Sunday, February 18, 2018

Washington Post Pulls No Punches In Reporting On Trump's Dreamer Sabotage


This is how journalism is supposed to work: tell the truth about what you see.

On the front page of The Washington Post today, there's no "both sides" CYA in this lead news story by reporters David Nakamura and Mike DeBonis:
Trump administration assault on bipartisan immigration plan ensured its demise
As much of the country was gripped Wednesday by horrific images from the mass shooting at a Florida high school, two dozen senior Trump administration officials worked frantically into the night to thwart what they considered a different national security threat. 
The looming danger on the minds of the officials was a piece of legislation scheduled for a vote the next day in the Senate. It was designed to spare hundreds of thousands of young immigrants known as “dreamers” from deportation — but to the men and women huddled in a makeshift war room in a Department of Homeland Security facility, the measure would blow open U.S. borders to lawless intruders. 
“We’re going to bury it,” one senior administration official told a reporter about 10:30  that evening. 
The assault was relentless — a flurry of attacks on the bill from DHS officials and the Justice Department, and a veto threat from the White House — and hours later, the measure died on the Senate floor. 
The Trump administration’s extraordinary 11th-hour strategy to sabotage the bill showed how, after weeks of intense bipartisan negotiations on Capitol Hill, it was the White House that emerged as a key obstacle preventing a deal to help the dreamers.
Bravo, and thank you!  This has to continue because there are so many lies and so much disinformation pouring out of the Trump/ Republican firehose of falsehood, that we need a continual, factual pushback and record. Here, those facts point to a vile White (Supremacist) House that's determined to resist any attempt to provide a humane solution for Dreamers, as part of their overall campaign to "Make America Great White Again."  Now (very belatedly) perhaps we're seeing an emerging sense that journalists bear a great responsibility in our system for telling the truth and holding people and institutions accountable.  Perhaps.