn’t get government funding.
The important issue here is whether or not Trump knows he is lying. It seems improbable that he would deliberately deliver nonsense so easily disproven as the birthright claim. It’s much more likely that he is one of those narcissistic personalities who invents a reality that he also believes.
That’s not confined to the Jeffrey MacDonalds and OJ Simpsons who believe protective lies that cover horrific, traumatizing events. It includes the guy who has convinced himself that he was the state boxing champion in high school or the woman who honestly believes her claim to be of royal blood.
There was a guy back home whose endless string of hogwash was a source of amusement. He was a good guy and we liked him, but we didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth.
Besides, he was not privy to the nuclear codes, nor was he appointing the people who ran our nation.
As Glen Le Lievre suggests, the rat problem is not them deserting a sinking ship but, rather, it’s a sinking White House towards which rats are streaming, which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Pete Hegseth’s nomination doesn’t pose half the problems of putting Comrade Gabbard in charge of intelligence or appointing Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to a nation he hopes God will smite in the process of scooping him up to heaven. Those latter propositions require some parsing of beliefs and trends.
By contrast, the more Hegseth’s nomination dangles in the breeze, the clearer it becomes that he is unfit for any government position. Lester suggests that people are lying about him, but there’s no need to lie because the verifiable stories — some of which emerged before he was even being considered for a government post — are more than sufficient.
Between excessive drinking, sexual misbehavior, his paying off a rape accuser and his having been dismissed from two veterans’ organizations for mishandling of funds, it’s amazing he has any job at all, much less one in which he’d be able to fire qualified generals and downgrade the role of military women.
But as the father in Bramhall’s cartoon says, that seems to be what we want.
After all, the only real difference between Hegseth and Trump is that Trump is a teetotaller, and that, as Rob Rogers points out, the American people have given Dear Leader their stamp of approval.
Nobody voted for Hegseth. (Perhaps they would.)
Though we shouldn’t be too hasty to declare what it is the American people want. On the other hand, we should also not be afraid to read the tea leaves.
Shannon Wheeler mocks the Chattering Class as they suck their thumbs and ponder the response to the murder of Brian Thompson and the rage that has poured out from those damaged by insensitive, uncaring health insurance companies.
To repeat yet again, each man’s death diminishes me, but that includes people who die for lack of appropriate health care.
I am equally horrified by the murder of Brian Thompson and by the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, but I’m also outraged by the stories emerging from average people who have lost loved ones, or perhaps “only” their life’s savings, because of our bureaucratic health care system.
And I’m happy to have quoted “Tale of Two Cities” yesterday, because it set me up to really appreciate Guy Body’s caution today.
In fact, I just got a copy of Dicken’s novel, which I haven’t read since I was 14, and plan to follow that by reading a serious history of the French Revolution, before our own Napoleon is too firmly entrenched.
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