Some Truth; No Consequences

His party found it no big deal when he claimed that "Mexico is sending us their rapists and drug dealers." And they were rather quiet when he wanted to emulate Ike.

But Trump still leads the pack, so the GOP has finally taken a stand: that barring Muslims entry to the U.S. is "Un-American."

The supposed pivot is almost amusing in suggesting that, until this, Trump had not gone too far... And it predictably signaled the media that criticism of Trump is now OK.

Why, the NYT has gone so far as to run this.

tengrain says, "I for one am glad to welcome the NYTimes to the blogosphere, where we've been saying for more than a decade that the Right has lost its mind and has spiraled into fascism."

The new forthrightness will last just until Trump is out of the picture. At which time the media pack will take the departure as their cue to pretend the GOP has returned to sanity. Along with that will go the corollary: that whichever extremist becomes the nominee will then be deemed "serious" and "presidential."

Good discussion by Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter (starting at :30)–on the media's pretense that Trump has now been renounced by the GOP. That's when the reality is that even as the candidates stumble over themselves to condemn Trump for saying such awful things, they all affirm that if he becomes the nominee, they will vote for him.

There certainly has been no denunciation. As Sam says, the candidates are simply running against each other, responding to every statement from Trump with, "I have a different proposal." Republican "condemnation" of anti-Muslim statements is mere policy quibble, as in Jeb's previous "we should only let in Christians" line about Syrian refugees. The GOP immigration "debate" is all about who will build the biggest wall and mete out the cruelest punishment to immigrants and refugees.

After decades of their party's ginning up anti-immigrant fear and hatred, Republican voters are eager for just such immigrant-bashing and deportation as Trump's. As Sam puts it, "The suit has been tailored for years; Donald Trump just walked into it..."

And as Cliff says, Trump simply came out and said things that until now were supposed to be only implied. Cliff also brought up a Republican of yore: Margaret Chase Smith, who managed to get at least a few other Republicans to join her in censuring McCarthy.

As it happens, I've been reading this: J. Fred MacDonald on how television as a mass medium arrived about the same time as the Cold War, with anti-communism providing the new medium a programming theme. Trump certainly is reminiscent of the author's description of an earlier media phenomenon—

Senator McCarthy appeared on many TV discussion programs in the early 1950s... Always, McCarthy demonstrated his peculiar argumentative style: making broad charges certain to garner headlines the next day; dropping names, dates, and specifics even if they were inaccurate; and dominating any opposing views by undermining the credibility of speakers on the show. ...on June 21, 1953, for example, McCarthy employed accusations, oversimplifications, and interruptions to dominate a discussion... To one reviewer, the senator's debating "acrobatics" were by turn bland and savagely harsh for vocal effects"...

McCarthy was a good television performer. . TV critic Jack Gould described him as "a master...[who]skillfully exploits an elementary rule of showmanship—a sensation or two never fails to hold an audience." And his message was believed. McCarthy continued to hold great popularity among the American people...

It was only after he took on the Army in the spring and summer of 1953 that McCarthy was finally stopped.

...The [Eisenhower] White House would not cooperate with him. With elections in the fall, Republicans tried to end the hearings as soon as possible, as McCarthy's sullen attitude toward the Army quickly became a debilitating revelation of his own pettiness and ambition.

Later that year the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. He upped his game by attacking Eisenhower, but the censure had ended his official power. When the Senate changed hands he lost his committee chairmanship and public platform.

If television finally helped expose McCarthy as a fraud, MacDonald notes that coverage of the Army hearings was "no ringing victory for public affairs television"—

The two networks that covered the hearings live, ABC and Dumont, did so because they had virtually no morning or afternoon programming. With a roster of sponsored soap operas and game shows, CBS rejected the hearings, preferring to air a 45-minute daily summation at 11:30 P.M. NBC offered the hearings live for two days. But since those two days cost $125,000 in lost advertising revenue, that network also opted for a late-evening summary.

1953 stakes; one can adjust for a different value for the dollar, but there's no comparing the astronomically higher level of media stakes today.

Another comparison with 1953 is more apt, though. Media coverage of Trump's demagoguery can be seen in view of the fact that McCarthy's anti-communism was not to be discredited by his downfall. Look at MacDonald's conclusion, and just update "anti-Communism"—

McCarthy's fall ... did not signify the end of anti-Communism as an alluring mind-set. McCarthyism was only one of the more virulent strands of this popular hatred of the political left. Thriving on fear and ignorance, McCarthyism represented oppressive power emanating from unsubstantiated accusation. It pursued enemies of the state where there where no enemies. It was aggressive and egotistical, colorful and falsely reassuring. The Army-McCarthy hearings only demonstrated that McCarthyism had overstepped the boundaries of permissibility in American politics as well as television. They did not demonstrate popular determination to reappraise anti-communism or to approach the East-West struggle in more realistic terms. Anti-Communism continued to thrive in politics and video.

An opponent will always be accused of softness on immigration (or terrorism, or political correctness, or War on Christians). Trump invented none of this, and any will serve as the torches to be picked up when Trumpism ends.

If At First They Don't Suceed

They will try again, and again.

And as he again proves: "Scalia Better Off in 'Less Advanced' Court"

Tower Of Babble

When horrifying things happen, they tend to be recognizable as such to regular human beings. That they happen so often and so quickly must occasionally throw even right-wingers off their game—of turning any horror into grist for the propaganda mill.

This time around they've received a bit of negative reaction. Even the NY Daily News has had some things to say with recent covers ("Syed Farook joins long line of psychos enabled by NRA sick gun jihad against America in the name of profit.")

And this—

It's just this that makes the right certain they are the real victims: their feelings are being hurt. Roy Edroso explains the inexplicable; that is, riffs on it—

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...
...about the San Bernardino shooting and rightblogger attempts to wrest benefits from it. The War on Whatchamacallit angle was expected since the assailants turned out to be Muslim, but the "prayer-shaming" bit was something new and unexpected. I mean, it fits their classic template -- since they lost their 9/11 juju rightbloggers have perfected the rhetorical soccer dive, and Lord knows they like to pretend they're oppressed because of their Christianity, as we saw after the gay marriage ruling. But whereas their gay-marriage victimhood claims were based on the possibility that The State would make them do something -- bake cakes for gay weddings, for example -- the prayer-shaming shtick is nakedly about people making them feel bad....

In post-massacre San Bernadino, reporters themselves created quite a spectacle. About which David Ehrenstein adds an interesting perspective on paparazzi and crime scene behavior.

Cause and Effect

The victims were in range of the Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by a "Christian." Apparently, "baby parts" provided the marching orders the assassin heard in his head—marching orders unlikely to have occurred to him independently.

It also happens that one of the dead was an off-duty cop and church minister who had responded to the emergency. But as Steve M. observes, expect silence from the Right, because—

In this case, blue lives don't matter, and this wasn't part of the war on Christianity. The killer wasn't a member of any group conservatives hate, and his main target was a group conservatives absolutely hate.

Holding The Line

Since the newest attack in Paris, governors of states here have been taking a brave stance: against women and children.

At Hullabaloo: Tom Sullivan on who was turned away in 1939.

Syrian refugees already face years of screening, as in the case of the two families described here. Gaining admission to the U.S. has never been quick or easy for most refugees. That's something that doesn't change—unless even more hurdles are added, out of xenophobia and political calculation.

In this 1998 collection of essays, Charles Simic recalls nine years of his childhood—

"Displaced persons" is the name they had for us back in 1945, and that's what we truly were. As you sit watching bombs falling in some old documentary, or the armies advancing against each other, villages and towns going up in fire and smoke, you forget about the people huddled in the cellar. Mr. and Mrs. Innocent and their families paid dearly n this century for just being there. Condemned by history, as Marxists were fond of saying, perhaps belonging to a wrong class, wrong ethnic group, wrong religion—what have you—they were and continue to be an unpleasant reminder of all the philosophical and nationalist utopias gone wrong....

My family, like so many others, got to see the world for free thanks to Hitler's wars and Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe... Small fry, we made no decisions ourselves. It was all arranged for us by the world leaders of the times. Like so many others who were displaced, we had no ambition to stray far beyond our neighborhood in Belgrade....

...

It's hard for people who have never experienced it to truly grasp what it means to lack proper documents. We read every day about our own immigration officers, using and misusing their recently acquired authority to turn back suspicious aliens from our borders. The pleasure of humiliating the powerless must not be underestimated. Even as a young boy, I could see that was the case. Everywhere there are bureaucrats, the police state is an ideal.

I remember standing in endless lines in Paris at police headquarters to receive or renew residential permits. It seems like that's all we ever did when we lived there. We'd wait all day only to discover that the rules had changed since the last time, that they now required, for instance, something as absurd as my mother's parents' marriage certificate or her grade-school diploma, even though she was in possession of a French diploma since she did her post-graduate studies in Paris. As we'd stand there pondering the impossibility of what they were asking of us, we'd be listening to someone at the next window trying to convey in poor French how the family's house had burned, how they'd left in a hurry with only one small suitcase, and so on, to which the official would shrug his shoulders and proceed to inform them that unless the documents were procured promptly, the residence permit would be denied.
...

The mail didn't travel very swiftly, of course. We would go nuts every day for weeks waiting for the mailman, who couldn't stand the sight of us since we were always pestering him, and finally, somehow, the documents would arrive thanks to a distant relative. Then they had to be translated by an official translator who, of course, couldn't make heads or tails out of the dog-eared fifty-year old entry in a provincial Balkan school or church registry. In any case, eventually we'd go back to the long line only to discover that they were not needed after all, but something else was. Every passport office, every police station, every consulate had a desk with a wary and bad-tempered official who suspected us of not being what we claimed to be…. The officials we met knew next to nothing about where we came from and why, but that did not prevent them from passing judgment on us....

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. ...

...we got used to the idea.... Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.

I stepped off the boat in New York City on August 10, 1954, with my mother and my brother....

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