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Charles P. Pierce: This Is a Fight Over What It Means to Be an American
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21729468/trump-border-policies-america/This Is a Fight Over What It Means to Be an American
The Trump administration's border policies are a story about America at its very core.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 20, 2018
snip//
On Tuesday night, dropping by Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, who remains the terrific reporter he was long before he became a TV star, pointed out something that has gone largely unremarked in the explosion of news, opinion, and outrage that has erupted in the past two weeks: Namely, that these children are moving from trauma, through trauma, and into trauma, with almost no relief along the way.
The links in the chain go all the way back to the northern triangle in Honduras and Guatemala and people are making the decision to come here because they are facing the most unimaginable personal terror. They’re not on the thousand-mile journey for any other reason. What the Trump Administration has entered into is a war of terror with the cartels in Central America, in which they [the administration*] have now said we must terrorize people more than the cartels are terrifying people in their home countries so they don’t come here. That is a bidding war that is ghastly, and a moral abomination, and one I pray that we cannot possibly win.
snip//
The puzzle, of course, is why he needs a new executive order when he simply could end the policy with a single phone call to Nielsen or Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, but they’re not speaking right now, so maybe that’s the explanation. He then went off to meet with Republican congresscritters, who managed to look ever more obsequious on television but who were exceeded in suck-up-i-tude by Vice President Mike Pence, whose bootlicking skills are unsurpassed by anyone since the Bourbon monarchies went out of business. At the end, of course, he went very long on both meretricious Obama-blame and strange bullshit.
“We are not going to let people from the Middle East using children to cross our borders.”
Oy.
The most important thing to do about this ongoing story, and the roiling boil of outrage it has prompted, is to keep it from centering itself in Washington. Toothless compromises are being offered by the timorous Republican congressional majorities. The president* is just charlatan enough to swoop in behind one of these Potemkin bills, beat his chest for his deal-making prowess in “solving” a catastrophe of his own making, and then run on it this fall, while they’re still shipping unaccompanied infants and toddlers off to god-alone-knows-where.
This is an American story that is taking place over the length and breadth of this country. It is a fight over the essential nature of what an American is, and what being an American always has been. The story is the country, not its feckless, complicit, and increasingly ridiculous government.
