All Wet

Writing at Hullabaloo, Digby says—

"I must confess that I'm a little bit surprised that so few journalists seem to have been familiar with "Operation Wetback" or that Donald Trump had been extolling its virtues on the campaign trail for months. I guess they don't actually listen to what he's saying.

From Digby's piece in Salon—

In the debate on Tuesday, Trump reiterated the plan which half of Republicans in the U.S. support. He promised to build a wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border and to make Mexico pay for it. He also once more committed to rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants. As he has in the past, he referenced President Eisenhower's program from the 1950s, fatuously insisting that it must be "nice" since everybody "liked Ike," even as he assiduously avoided calling the plan by its name: "Operation Wetback."

Here's Trump’s exact quote from the debate:

Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. "I like Ike," right? The expression. "I like Ike." Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back.

Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.

(LAUGHTER)

Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.

Indeed, Trump has been saying this all along. Back in September, the Washington Post responded with the
history of how "repatriation" actually was conducted—

In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.

During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were "dumped" after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.

This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.

After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.

At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were "brought like cows" into the desert.

Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an "eighteenth century slave ship" and "penal hell ship."

These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.

In the Hullabaloo post above, Digby adds this—

I noticed this morning that Luke Russert and Tamron Hall both refused to use the word "Wetback" when describing Eisenhower's program. This is a big mistake. People need to know exactly what they called Donald Trump's "nice, humane, 'I like Ike'" program. It brings the reality of what he's talking about right home. His voters won't care. They probably like it. But normal people will recognize it for what it is.

Certainly, our native Nazis recognize Trump's shout-out; via tengrain—

The New Confederacy isn't even trying to hide it anymore: White Supremacists Are Thrilled Donald Trump Mentioned "Operation Wetback"

White supremacists are praising Donald Trump for citing a 1950s U.S. government policy that deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants.

After Trump mentioned the policy, called "Operation Wetback," at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, tweeted, "Operation Wetback, fuck yeah!"

... A post that ran on the white nationalist site Vdare.com and the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer called it a "milestone in the immigration debate."

Passion Play

He has one all his own, and it has had a 21-year run—

..."Ben Carson, M.D.," a children's theater production seen by a generation of Baltimore area school kids who read Carson's memoir Gifted Hands as part of their curriculum.

Quote is from this. Politico intends the hook of this rambling article to be reactions to Carson's new endeavor by Prince Havely, the actor who has made a career of playing the man—

...allegations that Carson fabricated significant features of his autobiography—the stabbing of a childhood friend in a "pathological" rage and the candidate's claim that he was admitted to West Point on a full scholarship—have not swayed Havely's faith in Carson. "I don't doubt anything he says."

Need it be said? Some not particularly astute reactions from a party with an interest in accepting anything Carson does. While Havely says the political run came as a big surprise from someone he thought he knew so well, in all the surpising events, Politico reports—

What is shocking to Havely is that the play is not being staged this year—the first time, he says, since its debut in 1994.

Havely suspects that the directors and crew at Toby's Youth Theatre in Columbia, Maryland, where the play was born, wanted to avoid any association with Carson's politics. The theater's spokesperson rejects that notion, saying that the book on which the play is based is falling out of favor with teachers. "No political agenda on our part," Janine Sunday of Toby's told Politico in an email. "Just trying to make connections between theatre and the core lessons the students are learning."

"It's the perfect time to do the show," Havely says. "My jaw is on the ground."

Grist for the Politico mill, at least.

The play sounds like pretty standard uplift—well-meant, if crude, and offering a heroic figure with whom audiences are meant to identify—

"This young boy with the knife would have ended up in jail or reform school!" the narrator says as Havely, in a surgeon's smock, turns around to face the audience. "That man with the knife led a team of 70 on a groundbreaking operation!"

If they were a captive one, schoolkids were not the only audience—

The show went from a local novelty to a sprawling exposition of Ben Carson literature, including his self-help book Think Big.
...
Over the years, the Carson family remained devoted to the production. Sonya Carson, Ben's mother, came to a performance of the play every other week, according to Havely. She was a constant critic of her son's character and her own, letting Havely and the play's directors know when the fictional "Mama" got a little too sharp-tongued. In a 1997 feature about Sonya Carson in Parade Magazine, she asked the author to accompany her to the play, where she basked in the "moist eyes" of the students around her.

Havely says that area teachers would arrange for children who had been operated on by Carson to attend the play. Havely would feature them in the post-show Q&A session. He believes the idea of kids seeing Carson's patients in their classrooms and social circles served to accentuate the force of the Ben Carson lore.

The real Carson saw the play at least once every year starting in 1994. The surgeon, Havely says, didn't just come to watch. Once, while bringing a group from the Carson Scholars Fund to a performance, Carson stood up in the front row to play himself in the play about himself. "It was cute, because I got ready to end the play, and I go, 'I have an answer for that: it's think big!' He's in the front row and he goes, 'Let me take that from here.' And he comes up, and everybody applauded. It was the coolest thing," Havely says. On several occasions, Carson brought Havely to dinners and Scholars Fund events to appear in character for a selection of the most memorable scenes.

The Passion of Dr. Ben is of a piece with the museum.

You can't help but notice who seems to have pride of place here.

Ben Carson inside his home in Upperco, Maryland, in November 2014.
Photograph by Mark Makela

Magic Money

At least CNN assigns its "America's Choice 2016" coverage the appropriate category—Money. There, we find the sad story of "'Shell-shocked' CNBC staffers" on their "long flight home," and this—

The Republican National Committee says it is suspending its February debate with NBC News amid anger over CNBC's handling of this week's debate in Boulder, Colorado.

NBC said in a statement it will "work in good faith to resolve this matter."

Now that's more like it: having networks agree to this. Among the long list of conditions the Republicans' negotiator demands of the networks—

Will you commit that you will not:

o Ask the candidates to raise their hands to answer a question
o Ask yes/no questions without time to provide a substantive answer
o Have a "lightning round"
o Allow candidate-to-candidate questioning
o Allow props or pledges by the candidates
o Have reaction shots of members of the audience or moderators during debates
o Show an empty podium after a break (describe how far away the bathrooms are)
o Use behind shots of the candidates showing their notes
o Leave microphones on during breaks
o Allow members of the audience to wear political messages (shirts, buttons, signs, etc.). Who enforces?

What is the size of the audience? Who is receiving tickets in addition to the candidates? Who's in charge of distributing those tickets and filling the seats?
What instructions will you provide to the audience about cheering during the debate?
What are the plans for the lead-in to the debate (Pre-shot video? Announcer to moderator? Director to Moderator?) and how long is it?
Are you running promo ads before the debate about your moderator(s)?
What type of microphones (lavs or podium)?
Can you pledge that the temperature in the hall be kept below 67 degrees?

There's nothing new in the media pretense of maintaining the highest professional standards even while bowing to the demands of bullies. But the spectacle of broadcast media wallowing in unprecedented amounts of cash in exchange for abetting a GOP every day more willing to display its real nature—well, it makes me think of think of this particular scene in a novel—

Grand buys a huge downtown vacant lot in a major city. He then has a three foot brick wall built around the perimeter and fills it with feces and offal into which bills of all denominations have been mixed. He then takes pleasure watching immaculately dressed people defiling themselves by braving the stench, and ruining their clothing and dignity, by wading through the muck for the bills.

image: wikipedia

What Never Can Be

The death of Fred Thompson as noted in Morning Edition Monday political punditry—

ROBERTS: Well, of course everybody thought that his popularity on TV and in the movies would propel him into the presidency. And he declared for president, as we've just heard, in 2008. But it fizzled pretty quickly. And, you know, Renee, that happens every cycle. There's somebody who everyone thinks is the natural - think John Glenn for instance. And then they fizzle out. This year is a different year. His TV appearances seem to be - still be helping Donald Trump. We'll see what happens in the long run.

"Everyone thought...": the wisdom of Cokie can always be relied upon. Since there's nothing like a fake homespun ham actor to inspire a pundit crush or to be a ready fit for what The Heartland is supposed to buy.

On the other hand, here's a great catch of a reality check from Steve M—

You probably lost track of Thompson after his 2008 presidential run, but he kept himself active on social media nearly to the end -- and he was really kind of a jerk until the end. His specialty was the wingnut one-liner ...

...this, about Richard Branson, was his final tweet:

Branson wants "world powered by sun, powered by wind." Ohhh...like in the Dark Ages when everyone used sailing ships and clotheslines...

...

They say that a near-death experience can give a person a perspective on what really matters in life, that coming face-to-face with one's own mortality can make certain squabbles in one's life seem small and petty. Thompson got a cancer diagnosis in 2004. I don't know when he became aware of the recurrence that killed him. But it seems as if none of this ever made him think, "Y'know, I want to do more with my remaining days than script an ideological social-media Hee-Haw." He did this almost until the end.

A Romance That Will Never Fade

After its fawning over St Boehner (and yawning over this), the media has new opportunity to swoon over the object of its affection.

Ryan may be in a new role, but he lost no time in being predictable. For openers, claiming the House can't act on immigration because the president is "untrustworthy." As tengrain says—

So, um, Paul: legislate something. Put it before the president. He signs it or he doesn't. That's the process.

Unless of course, you want him to use Executive Orders on immigration which you can then use to fundraise as you posture with the rubes.

And is in usual form with this; in tengrain's synopsis—

Zombie-eyed Granny-starver Paul Ryan explains to us why it is that members of Congress deserve work-life balance, well him anyway, but the rest of us don't...

tengrain adds —

Personally, I want my representative to be exactly like the rest of us: in a hurry, harassed, exhausted and living in fear from paycheck to paycheck (but considering that most of them are multi-millionaires this is unlikely).

I'd like them to feel exactly what the rest of us feel as they chop away at the safety net and set the ammosexuals loose against the rest us.

I’d also like to think that they care, but they are clearly sociopaths.

They Also Serve, Who Shill

In what's now post-massacre routine, the Noise Machine went into high gear, reassuring the audience that mass murder should be blamed on anything other than guns. And as it suggests enemies to blame, this encouragement for paranoids to stock up an ammo is less than subtle.

With the lunatic segment so well served, why shouldn't the industry try some seemingly gentler PR—say, on the NPR fans? Ergo: Malcolm Gladwell, on today's Morning Edition.

Here, Gladwell's spuriously "scientific" talking point was that—

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person. By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

...

The first half-dozen or so cases [of school shooters, beginning in the 1990s] are kids who are profoundly psychotic, deeply traumatized or, in the case of someone like Eric Harris at Columbine, are kind of textbook psychopaths. Now 20 years into the epidemic, the kinds of boys - it's all boys - who are attracted to this are no longer as profoundly troubled or - you know, as the early ones were. We're replicating Granovetter's theory of riots. The hundredth person is not nearly as much of a committed radical as the first person in. And that's a terrifying conclusion if that's what we're seeing.

I found the segment incoherent, but Gladwell was touting his latest piece in the New Yorker, where he no doubt aimed to overwhelm objection by expounding on the theme at more stupefying length.

Gladwell is so entrenched, by Establishment embrace and by his book sales, that it's hard to find much public critique. There's this, which notes that social scientists have objected to Gladwell's use of their work, complaining of "the writer's penchant for reporting correlations as causations."

Certainly, it could be at most correlative for the psychology of people joining a riot in progress to have any relation to the mental workings of an emotionally isolated person who decides to enter a school and start firing. But, it serves as a change of subject: from guns, to something abstract and purportedly Scientific.

If, for that matter, social science was anything to Gladwell other than material to mine for great profit, he could examine what social context might tend to produce these enraged loners. And, perhaps even look at Family; now that would seem a good topic of inquiry, considering some of the parents who have encouraged their sons' "interests." In the case of this most recent massacre—

According to multiple reports, the shooter's mother boasted online about her arsenal and feared that gun ownership would soon be restricted.

"When the mood strikes," Harper reportedly wrote on Facebook, "I sling an AR, Tek-9 or AK over my shoulder, or holster a Glock 21 (not 22), or one of my other handguns, like the Sig Sauer P226, and walk out the door." "Shotguns," she said, "are a little too cumbersome to open carry."

According to officials, the Harper family moved from Torrance, California to Winchester, Oregon, in 2013. "I moved from So. Calif. to Oregon, from Southern Crime-a-mania to open carry," Harper noted in that same Facebook post advocating for open carry laws.

Harper, a registered nurse who shared an apartment with her son, spoke "openly about her love of guns," according to one of her patients.

But to examine this sort of thing is certainly not what Gladwell is about. The most thorough critique of his career has been Yasha Levine's. Unsurprisingly, Gladwell got his start in a right-wing pundit mill, from whence he was thrust into prominence. Along the way up, says Levine—

... Gladwell has shilled for Big Tobacco, Pharma and defended Enron-style financial fraud, all while earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a journalist.

Malcolm Gladwell is a one-man branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on the public's gullibility in trusting his probity and intellectual honesty in the pages of America's most important weekly magazine, The New Yorker, and other highly prominent media outlets.

Presumably, the New Yorker, NPR, and Gladwell's many other forums will be a source of new PR work, on behalf of yet another industry with no regard for human life.

Bad Medicine

When guns can never be the problem the subject will be changed to anything else.

Steve M. runs down Ben Carson's lunatic statements, from "I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away," to his suggestion that kindergarten teachers be armed.

Insane these may be, but proclaiming them is mere SOP for GOP vote-getting.

Another change of subject, from real to paranoid fantasy: the narrative that the latest school shooter was out to persecute Christians.

With this perfect marketing move...

... He looked ever so pleased with himself. The Noise Machine was pleased, too, using the photo op to boost Carson's popularity.

Next up: gun control enabled the Holocaust. Even if the usual media had never before deigned to take note, Carson was simply parroting established right-wing mythology.

After the bravado of Carson's fantasy heroism ("I would not just stand there and let him shoot me"), this was particularly telling—

In an interview with Urban View host Karen Hunter Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson recounted a story about being held up at gunpoint at a Popeyes.

"Guy comes in, puts the gun to my ribs and I just said, 'I believe that you want the guy behind the counter,'" Carson recalled.

Sociopaths of a feather... Carson's self-satisfaction reminiscent of nothing so much as Mitt Romney's citing Seamus on the car roof as proof of his executive ability.