Trump talk more about scaring people silly, not accomplishing anything

I’m not sure how seriously we ought to take the latest round of Trump trash talk that says, beginning Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will step up their efforts to remove from this country those individuals who haven’t dotted all the “I’s” and crossed all the “T’s” involved in getting a valid visa.

TRUMP: Sunday's the day; no more foreigners

Trump says the efforts will focus on certain cities, places that he thinks are so-called hell-holes that have too many foreigners. Yes, our very own Chicago is on the list.

SO ARE WE going to see people getting picked up, hauled away in a van, and wind up being processed for removal from this country?

Is this weekend literally “the end” of their stay in the United States for some 1 million people, as President Donald Trump insists?

I don’t doubt there are individuals who will, by coincidence, come to the attention of federal immigration officials and wind up being processed for removal this weekend.

But let’s be frank (or should we be Francisco?) here and say I doubt there will be much of a coordinated effort taking place across the more urban areas of our nation, all at the whim of Donald J. Trump.

FOR ONE THING, I suspect such an organized effort is beyond the organizational skills of federal immigration officials. If anything, it might be better to study how many people continue to evade the attention of immigration this weekend, or in coming weeks.

I suspect that Trump’s trash talk is more about el Donaldo thinking he can scare the chones off of so many Latinos by making them think the end is near for their search of a better life in the United States.

Because the dreaded la Migra is going to come and get you, similar to how some people like to tell their children tales of the boogeyman coming to take you away.

PRITZKER: The protector?

Trump thinking he can terrify Latinos (and anybody else who isn’t “white American” enough to satisfy his definition of “belonging” in this country) probably gives him a tingle of joy. Although for all we know, that ‘tingle’ is really just the president wetting his pants.

OR MORE IMPORTANT, it could be something he says just to give his silent majority (which is most definitely not silent and really only consists of about one-third of our society’s population) a jolt – to the point where they’ll sing his praises and talk up a storm about how we need “four more years” of a Trump presidency.

It’s political rhetoric, not serious public policy. Because it is delusional to think that Trump could seriously achieve the notion of removing more than a million people from this country without causing a sudden vacuum in our society.

Then again, I have to wonder about the three bills Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law on Friday – all related to immigration and preserving the notion that our state government views the federal immigration officials who get worked up over xenophobic fantasy as political nitwits.

Illinois now forbids the private detention centers that immigration officials want to hold all these foreigners until they can get around to deporting them. Also, non-citizens will be able to apply for financial aid if they’re accepted at state colleges.

AND LOCAL LAW enforcement officials across Illinois will be prohibited from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Which theoretically means immigration officials will have to do their own work in terms of enforcing federal law. Local cops will stay out of it.

Which ought to make sense to everybody. Except for nativist ideologues who want to view police of all types as a unified force that harasses people who aren’t exactly like themselves.

As much as Trump is trying to gain the support of those ideologue-inclined individuals, Pritzker wants people to know clearly that he (and Illinois) is on the complete opposite side of this political equation.

Think of it this way; Trump wants to scare up the foreigners, while Pritzker wants to frighten the ideologues who can’t comprehend a society that is accepting to all. What does it say about you personally if you side with Trump and his trash talk?

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“Deport ‘em all” seems to be the extent of a Trump campaign strategy

Donald Trump may well have said stupid things about just about every group of people possible who isn’t like himself, but he’s the guy who kicked off his time as a political person by calling Mexicans “drug dealers,” “criminals” and “rapists.” 

TRUMP: He wants to stay in D.C.!

So it really shouldn’t be surprising that to kick off his bid for re-election, he’s going on a rant about deportation.

AS IN HE’S going to have federal immigration officials begin the process of kicking out millions of people whom he wants to believe have no business being in this country.

Of course, that’s just Trump his role as the twit who Tweets – using his Twitter account Tuesday morning to send out messages to his followers about how he’s going to get serious about removing all these foreigners from this country.

Which may well be a task too large to take on. It may well be that trying to get rid of that many people at once is too great to accomplish. It may very well overwhelm the infrastructure of our immigration department.

But then again, I doubt that Trump is seriously intending to accomplish much of anything – other than spewing cheap trash talk to get his ideologue followers all worked up.

AND SINCE MANY of his backers seem to have a xenophobic streak behind their thought processes, saying he’s going to get the foreigners out of this country so that only people like themselves will remain will be just the kind of trash talk that will get them all worked up.

Which makes this perfect for the rally Trump planned for Tuesday night in Orlando, Fla. – the one where he officially kicks back into campaign mode and becomes the guy trying to win himself re-election.

Actual governing? He’ll leave that to the geeks whom he has appointed to various federal government posts. And when they turn out to be incapable of getting anything done?

 

OCASIO-CORTEZ: She's not leaving, either!

Well, he’ll blame it all on Democrats for standing in the way of everything he wants done on behalf of people just like himself.

OR MAYBE HE’LL blame it all on Alexandra Ocasio Cortez – the congresswoman from New York whom the far right seems overly obsessed with. Even though many of them don’t even appear to know her name, instead merely referring to her as “that AOC woman!”

Who knows? Maybe Trump, in his own delusional way, thinks she’ll be the first one he can have deported. Or maybe one of her relatives – even though as one of Puerto Rican ethnicity, that means her family consists of U.S. citizens going back generations.

For all I know, she’s more a “real American” than any of the Trump backers whose families came here a generation or two ago from somewhere in Eastern Europe – and view nodding their heads in accordance with Trump trash talk as their way of “fitting in” with our society.

But back to Trump, who’s more than willing to use his xenophobic scare tactics to stir up support.

TAKE TRUMP’S SON, Eric, who had an e-mail message sent out Tuesday telling people that his father wanted $7 million in contributions made to him that day – a “huge” and “incredible” gesture meant to show that everybody loves Donald. “Even the Radical Left won’t be able to lie their way out of this one,” Eric said.

 

BIDEN: Can he even beat his 20-plus opponents

Although going through my e-mail, I also found a message from the Joe Biden presidential campaign – announcing his own Internet-based fundraising effort.

Both men are seeking donations of $5 or more per person (although Trump claims the average donation he’d like to see is $42), all in a grand to try to one-up each other. Which makes me think that Trump’s trash talk about deportations is meant more to inspire donations toward his $7 million goal, rather than being about removing a single soul from this nation.

And making believe all the moreso that Election ’20, regardless of its outcome, is going to be an incredibly depressing period in our society – as we all dive down to the bottom of our pit!

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Mexican “countries” as ridiculous a nativist thought as speaking “Mexican”

I remember once being in a conversation with my peers in school about exactly what people in Mexico spoke. As in did we speak Mexican?

THE controversial moment of nonsense

And didn’t we realize we had no right to question how ridiculous that thought was. Because, after all, only people in Spain spoke Spanish!

NOW BEFORE GOING further, I should point out that I was all of 7 years old when this happened. The “peers” I refer to were my fellow schoolmates and my parents had moved to a heavily-Anglo neighborhood.

In short, I was dealing with kids who didn’t know any better. I can think back to the incident and laugh my culo off. They didn’t know any better, and their ignorance was just downright absurd.

But I find it hard to find anything particularly humorous about what Fox News Channel is trying to defend as just a technical glitch when they made a reference to “three Mexican countries” that their political savior, Donald Trump, was intending to cut off federal funding to.

Actually, what Trump’s trash talk alluded to was a thought that he could cut federal funding provided to El Salvador, Guatamala and Honduras. None of which are in Mexico, except to those nativist nitwits who want to think that everything involving Latin America is “Mexican.”

WHICH BASICALLY MEANS the nitwits are stupid, most definitely weren’t paying attention during grammar school geography and (most importantly) are really bothered by the fact that anybody would feel the need to correct them on the factual error – which was contained within a chyron; the caption that runs on-screen while the news anchors “speak” on-camera.

Nativist nitwits not singling out Spanish

Now I should state that Fox News types quickly caught their error, and one of the co-hosts publicly corrected the notion that there were separate “Mexican” countries.

Of course, Fox News with its desire to play ideological games with everybody who dares to disagree with their own nativist view of the globe would think nothing of publicly trashing a competitor for trying to claim an error was “just a typo.”

Which is why I have no compunction about pointing out just how stupid a mistake this truly was. Just like I'll point out that Mexico is as much a part of the North American continent as Canada or the United States.

IT WAS SOMETHING that could be excused amongst 7-year-olds. But seeing other people try to reduce our intellectual discourse down to the level of second-graders is nothing but contemptible.

If anything, it is what is most reprehensible about this Age of Trump that we’re now in. I accept we have an intellectual half-wit as our president. It’s the fact that an outspoken minority thinks the majority of us are obligated to accept this is what is wrong – and what ought to be our national priority in trying to undo come the 2020 election cycle.

So no, Mexico is a single country – albeit one with 31 states and a Federal District. Actually, it astounds me the notion that some ideologues get upset about that fact – they don’t want to have to acknowledge anything unique about Mexico.

And as for the language spoken, yes there is a certain dialect of Spanish unique to Mexico (similar to how British English isn’t the same as so-called American English, and certainly not as crude as that babble otherwise known as a Southern drawl).

ANYBODY WHO FEELS compelled to defend such moments of ignorance as expressed on Fox News on Sunday is someone who provides the very definition of a pinche puto and un baboso.

And if you’re feeling a bit confused about the shift into Español, I’d say “look it up yourself” to find out just how insulted you ought to feel right about now.

Some of us too willing to live life like a cheap cartoon

Of course, I don’t really expect you to take the time to reach for a Spanish/English language dictionary to do a translation.

In fact, I expect most of you who were watching the Sunday morning broadcast let the chyron slip right past you without noticing what it said – you were probably more obsessed with gawking at the content contained under anchor Jedediah Bila’s short skirt.

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What is citizenship, really?

I have always thought we’re all residents of Planet Earth, and that the fact of individual citizenship is more an accident of birth than anything else.

Obama assimilation dream is Trump's erasure fantasy

In my own case, I am a U.S. citizen because I had two grandfathers both of whom had the tremendous ambition to want more out of life rather than just sit around on their nalgas and take what others would have handed to them.

WHICH IS WHY they both wound up living the bulk of their lives in the South Chicago neighborhood working in the steel mills that used to be nearby, why my parents were born and raised there and I was born there.

Anything about myself that makes me a more desirable human being than others in our society has little to nothing to do with the location of my birth – although don’t get me wrong, I consider myself fortunate to have been born and raised on the shores of Lake Michigan in and near the greatest city on the aforementioned Planet Earth.

Which is why I find much of the political debate over our nation’s immigration policies to be downright pathetic; it seems far too many of the nativist nitwits amongst us think their birthplace is what makes them superior.

When most of them have no right to think of themselves as superior to a gnat, let alone any other individual. If we could deport people based on what they contribute to our society, many of these folks would be the first to go – except I doubt any other country would be willing to take them off our hands.

SO I’M HEARING the rhetoric being spewed by the president in this Age of Trump about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that some people were convinced would be wiped out of existence effective Friday.

Even Speaker Ryan thinks Trump ...

For those of you who don’t pay attention to details, DACA was the initiative created by now-former President Barack Obama to offer legal protections to those people born in other countries but who were brought here by their parents without the proper papers being lined up.

Obama’s initiative was intended to give these individuals who had been raised U.S. and were fully assimilated to be able to advance in life without the bureaucratic mess of immigration and the lack of a valid visa.

But to Trump, it is merely yet another policy that must be wiped away so as to erase any trace that this nation was ever deluded enough to elect one of “those people” as president.

... goes too far with DACA talk

PLUS, THREATENING TO erase the policy helps to keep those individuals off-balance and forevermore uncertain about their status in this country, which only serves to benefit those individuals amongst us who are so insecure they want to think their U.S. birthplace is what makes them superior to others.

Heck, even some Republicans, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., think that Trump should let Congress try to revamp DACA, rather than abolish it by presidential decree.

It’s actually as sad as the case of Genoveva Ramirez, a grandmother from suburban Berwyn whose visa expired years ago. She had immigration tell her she must produce a plane ticket that shows she’ll be leaving the United States by the end of October – or else the federal government will force her onto a plane at a moment’s notice.

There’s also the fact that Ramirez could now be detained by federal immigration officials at any time, if they suddenly decided to see her as a threat.

HER CASE IS that her family is here. They have become U.S.-based. Her grandchildren definitely are assimilated. Although I’m sure the xenophobic amongst us will try arguing that her status means nobody in the family ought to be permitted to stay.

DACA another Obama relic Trump wants to erase

The debate over immigration policy truly has become a pathetic argument by people who enjoy the bureaucratic nightmare that currently exists because it harasses people who aren’t exactly like themselves. Keeping people harassed is probably more important to the nativists than actually removing them -- an act that would be costly.

Too many people who want to talk about increased deportations, rather than engaging in a serious debate over who ought to be permitted in our society and how they wind up enhancing us all.

So for those young people who registered for DACA and now wonder if all that personal data they gave to the federal government will be used against them and for the grandmother who could wind up being sent away from her family, keep in mind that this is the particularly embarrassing part of this Age of Trump we all must endure.

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Will Latino vote be our savior and devastate Trump camp come Nov. 8?

I’m not surprised by the tidbit from this week’s vice presidential debate that had Republican running mate Mike Pence trying to dismiss his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine’s repeated criticism of GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s attitudes toward Mexico as “that Mexican thing.”
 

PENCE: Wants us to back off 'Mexican thing'

As in wanting us all to think that Trump’s comments aren’t significant, and that we should disregard what may well be the most outrageous views put forth by the New York real estate developer as he tries to become our nation’s president.

A PART OF me knows we shouldn’t take Trump too seriously with regards to his comments about Mexicans now living in this country being “rapists” and “drug dealers,” along with the idea of a federal court judge from Indiana not being fair to him in a lawsuit because the judge is of Mexican ethnic descent.

The part of me that thinks of electoral politics in a purely strategic manner knows this is something that Trump said to catch the attention of the segment of the nativists and xenophobes in our electorate who he thinks can put him over the top come Election Day.

Trump may not have as irrational a hang-up with regards to Mexicans, or Latinos in general, as his rhetoric would indicate. He may even think more highly of us than he does of fat chicks, or any other group that he has chosen to demonize. Who's to say which of Trump's nonsense-statements ought to be taken seriously?

In short, we’re the political punching bag being used so that Trump can get the support of the would-be voters whom Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has dismissed as the “basket of deplorables.”

WHICH MAKES THE significance of the 2016 electoral cycle that we determine whether such tactics can continue to work in our ever-evolving society.

 

A key factor come Nov. 8?

There once would have been a time when it would have appeared to be common-sense political science strategy to single out Latino voters – they didn’t vote in large-enough numbers enough to matter.

Which brings up the comparisons to George Wallace, the Alabama governor of old who made his own presidential bids trying to get the votes of those people who yearned to keep the segregated way of life in this country.

How else to interpret, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

 

Too many similarities between Wallace and Trump

WALLACE LATER IN life said of his own racially-charged rhetoric that it was a lesson he learned early in politics when he lost a campaign because his opponent tagged him with a label of being too friendly to black people.

As Wallace put it, his offensive rhetoric was because, “I will never be out-niggered again.” Does Trump think he won’t be “out-beaner’ed” this time around and thinks there are enough votes of people who’d encourage such thought?

The reality is that those kind of people often do live in such isolation, and really want to believe they’re the only ones that matter. Which means a Hillary Clinton presidential victory could be an earth-shattering event to their mentality; with some of them, I’m sure, still trying to recover from the shock of the past year years of having a president with too much melanin for their sensibilities.

Then again, it does mean that as much as Trump thinks he has hard-core supporters, he also has outraged enemies.

PARTICULARLY FROM THE Latino vote, which the Miami-based Latino Decisions group has said will be nearly insignificant for Trump. They said Thursday his Latino support will be somewhere between 9.5 percent and 20.5 percent, with next to no Latinos bothering with Libertarian or Green candidates.

Not just Madonna's kid breaking a piñata

Which means Hillary gains Latino votes – largely because we find the GOP opponent to be too much of un pavo to take seriously, except perhaps as part of a Thanksgiving Day dinner. Which may be the way we celebrate a Trump defeat and being spared the misery of such an egomaniac gaining electoral office.

The study says Clinton could very well take more than 72 percent of the Latino vote – which is what her husband, Bill, took in 1996. Or the 71 percent that Barack Obama received in 2012. Actually, 76 percent to 82 percent is figured most likely. Many Latino activist-types may wind up being praised for saving us from xenophobes shoving a Trump presidency down our throats – even if it means backing the woman who aroused our laughter when she absurdly tried comparing herself to a Latina grandma.

If only Trump could have kept his mouth shut about Mexicans, perhaps he might have had a chance. But then again, an ego-less, non-arrogant Trump would be about as real a concept as the 2016 World Series champion New York Mets.

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Grand Old Party: From Party of Lincoln to Party of Crackpots – how truly sad

I used to think that the one-time Party of Lincoln was more interested in wishing it could be the Party of Reagan.

TRUMP: Did anybody watch his pageant?

Although I’m now wondering if the Republican Party has its desires to become the Party of Extremists who can only “fit into” society by marginalizing all the normal people.

HOW ELSE TO explain the fact that real estate mogul Donald Trump has polls showing his presidential fantasies being taken seriously by those people inclined to cast ballots in Republican primaries.

Or the fact that presidential dreamer Rick Santorum (a former senator from Pennsylvania) is taking up his own issue – gay marriage. He wants it written into the Constitution that gay couples have no business thinking of marriage as something that applies to them.

He’s sure there are enough people still peeved about the Supreme Court of the United States striking down efforts by the states to ban gay marriage that they will unite behind his would-be presidential campaign.

Of course, it would mean that everybody in society not interested in voting in the Republican primary would be united against him. But what does he care; the basic principle of ideologues is that everybody who doesn’t think like themselves is irrelevant and to be disregarded.

THAT’S DEFINITELY THE strategy of Trump, who got the people worked up with his nonsense talk of Mexico (he wants the nativist and xenophobe vote) and now is claiming he’s owed an apology by his detractors – on account of the fact that the drug boss who was imprisoned in Mexico managed to escape.

Does he think those two morons who escaped from an upstate New York prison last month somehow allow him to score political points against some other group? Or is it just as irrelevant a point as anything related to Joaquin Guzman.

SANTORUM: Looking for his political niche

Or is all of this just more cheap political rhetoric of the sort that IS the inherent problem with our political system these days?

Although I don’t take Trump’s poll lead at all seriously.

FOR ONE THING, it is early in the process. There also are so many candidates in that Republican primary.

Which is why a 15 percent support total (which is all Trump can claim) is enough for him to be “the leader” at this point in time. It’s also possible that those people in the 15 percent are the only ones who will ever support the idea of a president who probably thinks he can remodel the White House and rename it “Trump Mansion.”

 

GUZMAN: Nobody owes Trump an apology

They’re also probably the people who actually bothered to watch the Miss USA pageant Sunday night; living in their own world and pretending that Trump didn’t say anything out of the ordinary.

As though the fact that the pageant wasn’t on a national network and had to settle for being viewed on an obscure cable TV channel wasn’t evidence enough – some people are just way too eager to live in their own world and think the rest of us have to live there subordinate to them.

NOT THAT THE GOP is alone in playing its political games with these issues. My e-mail inbox has been getting flooded with its share of messages such as, “Trump’s ridiculous, offensive ideas (and the Republicans who agree with them”).

The real point of those messages is to encourage us to donate money to the Democratic National Committee, or other allied groups, to bolster their own election efforts. After all, what good is a “President Clinton” or whomever if they run into a Congress determined to vote “no” on anything they desire?



CLINTON: The beneficiary?

Such as the kind of people who fall into the “15 percent” and would be inclined to sympathize with Trump’s business interests over the concerns of the people.

Which may be what Trump really hopes to achieve by running for office – being able to tell the president what he should do is better than having to hold the office and deal with all its inherent stresses and frustrations.

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