Fake Tears, Fake Response

The news flies past so fast that this smallish eddy may by now have slipped your memory. After all, last night we got a new Supreme Court nominee, a nice looking feller from Colorado who gave a nod to Whizzer White, a guy no one remembers any more, last Supreme from Colorado. The new guy, who will be the end of the filibuster procedure in the Senate, has a mother who ran Reagan's EPA briefly, and upon her death her obituary noted that she was so tough she could kick a grizzly to death with her bare feet. The son would likely have taken the grizzly out from half a mile with his $1,000 big game rifle and scope. But he's definitely against Roe V. Wade.

Anyway, that was last night. The day before Mr. Schumer had presented to the public some real people who had escaped the hells of Iraq and Syria, a US Army interpreter who's life was in danger due to his collaborating with us, and some young children who lived in Damascus and saw a man blow himself up on their doorstep. Schumer was brought to brief tears by his empathy with these people, and by the patently cruel policies being instituted over the weekend by the Trump Administration in the form of its "Muslin Ban." Schumer might also have been weeping for the future of the America we've assumed would always survive--a country of compassion and mercy, a country that would not slam the door on desperate children.

Mr. Trump's jibe was petty, mean, and totally beside the point. He was actually misdirecting the public's eyes away from those children and that courageous interpreter to look instead at the messenger. Schumer, in the press conference, made every effort to not be the center of attention. He was simply introducing real people who but for the fact that they'd already entered the country before the ban, would have been either handcuffed at US airports, or denied air travel altogether from their points of origin. These things were happening under our auspices. All of us Americans were being morally stained by what our government officials were doing. Schumer was only showing us the real people involved. His own emotions were not the story, except to the extent that it is heartening to see a public official who retains some sense of empathy in a brave new world where our President brags and preens on having none.

Trump derides. It's his predictable response. He might even have felt a tiny twinge himself. He has a young son, about the age of one of the Syrian kids. God forbid that his own feelings get in the way of his brutality.

This is what we have. And over the weekend our special forces killed the eight year old daughter of one of the terrorists. It is asserted by the Administration that of course this was an accident, no matter that Mr. Trump had promised exactly this response to terrorists during his campaign. "We'll kill their families," he said with a grin. Spicer recoiled at the daily presser yesterday and said of course we didn't do that on purpose. Meanwhile, at the state level various legislatures are considering bills to make public protests much more burdensome. In North Dakota they're considering whether to wave any penalty for a driver who happens to run over a protester in the roadway. The same legislature is also considering a bill allowing convicted drunk drivers to possess weapons. Here's a brief rundown of legislative news:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/02/by-any-means-necessary-by-bloggersrus.html

We'll be seeing stories like these from now on:

https://thinkprogress.org/muslim-ban-consequences-cdefe912cc38#.la6lmoj9l