CSotD: My Heroes Have Always Been Conmen

Dear Leader has revealed his plans for reforming immigration, and Jack Ohman sums it up: The idea is to have only people come here if they don’t need to be here, and the question is whether the people who harvest our fruits and vegetables will have full Phd’s or if we will allow people to work in the fields who never finished their dissertations.

Several people on social media have pointed out that the proposal to make immigrants pass civics tests — not to gain citizenship but simply to enter the country — is requiring them to know more about our system of government than most Trump supporters and perhaps most of Trump’s staff.

And perhaps the President of the United States hisownself, though it’s hard to tell where arrogance and ignorance overlap there.

 

Jimmy Margulies may be overstating it a bit, but I laft. I’m skeptical of the attacks on Melania’s entry to the United States because some of them are clearly false, so that the others have to be taken with a grain of salt.

But every time Dear Leader pipes up about the evils of chain migration I have to wonder how he thinks his in-laws got here, and it’s clear that he’s practicing that old hypocritical trick of “raise the drawbridge, I’m in.”

Which is no barrier to his appeal among the Deplorables, many of whom come from ethnic groups once targeted by the Know-Nothings, and nearly all of whom are angry and marginalized because of people like Dear Leader who keep them down while advancing cronies.

 

I’ve always been uncomfortable talking about the NRA, because, for one thing, I learned to shoot through NRA training, back before it was transformed into a rightwing terrorist organization.

The other is that non-shooters tend to talk about guns and NRA interchangeably, which is understandable given how the NRA dominates anti-regulation lobbying, but which is unfair to sane, responsible gunowners, among whom I count friends and family.

The fringe whackos can’t be reasoned with, the crazies who think they’re going to hide in the woods and wage war on the Soviet invaders, but even in their case, you have to wonder how they manage to ignore Dear Leader’s bromance with Putin?

More potentially productive is to reach those who believe in the NRA but might be offended and upset to know, as Bill Bramhall depicts it, that their donations are being re-directed into the pockets of the NRA brass.

Lapierre’s lavish lifestyle is bad enough, but the fact that he’s not simply living large off his salary but by misuse of general NRA resources should awaken the less brainwashed of his membership.

Meanwhile …

 

Bill Day wonders how Lindsey Graham transformed from staunch critic of Trump into, as Day puts it, a rubber stamp for whatever Dear Leader wants.

Well, wonder no more. Turns out Lindsey is as deeply in thrall to Russian and Ukranian oligarchs as Dear Leader.

For those who rail against “old white men” running things, the problem is not age or race or gender but money. As long as we allow money to influence our elections, you’ll see them dominated by the power structure, and whether that’s Wayne Lapierre buying expensive suits — and there seems to be some Russian money in there, too — or Vladimir Putin straight out buying senators and congressmen and even presidents, it’s the money, stupid.

Though, again, as someone who sat through at least one John Birch assembly in grade school, I find it bizarre that the people who warned us against them Russkies turned out to be the most vulnerable to their influence.

I suppose it’s not all that different than the fellow who rails against homosexuals being caught with the pool boy or the one who screams about abortion paying for his mistress to have one.

 

But jumping jesus on a pogo stick, how can Trump get away with pardoning Conrad Black?

Black admittedly has a larger presence in Canada, which is why Graeme MacKay leapt on the story and did this cartoon for the Hamilton Spectator.

Black was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice and was serving a 42 month sentence when he remembered that he was (A) rich and (B) a publisher …

… so he wrote a glowing book about Donald J. Trump, whereupon he was pardoned.

In that above-linked article, the lead prosecutor on his case says

I am saddened at the pardon of Conrad Black because it lays bare the fact that justice in Donald Trump’s America is unapologetically linked to who you know and how much money you have. 

And Black himself explained how fair and right the pardon was, in a lengthy letter to the National Post, and also expressed his feelings to reporters there in an article by Barbara Shechter:

 Look, on anything like this you’re going to get people saying it’s a back-scratching job and he’s just rewarding me for writing nice things about him, but so what? Some people criticize Santa Claus, some people find fault with everything.

So there you have it. The only way to stop the persecution of rich white men is with the power of the pardon by rich white men.

Don’t you feel better now?

Here … have a little

Juxtaposition of the Day

(John Cole)

 

(David Horsey)

Cole captures the “Are You Shitting Me?” element of John Bolton’s re-emergence from well-deserved obscurity, while Horsey accurately labels his depiction “Chickenhawks.”

It should be noted that, when Bush joined the National Guard, there was a program that allowed pilots to volunteer for duty in Vietnam and that he reportedly inquired about it and was turned down, in part because the program was ending.

By contrast, by the time Bolton — who supported the war — joined the Army National Guard, there was no chance of being deployed and he knew it and acknowledged that he joined to avoid being drafted.

While, of course, Dear Leader was an unabashed draft dodger.

The kind of entitled weasel that even opponents of the war held in contempt: