QOTD -- "State Terror Has Arrived"

 

"After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

"Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range..." -- Masha Gessen, NYT, in her op/ed "State Terror Has Arrived."  Russian- born Gessen, of course, is an expert in autocracies and has seen how democracies can slide into dictatorships.

There's not much more to add, except to say "a picture is worth a thousand words":

QOTD: One Year In

 

"January 20 will mark one year since the United States embarked on a flight toward the abyss: Donald Trump’s second coming. Twelve months of dizzying authoritarianism followed that inauguration. The crossing of one unthinkable Rubicon after another without time to look back. A year in which the entire world has witnessed the deterioration — perhaps irreparable — of one of its oldest democracies, always at the mercy of the unpredictable mind of the most powerful man on the planet, who also happens to be one of the most capricious.

"The runaway carousel of Trump’s second presidency has hurtled along in what often seemed like an eternity, lurching from one mood swing to another, threats, a climate of vengeance, exaggerations and lies, insults and tasteless jokes, almost always posted on Truth, his social media platform. And it has done so with only one certainty: as he himself admitted last week in an interview, the only limit to his power at the helm of an empire threatened by China is not institutional decorum or the manners that used to govern traditional politics, but his own 'morality'"... -- Iker Seisdedos, EL PAÍS, summarizing the first year of the second Malignant Fascist administration's "flight toward the abyss."  Seisdedos fleshes out his look back at the last year with every significant example of the Malignant Fascist's power mad descent into insanity, unencumbered by concerns about accountability or checks on his power from his cowardly supine cult/ party. 

BONUS:  Masha Gessen takes stock of where we are and what we need to do.

Exceptionally Cruel

Merriam- Webster dictionary:

concentration camp: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.

***

Nearly a week ago in a tweet, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) described the places where the Trump regime is warehousing asylum- seeking families as "concentration camps." Since then, there's been a lot of reaction and counter- reaction to the characterization. The perpetually outraged right took great umbrage at the use of the term (as well as the usual "both sides" jackasses), being the defenders that they are of a morally superior "American exceptionalism."  Of course, these are the absolute last people on earth who have a claim  to speak for "American values," something the new generation of Millennial progressives is keenly aware of, a higher proportion of whom are people of color.  They and their families have experienced the gap more starkly than most between the moralistic "American exceptionalism" rhetoric and the American reality.

Peter Beinart makes the point that Ocasio-Cortez's comment points to this reframing of "exceptionalism" in light of the Trump regime's America's treatment of families on the border:

Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.

Masha Gessen makes a similar point:

... It is not an argument about language. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. (For this reason, mounting a defense of Ocasio-Cortez’s position by explaining that not all concentration camps were death camps misses the point.) It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves—not just as Americans but as human beings—and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold—not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position. 

If your image of America today is that we're not creating concentration camps, how does this fit that image:

A prematurely born infant and her 17-year-old mother spent seven days being almost entirely neglected in Border Patrol custody, according to lawyers who visited an immigrant processing station in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The baby, barely a month old, was wrapped in a dirty towel, wore a soiled onesie and looked listless, said one of the lawyers, Hope Frye. The mother was in a wheelchair due to complications from her emergency C-section and had barely slept ― the pain made it too uncomfortable for her to lie down and she was afraid of dropping her baby, the immigration and human rights attorney said.

How about this:

Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.

The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.

How about this:

A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.

The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.

"... [A]t the hands of the U.S. government."  Those are the children, who are the most helpless of all. That's us government- by- the- people citizens.  That's the banality of evil. That's America. That's reality, 2019.

If you're as sickened by this as we are, please contact your Senators and your Representative and demand that the government immediately provide humanitarian aid -- including medical assistance -- to these victims of our exceptionalism.  Because, this is cruelty being used as a deterrent to migration. It's cruelty as policy, and it's being done in your name and ours.

BONUS:  But of course.

If there were pictures of little blonde children sleeping on cement floors covered in their own filth, it would take all of 24 hours to get them out

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) June 22, 2019

BONUS II:  If only...

These are crimes against humanity. Everyone responsible for it, from the guards who took the clothing to the federal lawyers defending it in court to Trump and his administration leaders, should stand trial over this. https://t.co/66ttnryKVR

— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) June 22, 2019

Sunday Reflection

“Lying is the message. Its not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power of the truth itself... Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them." -- the always prescient Masha Gessen, in "The Putin Paradigm," New York Review of Books, December 2016.

The Media's Drift In Trump's Direction - PBS Edition

Watching "librul" PBS' "Washington Week in Review" last night, we were struck by the whole atmosphere of the show - five "insider" journalists summarizing the events of the past week ... without giving any sign that things are not normal. In fact, as you can read for yourself, there was a largely anodyne, horserace approach to the circus that's in town.

Here are just a few excerpts from the transcript (our emphasis throughout):

Nancy Cordes (CBS News) on the wealthfare tax bill:

... the fact that they said they would get it done on Friday and they did is actually a big sign of how unified this party is.  And it’s the culmination of a decades-long dream.  So it seems like, you know, the party’s really hanging together now, and looking to avoid any last-minute derailment.

Yes, super unified!  Just ask Steve "Loose Cannon" Bannon! They're only unified long enough to screw America and future generations. MAGA!

Shawna Thomas (VICE News) on the rush to pass the wealthfare bill:

... Everyone has been saying we have to pass this bill by the end of the year.  We have to pass this bill by the end of the year.  They didn’t really have to pass this bill by the end of the year.  (Laughter.)

Harhar! And, no, it wasn't because of Doug Jones' victory -- they targeted passage before Christmas long before the Alabama election -- it was because the bill is a reeking pile of regressive social and economic engineering that they don't want people to understand (too late!).

Kristen Welker (NBC News) on the involvement of nitwit know-nothing Donald "Rump" Trump:

... [H]e was really serving as an energizing force, I think, as opposed to sort of derailing the negotiations.  Today we had a chance to ask him some questions early in the morning, and I asked him if he would support increasing the child tax credit.  He indicated the answer to that was yes.  [Ed. See how piddling a deal this was below.] So it was very clear, as the day was progressing, that this was moving in a good direction for this president.  I don’t think you can overstate it.  President Trump needs a victory after the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.  He hasn’t had a major legislative victory.  And so this was a full-court press for this president, the vice president, and his entire top staff.

Stand up and cheer for Big Boy Donnie! F*ck you average Americans who'll be losing health insurance! It's the horserace and the appearance of competence that matter most!

Cordes on the bill's repeal of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate:

Republicans don’t want to talk about it because they’d love to be able to slide that through.  There’s another big GOP priority in this bill they don’t talk a lot about either, and that is opening up part of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling... 

Hmmm. Republicans don't want to talk about it, and neither does Nancy Cordes!

Cordes again on the child tax credit:

 ... I will say that there are some changes in this final version that may help to win people over, at least in the short term.  The fact that that child tax credit is refundable up to $1,400.  That’s a pretty big chunk of change. 

No, no it's not you simpleton.  Again, as Andy Slavitt points out, it amounts to $25 a month for a family with two kids (whose daycare costs would average $2,000 a month). Do your f*cking homework!

We could go on (that's just from the first few minutes of the program), but the point is, these "elite" media types are very content to go along with the talking points Republicans have tossed over the transom, while ignoring the yuuuuge elephant in the room:  that we have an abnormal "president" and a party that is increasing its culpability in the rotting out of American values and social fabric. Isn't that newsworthy? (Rhetorical question.)

It's always helpful to keep in mind Masha Gessen's warning to all of us:

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information. 

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

These people need to be held to account for their lazy complicity in normalizing this monster, his legion of thugs and their efforts to destroy the good that America stood for just a short 13 months ago.

Sunday Reflection - No Compromising With Autocrats

Masha Gessen, in her classic post- election essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival," tells us "don't make compromises" with neo- fascist autocrat Donald "Rump" Trump whose goal will be to consolidate power by continuing to mobilize the right- wing:

This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

If you haven't read Gessen's entire essay, please do so -- and fortify yourself.

BONUS:  Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo riffs on an analysis by Neal Gabler on how America has become morally hollowed out.  Worth a read.