That right there? Was the most contentious the VP debate practically became. Because JD Vance stewed that he got called on the one very Big Lie thing he contributed to, because he can't understand why it is terribly wrong, bad and hurtful, and why he really did need to be checked on that very particular thing. Because he can't accept that the death threats and the bomb threats and the disruption of a whole town's active life can be marked down to his propaganda.
Is he naïve? Does he not get that there are real-world consequences that follow from such lies, and that people with a conscience would avoid them?
This debate didn't clue me anymore in on who Vance is, but he does remind me, oleaginously, of those old margarine commercials--it's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Johnson: Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana, and a very frank and outspoken person. He's also a very principled man. I didn’t even see it but he tweeted something today about Haitians.
There's a formula here that the GOP employs again and again: the Tweet/statement/activity was terrible, but this is a good person (because I said so), and while I didn't see the Tweet/know all the details, I will forgive/absolve this person, even though I was not the person hurt by the activity. Because it's the Christian thing to do.
It's a lie. They aren't forgiving a "real" transgression (to them), and they don't care if the person is a good person--that person is "good enough for the political moment" and requires a permission slip. The permission slip has been pre-written, and we are only really just viewing what the in-group's tolerances are.
This type of cheap grace applies to Higgins, to Mark Robinson, to JD Vance, and entirely explains Trump.
Instead of this statement vouching for Rep. Higgins, who is not noticeably repentant, I would throw it back to Speaker Johnson--why do have such a nasty racist for a good friend?
The most striking thing that JD Vance has admitted out loud and in public is that even if Haitians are supposed to be here legally, he's still going to call them "illegal aliens". He knows and knew that the "people eating pets" thing was a lie when he spread it. He could easily bother to check whether crime really was up or whether communicable diseases were up, But the point isn't whether he's being honest--he's not.
It's whether he can induce people to follow up on his story and keep it alive as if it were a big deal. Just like big public lies could induce people to follow up on a land deal in Arkansas, or a lie about a man's honorable service in Viet Nam, or a lie about a fully American man's birth certificate, or an attack on an embassy in Libya by Islamic terrorists, or an email server, or a man's son's laptop, and try to make that into a big deal, whether it really is or not.
But there is something else in Vance's particular set of lies that is revealing--the idea that if a person can wave a wand over someone and declare them citizens, having a particular office means you can "uncitizen" them. Or unperson them.
Now it's time to play the inciting new game show, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" where the contestants try to make out whether it's the word we are not supposed to say, or just a terrible, terrible slip of the soft palate. In our clip today, we have Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, on Megyn Kelly's show, which I guess is a thing, extremely butchering the word "migrants" or "immigrants" until it sounds like....
Well, you be the judge.
OK, time's up, audience. So, as is the catch phrase of our show: "Did you hear what I hear?"
No. You actually don't need more time for this. I don't know what part of NR or Megyn Kelly or Rich Lowry confused you about whatever is "in their heart". The actual answer is--the reason people are hearing it isn't about whether it has been said out loud, it's about this dumb dance we are doing around immigration trying not to make it about---that, when we know damn good and well it is.
You can actually not use that one word and still be saying that word more than you know. That's the whole answer. We don't need a whole lot more episodes.
So those of you who got the right answer here, you win a lifetime supply of the baggage of knowing about it, and for those you who didn't know, you get the parting gift of probably figuring it out but most likely not from this blogpost.
Thanks for playing everybody! And let's meet again probably sooner than we think we should right here in the 21st century but apparently not!
UPDATE: Here's a bonus round, Christian supremacist edition:
I guess I know what probably happened here. Trump was going to use the "Venezuelan gangs took over Aurora, Colorado" thing but then his brain got hijacked into the Haitian story. Which being all about Ohio is obviously a JD Vance joint. But because his few braincells are just playing a massively information-losing game of "Telephone" amongst themselves, he forgot why deporting people to Venezuela wouldn't be correct.
Trump has been referencing Venezuela a lot though. Maybe he thinks he wants to do like Matilda in the old Calypso song. He takes the money and runs to Venezuela. He surely thinks Caracas is nicer than Washington DC. He wants to meet with his friends there. I guess they don't have extradition to the US. Maybe he has his mind set in the Carribean for some reason. Not everywhere has the Pacific Ocean, but the Carribean is quite nice.
Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club hosted a convicted Jan. 6 rioter and alleged Nazi sympathizer twice this summer, where he was celebrated and gave speeches.
At one event, Trump sent a video praising the attendees as “amazing patriots.”
If I know my readers, you probably guessed "Trump" with a quickness and only wondered "Which Hitler enthusiast, though?" But this is where Trump's "MAGA movement" is right now, with Trump clearly saying "we" when referring to the 1/6 insurrectionists during the very revealing debate (because he did want to be there--and also did not turn up and he did tell them to be there and they understood the assignment).
But the answer is the guy who was most obviously Hitler cosplaying as if that was natural. Which Hitler enthusiast even being a question, just like sitting down with obvious antisemitic clowns Kanye and Nick Fuentes, or cozying up to Laura Loomer today, or spreading a blood libel about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio, is a hell of a sign that Trump has gone mask-off. Or maybe that needs to be: "hood-off"?
I recall in the aftermath of 9/11, one of my concerns was for the potential of people seeking vengeance for the tragedy and wreaking havoc on innocent people who had done nothing at all but were just nearby and brown. Your basic American bigot just wants a reason to start the fuckery. Just like people had conspiracy theories, blamed Muslims, and fucked around post-OKC (even though that was a white supremacist, Christian ID-associated attack), after 9/11, innocent immigrant citizens got profiled, and sometimes experienced tragic racist violence.
Laura Loomer is an Islamophobe and 9/11 truther and was a guest of Donald Trump at a 9/11 remembrance ceremony. She posted the above racist stupidity targeting VP Kamala Harris as a person of South Asian descent. That was three days ago. The Trump campaign was unaware of this? To her credit--a thing you won't hear me say often--she got called out for her racism by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And think what that says about the Trump campaign association with Loomer (IMHO, as dangerous for them as an association with Nicholas Fuentes). Did they not know she said this about people of South Asian descent? When the Trump campaign needs the support of people like Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Usha Vance? Isn't attacking Harris on the basis of her heritage so obviously wrong the campaign should step back from her?
The opponents of critical race theory, not more than a handful of months ago, were telling us it was a damn shame that Dr. Seuss was being cancelled for racial caricatures in a handful of nearly-forgotten children's books (yes, I do believe the Venn Diagram there is exactly a circle) but I wonder what they would say about the banning of books by Black authors in a school district in Pennsylvania. To me, it looks an awful lot like my impression that the criticism of CRT is actually a way to demonize a very specific kind of Black history (the kind that comes from Black voices and is heard from even when it isn't February) is pretty much the mood being catered to.
The reason certain people want CRT to be minimized, want to discredit the 1619 Project, want to talk about All Lives Matter instead of why Black lives need to be discussed, why Latino/a/ex lives need to be discussed, why Asian lives need to be discussed, all within their contexts, is because the context doesn't show white culture in a positive light. Because it shouldn't.
In discussing policing in the US, it's hard to divorce law enforcement from the slave patrols charged with keeping the peace (for a very racially-biased version thereof) in our early history, and about as hard to separate our Border Patrol from the same.
So when right wing people talk about caravans and the gathering of Haitian refugees (just like the "threat" of Syrian refugees) and think of course violence will turn them away because who even are they? I don't think my eyes deceive me. I see human beings who deserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But I know those other folks don't and I see what they are, too. And it's not so much that I want to emulate our nation's founders--I think we could do better.
We are not free if we don't believe in these principles for all. All. One runny pimple on Montana's ass just got upset at the notion of a mere 75 Afghan refugees resettling there, some very small quantity of a huddled mass of people yearning to breathe free. Sure, 75 human beings, with hardly nothing to their names, women and children included, are going to overrun your whole dumb gun-toting red white and blue-blooded state.
I'm not a Christian, but I believe what you are willing to do for the people with the least is your whole job as a human, because you need to know that could be you, too. Politics and weather and poverty and all the shit fate throws at you permitting. But there's a very good label for what my eyes see when I see CBP deploying whips (or whatever your sensibility prefers to call the lash or the strap) on Haitian asylum-seekers.
And it's the very word the anti-CRT folks want to pretend very much the US isn't about anymore, but you know what? Maybe we still live with that history and need to recognize and confront it. And we shouldn't fear people fleeing from danger so much as to hate, revile, and punish them on top of their own tragedy.
I guess I've been a little derelict in my blogging the past several days in what should have been, for me, a "target-rich environment" for blogging opportunities. But, I must confess, I am almost bored with the surfeit of nonsense that is the Trump experience. If Trump has been explicitly racist in his policies and denies temporary protected status to people of El Salvador, or says that all Haitians have AIDS and fails to understand the US shitty behavior to our neighbor, and denies these immigrants continued TPS status as well, and also treats all of the continent of Africa as if they are people in huts, we already know what he is. We could have known exactly what he was when he was denying apartments to "colored people" in the 1970's. We knew what he was when he was agitating against the Central Park Five in the 1980's (and later!). There are only so many ways I know to phrase, once again, the central and overwhelming problem I have with a Trump presidency--his utter lack of qualification to serve as the head of a diverse nation and to represent us in front of a diverse international community.
So, the disgraceful comments that Trump is alleged to have said with respects to calling Haiti and El Salvador and the African countries from which new Americans hope to come, don't surprise me, and I am mostly disgusted by the idea that there even should be an argument about what he meant based on whether he said "shithole" countries or "shithouse". The jist is the same. Senators Perdue and Cotton might feel fine temporarily assuming they did not hear what he said, and then pretending they heard no "shithole commentary". But we can all know very well what the White House immigration policy is, and in the meanwhile, Senator Graham knows what he knows, and the word is Trump even bragged to friends about dropping that nasty "shithole" statement about whole countries of people.
He said this about millions of human beings, all equal in dignity to himself, all endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. He said this. There should not be a mistake in pretending that this is not either anything he would have said or historically proved himself to believe.
But this isn't new news. Trump is a racist--big whoop. The main argument shouldn't be "shithole" vs "shithouse" but whether his policies are unconstitutional and also really bad in outcomes and how they represent the US. It's as silly as getting bogged down in whether Trump said he did have a great relationship with China and North Korea, or would have a great relationship based on a barely aspirated "d". (During an interview where Trump rambled and seemed uninformed and more than a little ridiculous for several letters, words, whole paragraphs-worth.) How stupid! Trump easily thinks anyone could be his friend if they only figured out how to suck up to him properly. It's like his hopes for a great relationship with Putin. Trump is a man who believes people like him despite his money and power because they survive his temperamental trials by bullshit, and thinks he isn't either surrounded by "yes men" because all his employees assure him he isn't. He is a stooge.
And he also has a certain inoculation against the recent surfacing of claims that he is profoundly sexually immoral--being that the evangelicals have accepted him as their boy even though this kind of thing is basically Trump's life story. Which tells us a whole lot more about the morals of evangelicals than it does about Trump.
They rather his racism no matter what their ministries say about human dignity if he supports their notions of sexual prudery if he'd only appoint judges who are prudery-compliant. Which I find revolting but I will suffice to let them do themselves until they are chafed, if that is what they prefer. My only concern is they should not get to make laws for people who aren't quite so morally fucked.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake was freed Monday when a judge convicted her but sentenced her to time already served in jail.
Laura Silsby, the organizer of the ill-fated effort to take the children to an orphanage being set up in the neighboring Dominican Republic, returned to her cell briefly to retrieve belongings before quickly heading to the Port-au-Prince airport.
"I'm praising God," Silsby told The Associated Press as she waited for a flight out of Haiti. She declined to answer further questions before clearing immigration and heading through a gate to catch a plane to Florida.
I don't have any real comment at this stage of the story. I'm just following up. The actual charge she was convicted of was "arranging illegal travel", which sounds altogether unlike kidnapping. In terms of unintended consequences, this story has shed light on the abuses that can occur with adoptions (and I think should make people aware that this is not just about Haiti, but anywhere that people might be in such straits that giving up children in the hopes of them getting a better life seems like the only way).
This story was a little confusing today--at first the missionaries' lawyer had indicated that nine of the group were expected to be freed, but almost immediately thereafter came this news:
As she entered the closed-door session, mission organiser Laura Silsby claimed: ‘We expect God's will be done. And we will be released.’
But there was confusion as the hearing drew to a close with a lawyer representing the group claiming that he expected nine of the ten Americans to be released.
But minutes later, the five men and five women were led looking grim and unsmiling to a bus and were driven back to jail.
After announcing the charges, Haitian Deputy Prosecutor Jean Ferge Joseph told the defendants that their case was being sent to an investigative judge.
‘The judge can free you but he can also continue to hold you for further proceedings,’ he added.
The Americans, who insist they did nothing wrong, were still behind bars last night awaiting the investigating judge’s decision.
The case has become a flashpoint for fears that child traffickers could profit from the chaos in Haiti, one of the world’s poorest countries, in the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake.
(Emphasis mine.) As I posted yesterday regarding this case, I tend to think these people probably started out with good intentions and are mostly guilty of not fully thinking through what they were doing. But besides my altruistic opinion, I also know that sometimes religious groups have taken this paternalistic approach towards indoctrinating children "in their own interest", up to and including kidnapping them from parents who they perceived as not providing the right (read: religiously-correct) influences.
I definitely mean to follow this story, and especially the trial, to see what defense unfolds, since, based on the clip from CBS I posted earlier, I have the impression that the story the missionaries have provided does not necessarily gibe with all the surrounding facts. Also, the odd story earlier that implied that nine of the ten were to be released puts an interesting focus on Laura Silsby, the leader of the group, and presumably the one who would not have been released (and possibly the person liable to be thrown under the proverbial bus come trial-time if they choose to seek separate representation.)
Just as with the Baptist missionaries who tried to smuggle kids out of Haiti, my first instinct is that these are well-intentioned people, but while I don't always question the motives of people, I am always skeptical of the motives of organizations. With the reputation Scientology has, well, color me extra-skeptical.
Regarding the Today puff-piece, I think that religions often do get an uncritical treatment in the media, and especially t.v., because it seems like it's "bullying" or "putting down other people's faith." To avoid being criticized in return regarding a topic that can really stir emotions, it benefits them to keep their framing positive and nonjudgmental. But any institution (even churches) can be capable of abusive or just plain wrong behavior at times, and it's just good journalism to look into that. (I think one of the better things about the internet over t.v.news--stories can unfold serially and there isn't a need to frame as much as report, but that's my Old Media vs. New Media bias.)
Regardless of whatever "good intentions" the American missionaries might have had in taking the children, it definitely was a stupid action. It's believed that most of the children were not orphans, and a recent story indicated that it was the parents of the children who had given them over in the hopes of giving them a better life. But in the midst of such chaos, and with the rampant opportunities for human trafficking by not-so-well-intentioned people, they really should have had second, third, and fourth thoughts before taking them. And sadly, it sounds like they've really gummed up the works for other people who were trying to do everything right.
John Travolta is using his air miles to help the Haiti relief effort by planning a mercy mission to the earthquake ravaged nation.
The movie star and celebrity member of the Church of Scientology has become the latest big name to dig deep to help the victims of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude tremor.
He says, "I have arranged for a plane to take down some volunteer ministers and some supplies and some medics.
"I hope that inspires others as well. It's needed."
See, it sounds good--until "volunteer ministers". Then it sounds like there will be some proselytizing to traumatized and wounded folks. I do protest.
Especially since Scientologist "scientifical help" is sometimes....dumb.
I'll let Gawker give the run-down of Scientologist catastrophe-response badness, because, after all, Gawker knows! And also, bothered to check! And, I have a link to them--so there!:
John Travolta to Airlift Desperately Needed E-Meters to People of Haiti Scientologists have mobilized to seize on the promotional and recruitment opportunities presented by the horror going on in Haiti, and John Travolta has personally arranged to fly "volunteer ministers" to Haiti to inflict his junk science on victims there.
Anywhere people are suffering, Scientology's yellow-shirted "volunteer ministers" can be found lurking near news cameras and claiming to help people with their bullshit technology. They performed "purification rundowns" on recovery workers sifting through the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11, administered "touch assists" to victims of the tsunami, distributed literature after the Virginia Tech shooting, and are on the ground in Haiti right now warning the starving, dehydrated populace about the dangers of psychiatry.
John Travolta is using his air miles to help the Haiti relief effort by planning a mercy mission to the earthquake ravaged nation.
The movie star and celebrity member of the Church of Scientology has become the latest big name to dig deep to help the victims of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude tremor.
He says, "I have arranged for a plane to take down some volunteer ministers and some supplies and some medics.
"I hope that inspires others as well. It's needed."
So precisely what does this desperately needed help consist of? To be fair, Scientology claims to have airlifted some actual medical professionals to Porte-au-Prince, a move that is hard to argue with even if the doctors are cultists and are accompanied by a retinue of recruiters and glorified masseuses who are there not to help but to carry on their "crusade to build a better world," as the web site for the cult's volunteer ministers program puts it, through the application of L. Ron Hubbard's paranoid and power-mad fantasies.
Check out the rest and the links--it's probably not what the folks there need either--also categorized under: Things that Aren't helping.
Just supposing that the problem with Haiti didn't have anything to do with colonialism, slavery, racism, corporate opportunism, IMF loans, deforestation, political upheaval, and a series of hurricanes followed by a big, freaking earthquake, well yeah--um, Satan....that's a plausible reason for all the ....
Well, no. That's stupid.
It's stupid because if you look at history, you can see how the poverty is a human tragedy. And if some uppity white Christian bigot has an issue with voudon or dark-skinned island people, that is just ignorant. These are resilient people who have had to eat a lot of crap, and right now they are going through a fuck of a lot. Their country isn't evil. It could have been a lush island paradise, but the users and the people abusers and the takers and the money-makers got in.
Oh, Focus on the Family, if you're feeling the evil--well, maybe predator-Christians would know. So sorry the Haitians don't have much to give right now in exchange for the FOTF interest but their desperation and their souls--but if you kick them while they are down....maybe you can feel better about your smug, comfortable form of Christianity. The kind where kicking people where they are down, or weaker or smaller, is just SOP. They deserve their problems through some hang-up you never knew about. You are just better folks than them.
You have things. They need things. And your God probably ordained it.
Feel good about it? Hopeful that they will find your version of God after some care-package? Will stop being all needy and foreign?
I still entirely approve of FOTF giving anything they can. Tents, food, money, wet-wipes--since clean water is scarce. Just not their sense of superiority and better-people pity. The Haitians have God--the island is very Catholic, for instance. They need material things to live. And what they have is being materially-disadvantaged--it's not evil. But it is evil to think your brother should live that way.
So, a lot of people are donating to great organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, which are both providing useful medical and rescue help with the crisis in Haiti from the tragic earthquake. Other people are also finding ways to help, like Faith Comes By Hearing.
Leave it to Christians to take advantage of those in need. While people from all over the world are sending money and aid to the people of Haiti to help them recover from the earthquake, one Christian group seeks to take advantage of Haitian situation to teach them about Jesus.
A group called “Faith Comes From Hearing” is sending 600 solar-powered audio Bibles to be distributed to the Haitian people. Each one of the devices can play the Bible in 414 different languages to insure that no matter what poor country you live in you too will have a chance to be converted. The device is called “The Proclaim” and it is “just a taste of the technology that God is using to spread His Word throughout the world,” according to the website.
The website also states that, “This could be the generation to bow before our Lord and offer Him the inheritance of the nations.” That seems to be exactly what the people of Haiti are in need of as their lives and homes have been shattered and friends and family members are dying. Food and medical supplies might be important, but that crap is useless in the afterlife apparently.
This could be the generation that decides that people who want to take advantage of a tragedy to pimp their particular god need a swift kick in the hind-quarters. I'm not really sure that while someone is kind of homeless and hungry and recovering from probably some kind of trauma, they really need to sit and hear the Gospel in a bunch of different languages quite as much as they need to hear where their next meal is coming from, and whether they'll get enough antibiotics to make sure they totally kill the bugs their open wound might get, and maybe get communications to whatever far-flung family they might have to see if they're still alive. And if they need company. And stuff like that.
Room on whatever plane takes those digibibles is totally room not spent on antibiotics, water or food. Also filed under: Things that aren't helping.
