The special counsel investigation into the “Russia thing” currently has President Donald Trump’s one-time campaign manager in jail and Trump’s former legal “fixer” facing similar legal difficulties, the First Lady is clearly unhappy in her marriage and the job it entails, and there’s a lingering discussion about why Trump is lavishing praise on North Korea’s nutcase dictator and still feuding with Canada’s democratically-elected Prime Minister. The president’s biggest public relations problem over Father’s Day weekend, though, was his “zero-tolerance” policy that separates children from the parents who have been caught illegally crossing America’s borders, which makes for some tear-jerking and potentially Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs of cute and crying toddlers being whisked away from their parents off to God knows where.
It’s all more complicated than those tear-jerking photographs might suggest, of course, and goes far back in complicated ways to the days of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, but rather than make those complicated arguments Trump has instinctively chosen to simplify it by brazenly lying. He blames those tear-jerking photographs on a “Democrat law” that requires him to drag children away from their mothers and fathers, and even as he appeals to his die-hard fans that he’s getting tough despite our weak Democratic immigration laws he expects the rest of us to believe those damned Democrats have forced him to adopt such severe measures.
We were tough-on-borders and opposed to those damned open-borders Democrats back when Trump was contributing big bucks to their damned campaigns, and we well understand how complicated the issue actually is, but we refuse to pretend that Trump is quote brazenly lying about it.
As old-fashioned conservatives we don’t believe there’s anything such as a “Democrat” or “Republican” law, only laws that were passed by a duly elected-legislature and signed by a duly-elected president, and in this case the law in question was passed by a majority-Democratic legislature but with numerous Republican votes and was signed by a Republican president. The well-intentioned law allowed an administration to separate children from illegal immigrants who might be engaged in human sex trafficking, which the Obama administration often used in less publicized cases, but it does not require an administration to pry children from illegal immigrants and legal asylum-seekers who crossed the border in violation of America’s misdemeanor laws. and Trump’s insistence that he’s forced by those heartless Democrats is a damnable lie. Attorney General Jeff Sessions invokes scripture to justify his “zero-tolerance” rule of using the well-intentioned and bipartisan law to pry crying children from their misdemeanor-commiting parents, drawing on the Pauline scriptures about obeying civil authority, but in the oh-so-conservatives verses of Leviticus they also admonish the children of God that “The foreigner among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt,” and the duly passed law by a bi-partisan legislature and signed by a Republican president law does seem to offer discretion.
This is all complicated further by the fact that even the quintessentially Democratic Obama also used the law to separate a few illegal immigrants from their provable progeny, which wasn’t nearly so publicized by either the mainstream media or Fox News, and that images of of children sleeping in wire cages on several of the networks and newspapers really was “fake news” footage from the Obama years, and that Obama deported far more adult and underage illegal immigrants than Trump ever gave him credit for, and that illegal immigration really is a problem. In spite of all these complications, though, Trump is still lying and Sessions is still citing highly selective scripture about about why those poor kids in those heartbreaking and potentially Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs are being ripped fromtheir misdemeanor-committing parents, and for now no one looks good.
Our hope is that they all somehow work it out fairly, and that America’s borders are properly secured but that immigrants who commit the misdemeanor of taking advantage of Trump’s booming economy don’t lose their children, and that at the very least everyone stops lying about it.For now the “Russia thing” has a former Trump campaign manager in jail, and a former Trump legal “fixer” in the legal crosshairs, and even the clearly disgruntled First Lady of the United States is “tweeting” her indignation about Trump’s “and Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy at the border, and it seems another bad news cycle for Trump.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 