Uh-oh

HotAir points out that the Washington Post seems to have learned who Kate Steinle is, though it's still unwilling to mention her name. Here is the editorial board urging a bit of caution about D.C.'s anti-Trump pro-sanctuary-city public defender program to protect violent illegal aliens from unfair deportation by the Man:
In drafting the program’s fine print, however, D.C. officials should take care: It’s not just most undocumented immigrants facing legal travails who merit protections. So do ordinary Washingtonians . . . .
Nonetheless, it is worth bearing in mind the unhappy experience of some other so-called sanctuary cities, whose zeal to defy federal immigration authorities has at times defeated common sense. In the prime example, San Francisco officials in 2015 ignored a detainer, an official request from federal immigration officials seeking custody of an undocumented immigrant with a long record of drug offenses. The man should have been turned over to federal officials; instead, he was released. A few weeks later, he shot and killed a young woman strolling with her father on the waterfront.
"So do ordinary Washingtonians."  That sounds . . . that sounds almost like "America First." Next, we'll see union leaders praising Trump for deep-sixing the TPP, and after that a rain of frogs.

By the way, how is it that people hear "America First" and think it means "America Best, you're scum"?  When I'm bargaining with someone, I expect to put my interests first as I expect him to put his interests first.  If we're both happy with a compromise, great.  If he says he's not interested in a deal because, much as it may suit me, it doesn't do anything for him, I don't think, "Why, that boor.  He thinks he's better than me."  Unless, I suppose, he owed me reparations or something.

5 comments:

Grim said...

In the early days of WWII, the America First Committee was the anti-war movement organized to keep us out of the war. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, popular culture redefined the phrase to mean Nazi sympathizer. Dr. Seuss, for example, drew cartoons like this one and also this one.

It's a bold move by Trump to try to reclaim the phrase, as it plays right into the hands of his opponent's charge that he is a fascist.

Texan99 said...

Yep. In foreign policy it can come to mean "I'm not interested in standing up to dangerous foreign dictators until someone can make me understand how the U.S. itself is in immediate peril." Which, oddly enough, is a view most people share all the time; only in retrospect do they say, "Well, obviously it was right to stand up to Hitler." But apparently it hasn't been right to stand up to anyone since Hitler.

douglas said...

I'm convinced that is deliberate phrasing by Trump to gin up the outrage and further lower the bar for him. Pretty soon at the rate they're going, if he's anything short of the devil himself, he'll go down as a good president.

Texan99 said...

I finally had to "unfollow" my sister's FB posts for a while. She's putting up 5-6 a day, the last one a link to a conservative concern troll explaining why he, as a movement conservative, was still a never-Trump. She accompanied it with a little sneer about how Hillary-haters should read it. Well, of course, I already had read it, and many like it. (She, on the other hand, to this day has not familiarized herself with any negative reporting on Clinton and just thinks there are people out there who have all kinds of unsubstantiated negative views on her that can't be explained but through the lens of misogyny, etc.) What's more, I had read it, don't dispute much of what it was, and still don't consider it grounds to overcome my deep personal and policy-grounded revulsion for Clinton and all who sail in her. I want to say, "I get it! He has terrible flaws! I see them too! But the competition was worse, and I like nearly everything he's actually doing, as opposed to his verbal pratfalls. I'm just not getting the Antichrist vibe at all." But it's unseemly to get testy with one's own sister on the internet.

CDC out of the climate nonsense business. Dakota and Keystone pipelines with new life breathed into them. New heads of EPA, Energy, Education, HHS who don't make my head come to a point whenever they open their mouths. It's worth a lot. These posting friends and relatives of mine still have no earthly idea what conservatives believe that they could be happy with the new policy directions. They've been paying no attention at all. It's not that they disagree so much as that they literally have no idea.

Ymar Sakar said...

They've been paying no attention at all. It's not that they disagree so much as that they literally have no idea.

The South went to war at Ft Sum, over far less.