All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[WestPhillyPunisher]

And yet, ICE has gone ahead and started trying to deport immigrant veterans. And the Pentagon ain't f***ing pleased none about that. Neither am I, personally, because it is super s***ty.

Methinks Stephen Miller levels of hatred against minorities would have to be involved.

As a veteran myself, it infuriates me that my fellow servicemen and servicewomen are being treated like **** by this administration because they aren’t white. Yeah, this nonsense has Kid Jackboot’s fingerprints all over it.

[Tami]

Oh good, glad you're willing to talk about this. So, what IS your evidence that journalists at CNN are doing the bidding of corporate sponsors, and that journalists at Washington Post are doing the bidding of Jeff Bezos?

Twitter Link

A freelance journalist with Boston Magazine and other news outlets got into a discussion with Sanders supporters. Sanders supporters think that the News media is biased against Bernie Sanders. You be judge.

[Gray Lensman]

Twitter Link

A freelance journalist with Boston Magazine and other news outlets got into a discussion with Sanders supporters. Sanders supporters think that the News media is biased against Bernie Sanders. You be judge.

I'd say some writers are, but the political media as a whole is more addicted to the 'horse race' narrative and if they don't have it, will actively try to cut a front runner down to get that all important close race narrative again. The first night of the second debates was pretty much the moderators asking one question over and over again: "Would you like to use this line of attack against Warren/Sanders?"

[Moon Ronin]

And yet, ICE has gone ahead and started trying to deport immigrant veterans. And the Pentagon ain't f***ing pleased none about that. Neither am I, personally, because it is super s***ty.

Methinks Stephen Miller levels of hatred against minorities would have to be involved.

Not started has been going on for a while now

[Gray Lensman]

Not started has been going on for a while now

What Trump did was cut the program for a lot of people who hadn't completed tours yet. Essentially, he escalated things even higher.

[Tami]

National Review’s ugly attack on me reflects the Trumpification of conservatism

I grew up reading National Review in the 1980s. As I described in “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right,” my father got me a subscription when I was 13 years old, and it shaped my worldview. Its founder, William F. Buckley Jr., was a childhood hero. As an adult, I was thrilled to occasionally appear in its hallowed pages. I admired its 2016 cover story “Against Trump.” More recently, the magazine has been largely supportive of President Trump — no doubt in part because it is eager to avoid the fate of the Weekly Standard — but it still publishes principled writers such as David French and Jay Nordlinger who are not afraid to tell its subscribers what they don’t want to hear.

So it was a shock on Monday afternoon to see myself attacked in National Review as, essentially, a traitor to the white race. “Max Boot Fans the Flames of Racial Hatred” was the headline of an article by John Hirschauer. This was a response to a Post column I had written last week taking aim at the 55 percent of whites who in a 2018 poll said that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups. This perception was obviously untrue, I pointed out, but Trump was playing on this sense of white victimhood. My conclusion: “White people can be pretty clueless. (I know, I’m one myself.) Get a grip, folks. We’re not the victims here.”

In reply, Hirschauer labeled me one of “the self-loathing whites” who has adopted “the politics of self-hatred.” He accused me of “speaking in … totalizing racial language” that “is stoking the flames of race hatred.” So telling whites not to be racists is an incitement to race hatred? How Orwellian.

[Moon Ronin]

What Trump did was cut the program for a lot of people who hadn't completed tours yet. Essentially, he escalated things even higher.

That's a different issue

[Mister Mets]

And yet, ICE has gone ahead and started trying to deport immigrant veterans. And the Pentagon ain't f***ing pleased none about that. Neither am I, personally, because it is super s***ty.

Methinks Stephen Miller levels of hatred against minorities would have to be involved.

The article suggests that this has been a problem since 2013, so it's not something ICE has just started doing.

As a veteran myself, it infuriates me that my fellow servicemen and servicewomen are being treated like **** by this administration because they aren’t white. Yeah, this nonsense has Kid Jackboot’s fingerprints all over it.

Stephen Miller was not in charge during the beginning of the second term of the Obama administration.

[Dalak]

Trump's presidential brand is finding small things that are problematic and making them into much bigger fusterclucks.

[Mister Mets]

I can't say fro sure, in that I'm not a member of Congress. If I was and I was working on Immigration Reform, I am the type of person to study the Issue first. Get feedback from experts, do research, whatever it takes to get it right.

What I woudl like to see is Immigration Reform that
1. Takes the 'Illegal' out of Immigration. Make it so that people coming here don't have to live in fear, or feel like they have to hide in the shadows.
2. Set it up so that everyone entering the country who wants to stay are Documented. Expand the concept of Documentation so that even non-citizens can live and work here, so long as they don't violate any criminal laws.
3. Upgrade and better finance the system for in processing new arrivals. The "Ellis Island" solution. Create better centralized system to in-process all new arrivals, do it quickly and humanely, and assign paperwork, including IDs to each new immigrant.
4. Improve the process of becoming citizens for those who want it.
5. Expand trade with our Neighboring countries, which can help boost their economies. As well as provide other assistance as needed, including dealing with crime and gangs, in order to raise those countries up and make them places where people want to live. Doing this would decrease Immigration since there would be less need for it.
6. Possibly other things I can't think of at the moment.

Of course, keeping crime and drugs and so on out is important, but we have systems in place to deal with it. Providing the needed support to these border agencies is what we need to secure the border against trouble. This includes High-Tech support.

You did talk about what happens when immigration reform is a reality, so I was curious what you thought that would entail.

An issue with getting experts to determine the right solution is that they still need a solution that is politically viable in order to get the House and Senate on board, and to avoid blowback in the next elections. So it isn't just whether the experts think we should have a system in which anyone who wants to get in is documented without fear of removal, but about whether you can get a White House and congress on board.

[Tami]

You did talk about what happens when immigration reform is a reality, so I was curious what you thought that would entail.

An issue with getting experts to determine the right solution is that they still need a solution that is politically viable in order to get the House and Senate on board, and to avoid blowback in the next elections. So it isn't just whether the experts think we should have a system in which anyone who wants to get in is documented without fear of removal, but about whether you can get a White House and congress on board.

That is a factor in the equation. One reason why I would advocate a period of study to consider all angles and aspects.

[Tami]

Bernie Sanders Again Attacks Amazon — This Time Pulling In The Washington Post

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is lashing out at the media coverage of his presidential campaign — in a way that might sound familiar.

"I talk about that all of the time," Sanders said of Amazon paying "nothing" in taxes. "And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn't write particularly good articles about me. I don't know why," he said at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon and privately purchased The Post.

The remark sounded an awful lot like the kind of criticism leveled by someone else.

"...[T]he failing New York Times and the Amazon Washington Post do nothing but write bad stories even on very positive achievements - and they will never change!" President Trump tweeted last year.

Hmmmm.....

Bernie Sanders tones down criticism of Washington Post

(CNN) - Sen. Bernie Sanders scaled back his criticism of the media on Tuesday, telling CNN he did not believe that Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was dictating the paper's coverage of his campaign.

But while the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate acknowledged that there is no direct link between the Post newsroom and Bezos, he continued to argue that the structure of the mainstream media leaves candidates like him at a disadvantage. "I think my criticism of the corporate media is not that they are anti-Bernie, that they wake up, you know, in the morning and say, 'What could we do to hurt Bernie Sanders?' -- that's not the case, that Jeff Bezos gets on the phone to The Washington Post," the Vermont independent said in an interview with CNN. "There is a framework of what we can discuss and what we cannot discuss, and that's a serious problem."

[Mister Mets]

That is a factor in the equation. One reason why I would advocate a period of study to consider all angles and aspects.

How long would the period be? You might have an entirely different White House and congress by the time the study is over, or a radically different dynamic (IE- if the study is complete a few months before a major election). You're also going to have people stuck in procedural limbo in the mean-time, and there's likely going to be a contentious vote on the question of whether to have the study in the first place.

A potential compromise would be to have some kind of larger immigration deal that fixes some of the problems, and calls for the larger study, just so politicians don't end up either making a tough vote on something that calls for another vote at a time when momentum may be stalled, or so that they couldn't use the study to shirk responsibility (IE- We don't have to do anything right now because the study will tell us what to do).

National Review’s ugly attack on me reflects the Trumpification of conservatism

The criticism he decries denounces white-grievance politics and goes after him for more than just telling white people not to be racist. The claim was that he frames opposition to his proposed policies as tantamount to support for white nationalism.

Boot’s central contention is that whites in America are beset with a victimhood mentality, one that “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree.” In the wake of the El Paso tragedy, Boot can make a plausible case that racial grievances (real and imagined) facilitate discord and violence, because, of course, they do. Instead, Boot denounces white-grievance politics (a politics well worth denouncing) while simultaneously granting other grievance groups a blank check to raid the expansive store of imputed guilt and collective punishment. As a matter of course, he favors any repatriation for injustices to which racial minorities and their ancestors may (or may not) have been subject — as long as it’s in an effort to “redress past wrongs,” as he puts it.

His ultimate prescription to the “white people” he instructs to “get a grip” is something like “Stop whining.” And that’s fine; we could certainly stand less whining in the United States. In effect, however, Boot sets up a Faustian choice for “white” readers: Side with the white supremacists and their detestable program, or sell your political soul to Max Boot and become one of the self-loathing whites so paralyzed by intersectional deference that they can hardly advance an argument without first reciting that neutered prelude: “As a straight, white, cisgender man with privilege, I . . .”

If Boot believes what he is saying — and I’m not sure he does — and assumes that “many” Trump supporters believe “that white supremacy is the natural order of things,” then he’d do well to provide them with a better set of options than white nationalism on the one hand and political impotence on the other. Surely there is a third way between a full-throated embrace of white identity and a supine adoption of the politics of self-hatred.

A responsible journalist would propose a realistic alternative for conservative whites who don’t want to cede their basic political premises but who nevertheless reject white nationalism. But Boot instead goes on a meandering tirade with scant a coherent point.

He takes on specific points in his rebuttal.

My reference to “self-loathing whites so paralyzed by intersectional deference” was not meant in the “self-hater” paradigm so often employed by racialists on both the right and left to describe members of a racial group who betray supposed majoritarian interests (thinking here of the various insults aimed at Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, etc. for being “self-hating blacks,” or actual white supremacists who claim that whites in favor of anything from immigration to intermarriage are “race traitors”).

In the piece, I state several times that white nationalists and white supremacists are evil people with repugnant ideologies. I did not do so to create an elaborate ruse to deflect attention from some deeply-held, clandestine racist agenda of mine. I did so because I believe that white supremacy, in all its forms, is a sin against the Creator and His creation. I meant, in other words, what I said.

My point in the self-loathing comment: if Boot is really condemning all white people — and his piece often leaves out any qualifier and talks directly to the unmodified mass of “white people” — then he, as he admits, is part of this all-encompassing category he finds worthy of such rank condemnation (as are Bernie Sanders, Rob Reiner, Howard Dean, etc.).

This collectivization and mass imputation of guilt would not withstand scrutiny if it were applied to any other group, nor should it.

All throughout his initial Washington Post piece Boot speaks in unqualified terms about “white people,” stating categorically that “they fear they are losing their privileged position to people of color,” and that they “can be pretty clueless.” Think, for a moment, of the utter outrage that would have met Mr. Boot had he stated that some other demographic category were in the grip of a group-wide “fear,” or were disproportionately “clueless.”

Such “totalizing racial language,” as I wrote in my response, is wrong. It treats fraught issues of race with a sledgehammer and stokes division at a time of “intense racial polarization.”

It only poisons public debate for Boot to pretend that any defection from his ex cathedra declaration of what constitutes a legitimate “attempt to redress past wrongs or foster equal treatment” is a form of white supremacy. No serious or respectable person has any objection to fostering “equal treatment” for all races and ethnicities, but there are basic political disagreements over what an “attempt to redress past wrongs” ought to look like. Should Cory Booker receive reparations from a first-generation Lithuanian immigrant? Should prospective Asian students be discriminated against in college admissions to increase the admission rates of black students? Will we demand that the descendants of American Indian slaveholders pay reparations, too? To assert that any disagreement with Boot on those questions reveals a “fear [of] losing [one’s] privileged position to people of color” or is reflective of white people’s broader “cluelessness” is to do an end-run around a sober argument about what the “redress of past wrongs” means. But I suspect that’s the point.

[Robotman]

Trump again “jokes” about cancelling election and having a 3rd term during a speech for PA energy workers.

https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/s...120619521?s=19

I still say there’s no way he leaves office in 2020. If he loses he goes to prison.

[Tami]

Trump again “jokes” about cancelling election and having a 3rd term during a speech for PA energy workers.

https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/s...120619521?s=19

I still say there’s no way he leaves office in 2020. If he loses he goes to prison.

Change that: There is no way he willingly leaves office. I gurantee that, if he either loses the election or is Impeached and evicted (Less likely because of the Senate), he'll have to be dragged out kicking and screaming. But he will be dragged out.