Dispatches from the American hellscape

A few quotes and links for your Interwebs perusal...

•  From our buddy Craig Calcaterra:

Stephen Miller, the Trump Regime official who I feel is most likely to be torn limb-from-limb by angry mobs once the public learns who did what during this time, said this when talking about education:

"Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding ... we're gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology."

I don't agree with Stephen Miller about a lot, but I agree with him to some extent here. I never wanted my kids' school to teach them about communism. They'd surely have gotten it wrong! That's why I made a point to teach my kids about communism at home, where they could get the straight dope. It's the responsible thing to do.

Anyway, I'm now gonna return to daydreaming about those mobs getting their hands on this Temu Roy Cohn over here and doing what mobs do.

•  From Will Bunch at the Philly Inquirer:

Most voters forgot, or never heard, the 2003 argument by some advocates that the creation of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the new Department of Homeland Security] to more aggressively hunt down undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil would create a 'monster' agency that would warp the entire national conversation around refugees. While it’s certainly and sadly true that waves of anti-immigration fervor are as American as cherry pie, from the anti-Irish 'Know Nothings' of the 1850s through the KKK resurgence of the 1920s and beyond, the 'national security' lens of ICE has taken us to a new low. ... Twenty-two years later, those 'monster' predictions feel understated. There’s no quick fix for the human rights nightmare of ICE and its sister agencies, because this warped experiment has gone off the rails in so many different ways.

•  From Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker:

This country was founded on the idea of habeas corpus. It’s a fancy legal term that, in plain words, means no government has a right to arbitrarily take your freedom away from you. Preserving habeas corpus is not some fever dream of the left wing echo chamber, it’s a fundamental concept of justice that people have fought and died for dating back to the Middle Ages. It was in the Magna Carta. It was considered by our nation’s founders to be so vital to our liberty that they wrote it right into the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson called it the essential principle of government. Benjamin Franklin opined that those who would give up habeas corpus for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security. And Alexander Hamilton wrote that the practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been in all the ages the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton. Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history. It’s the OG of political messaging. So I mean, what do we think that Colonel Stark was talking about, if not this, when he said, 'Live Free or Die'?

Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.

There are plenty of people in this country who hold opinions that I find abhorrent, but my faith and our constitution dictate that I fight for their freedoms as loudly as I defend my own. And as a Ukrainian-American Jew who built a Holocaust Museum, whose family immigrated here as refugees from the Russian pogroms, let me say this to Donald Trump: Stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors.

Do not claim that your authoritarian power grabs are about combating antisemitism. When you destroy social justice, you are disparaging the very foundation of Judaism. When the pendulum swings back, and it always does, you will have contributed to the climate of retribution that will inevitably follow.

...

We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools.

We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit.

We have an attorney general who hates the constitution.

We have a secretary of state—the son of naturalized citizens, a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both,

We have a head of the 'department of government efficiency'—an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself.

And we have a president who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them losers and suckers and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers.

...

If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated. It’s because I am. You should be too. They’re an affront to every value this country was founded upon.

...

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

•  From the great satirist Andy Borowitz:

ROME—A man who fell asleep during Pope Francis’s funeral was “already going to Hell,” God clarified on Sunday.

Although snoozing during the pontiff’s funeral was “beyond rude,” the Almighty said that the man clinched his place in the netherworld “decades ago.”

“If I hadn’t already made up My mind, the last hundred days would have made him a slam dunk for eternal damnation,” He said. “I mean, deporting a two-year-old? Come on.”

The Heavenly Father said the man’s decision to wear a blue suit at the funeral “wasn’t a factor” in his going to Hell, but was nevertheless “incredibly assholic.”

In another observation from the funeral, God noted, “Interestingly, Sleepy Joe Biden managed to stay awake.”

•  From, of all people, former POTUS45 National Security Adviser and longtime pre-Trump-Republican extremist John Bolton:

To be a fascist, you have to think at some conceptual level, which Trump never does. It's too far above Trump’s capabilities. He has no philosophy. He has, in the national security space, no grand strategy, and doesn’t do policy as we conventionally understand that term. It was difficult for me to accept. … There are plenty of people around him with problematic philosophies, people who do have the ability to think at a more conceptual level. What they say may ultimately be reflected in certain Trump decisions, but it’s not because he shares their worldview or anything like that.

•  And, finally, from POTUS47 himself, to ABC News reporter Terry Moran in an interview in the Oval Office, who had the temerity to ask him about the Supreme Court's order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and about his discussions with Vladimir Putin:

You're doing the interview. I picked you because frankly I never heard of you. But that's okay. But I picked you, Terry, but you're not being very nice. ... I don’t trust you. I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You’re so happy to do the interview, and then you start hitting me with these fake questions.

I'd like to know how a question can be a "fake question"; the implication of a question could be dishonest, which POTUS47 knows all too well from his own practices, or the subject of a question could be whether or not something is fake (e.g., "Mr. President, do you think Neil Armstrong actually went to the moon or was that merely a propaganda op?"), but a question is a question, it's neutral.

Actually, I don't care about that bit of semantics here, it's just telling to see that whenever our president (barf) is presented with reality instead of obsequious bootlicking he will immediately resort to condescending attacks and some sort of Pee Wee Herman impression with a version of "I know you are, but what am I?"

Good times, right?