High-minded ideals to do battle against the “red wave” – will anybody win?

There are times I wonder who is more delusional within our system of government – those who are expecting the election of politicos with high-minded noble ideals and our best interests in mind, or the kind of people who thought Donald Trump made any sense this week in speaking about immigration.

Images of children such as these in the Southwest create mixed emotions

I’m referring to his moment where he said Congress should drop the issue of immigration until after the Nov. 6 elections; because that is when we’ll get the “red wave” of politicos who will give Trump the rubber stamp, so to speak, to do what he wants with the issue.

WHICH, IN THE case of Trump, means some form of public policy meant to increase the authority of the federal government to remove individuals who don’t fit his ideal of who should be allowed to reside within the United States.

Trump, it would seem, has no desire to negotiate a deal of any type on this issue. Or any issue, for that matter.

This really is a man who got elected president with the image he’d be able to go about barking “You’re Fired!” to everybody within government who disagreed with him. Just like he used to do on that stupid television show he used to be part of.

It seems that his year-and-a-half of being in the Oval Office hasn’t taught him a damned thing about how government operates. He’s still waiting for that moment when he can bark out orders and have the rest of the country serve as his sycophants.

Some like to compare them to children in Holocaust camps

NONE OF THIS ought to be surprising. It is why I didn’t pay much of any attention to the ongoing debate over immigration reform and whether children brought to this country with their parents ought to be taken from them while the parents go through the process of being deported.

Republicans themselves couldn’t agree on what should be done. They didn’t have enough support to pass an ideologically-tainted measure that would have been the “far right fantasy,” and kept postponing votes in the House of Representatives on measures that were seen to be compromise.

As for the images of children being kept in crude conditions in makeshift detention centers scattered about the nation (the Heartland Alliance says 66 of them are in Chicago, with two-thirds of them under 13), all that gets from the ideologues are nitwit statements about how those aren’t “our” children.

Whose vision will prevail, the Age of Trump … 

I guess foreigners deserve harassment, regardless of age, in the mindset of those people who are in agreement with this Age of Trump we’re now in.

THERE WERE SOME people who wanted to get something, anything, passed that they could call immigration-related, in large part because they want the issue to wither away and be forgotten about long before the Nov. 6 general elections.

They don’t want anybody’s ballot being influenced by those sad images of kids in virtual incarceration.

My guess, though, is that the ideologues get their kicks out of such images – they appease those people who want to think that foreigners are worthy of such treatment, and perhaps Trump is clueless enough about political reality to think those people are the “red wave” that will supposedly wash away the majority segment of our society that is appalled by everything the Donald thinks is the way our nation should operate.

Appalling, yes. Disgusting, of course! But I also realize there is a certain segment of our society that not only likes such behavior, they will encourage it and are determined to turn out to vote come November in its favor.

THE ORGANIZING FOR Action group (the remnants of the old Obama for America campaign fund) is making its own fundraising appeal, sending out e-mails telling us of the, “administration’s cruel immigration policies” with “the sights and sounds of children languishing in federal facilities.”

… or the remnants of Barack Obama?

It also refers to the presidential action of earlier this week (the one that stopped separating families but said the parents could be detained with their children) as a “misguided measure” that calls for “indefinite detention of families.”

As for how many people will feel compelled by such appeals to do , anything about it, the reality is that many people are downright lazy when it comes to public policy and usually don’t feel a need to act until it’s too late.

So when it comes to “high-minded ideals” versus the “red wave,” there’s a part of me that fears we as a society are in for a lot of rancid rhetoric in coming months, followed by an Election Day that maintains the status quo – and a whole lot of more of the same indefiniteness in coming years.

  -30-