The Expansionist: More Tempests in a Teapot

Monday, March 06, 2017

More Tempests in a Teapot

I am hostile to Donald Trump and all his co-conspirators against this Republic and the planet Earth, but I'm not so carried away by hatred that I have lost all perspective and tossed aside all honesty. The extreme enemies of the Trump Administration, are manufacturing mountains from molehills again. The first is Jeff Sessions' having met with the Russian ambassador twice during the MANY months of the Presidential campaign. Big f* deal. That's what ambassadors do: they meet people, esp. influential people, in the country they are posted to, and try to make friends for their own country.
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The United States' embassy in Moscow has various organizational departments, such as an intelligence-gathering unit, in which Americans fluent in the spoken and printed Russian language read thru ALL major publications, scan ALL major news and public-affairs broadcasts, read as many regional publications as they can get, and speak with dissidents and prominent mainstream figures in Russian society. The Russian embassy here does the same thing in reverse.
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The issue is not whether Sessions met the ambassador but whether he lied about it. It is possible that he didn't remember an incidental contact of, say, three to seven minutes, in passing, and so he didn't lie about not remembering if he discussed the campaign. Plainly, during such a contentious time, any reasonable person would expect some aspect of the campaign to come up when people in public affairs met. It really is not a big deal, and we have much more important matters with which to concern ourselves. People hostile to Trump don't need to grasp at straws. I even agree with a few of Trump's stated policies, such as deporting ALL illegal aliens (tho he has, as usual, backtracked on that, as he backtracks on ALL his pledges from the campaign) — and no, I do not accept the recent renaming of illegals as "undocumented immigrants", because "immigrant" implies legitimacy. I would term them "barbarian invaders", and they are ALL lawbreakers, because they broke our immigration LAWS — not "recommendations" nor "informal policies", but LAWS. And they compete unfairly with the lowest echelons of American labor, partcularly native-born blacks and Latinos, drastically undercutting their wages and benefits, for NO benefit to society at large.
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Slaves WERE Immigrants. The second trivial matter of recent days concerns the statement by Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, (the moron) Ben Carson, referring to slaves as "immigrants". Let's not just wander around the intellectual firmament but consult the dictionary as to the exact meaning of "immigrant".
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Microsoft Encarta dictionary: "a newcomer to a country who has settled there". That is a perfect match. The definition does not address whether they immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily. That is not the issue. Yes, slaves from Africa were from another country; yes, they did settle here (altho almost all settled in this geograffic area before it became the United States; so the "country" they immigrated involuntarily to was Virginia or South Carolina, not the United States); ergo, they were indeed immigrants. That they didn't choose to come to what became the United States is irrelevant. The children of immigrants do not choose to come here either. They are taken, without their consent, by their parents, even if they didn't want to leave their friends, grandparents, cousins, schools, soccer teams, etc., behind.
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The American Heritage Dictionary defines "immigrant" thus: "A person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another." That is, again, a point-for-point match.
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Dictionary.com says an immigrant is "a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence", with no mention of voluntary or involuntary migration. That is, again, a perfect match. Carson did NOT misspeak.
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Yes, slaves WERE immigrants, and what Carson said further about them is absolutely true: "There were ... immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day, their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters ... might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land." Before anyone claims that slaves worked for "free", not "less", they got paid in housing and food — what is now known as "room and board". Indeed, it is one of the ironies of history that poor whites fought for the perpetuation of an economic structure in which monetarily-unpaid slave labor unfairly competed with free white labor, undercutting their wages and reducing them almost to slavery themselves.
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How can anybody argue with what Ben Carson said? Yes, slaves indeed "worked even longer, even harder for less". And many, if not every last one, did "ha[ve] a dream that one day, their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters ... might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."
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Fallon's Nonsense. NBC's latenite talkshow host Jimmy Fallon complained about a fotograf of Kellyanne Conway kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office, on the basis that she had her shoes on. But the foto does not show her feet!, and no one has produced a foto that does show her feet, with or without shoes on the fabric. So why did Fallon make so silly an accusation? Come on, people, let's stick to legitimate matters of public poicy. There is a lot to criticize Kellyanne Conway for. Kneeling on a couch is not one of them.
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Colbert Disgraces Himself. Stephen Colbert has lost his mind. He is constantly making 'jokes' about the outrageous accusations that Donald Trump watched Russian prostitutes urinating on each other for his amusement. NO ONE has presented ANY CREDIBLE EVIDENCE that such a thing ever happened, but Colbert keeps running with it, in hideous, crude, unfit-for-television "comedy" skits. That is irresponsible and contemptible in the extreme, AS contemptible and irresponsible as Trump's assertion that President Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped. Why the double standard, Mr. Colbert?
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Cease and desist, or a great many people will stop watching your show — I for one turned it off mid-skit — and indeed pressure CBS to REMOVE IT FROM THE AIR. Even if the assertions were true, and there is NO good reason to believe one way or the other, this is NOT a matter for public discourse (given Colbert's disgraceful behavior, perhaps we should spell that "discoarse"). Nor is the assertion that Donald Trump has unusually small hands fit for public discourse. All that that assertion is supposed to imply is disparagement about genital size — as tho genital size matters, one way or another! That is NOT an issue for public discourse in civilized society. And Donald Trump's hands look to me to be perfectly appropriate in size, if you compare them to the heads of normal people shown in fotos alongside him. What confuses some (feebleminded) people visually is that Trump's HEAD is ENORMOUS. Am I the only person in the Nation who has observed that? In any case, when did major U.S. media lose all standards of decency, to talk about sexual oddities and genital size? (I pass over the observation that it's not the size but the motion that matters in ordinary heterosexual intercourse. So is Stephen Colbert a pervert? You have to wonder.)
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Give It a Rest. Why is anyone complaining about these trivia? Everything Ben Carson said in his criticized remarks is absolutely true. Hold your fire for something UNtrue and viciously so, such as Trump's insane assertion that President Obama had his office/home(?) in Trump Tower wiretapped. We already know that Trump is a pathological liar, but perhaps he is more generally pathological, seriously ill mentally, as disqualifies him to remain in office.
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There is a constitutional amendment, the 25th, that provides for the temporary replacement of a President who cannot fulfil the obligations of the office. So to remove this madman from the Presidency, at least temporarily, and even if temporarily, again and again until his term expires, we do NOT need to impeach him, but merely to employ the mechanism set out in the 25th Amendment to find Trump unable to function by reason of (mental) disability. What if Donald Trump comes to have the delusion that Communist China or North Korea is about to launch a ballistic-missile assault upon us, so uses the nuclear codes to launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on one or BOTH of those countries? That is worth very serious consideration. None of the other matters I raised today is worth two seconds' attention.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

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