A Heart-Chilling Republican Christmas Story

At least baby Jesus was warm and dry, unlike homeless refugees at the US border.

 

By Emma Goldman
Immigration Correspondent

EL PASO, Texas – It's Christmas in America and around the world.  If you don't remember what is being celebrated, here's a report from this Luke guy, who claims to have inside knowledge:

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 

Luke 2:4-7.

It's damn cold in the hills of Judea in December and the family was fortunate to have a warm place to give birth to their son, Jesus.  From this story Christians derive the mitzvah (perhaps they have another word for it) of caring for those in need, especially those traveling in cold or slowed by pregnancy or infants.

Speaking of poor families trapped in the cold and seeking shelter, the Border Report tells us:

Churches and nonprofits that help asylum-seekers in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas are rallying to assist thousands of migrants before temperatures plunge below freezing.

Officials in South Texas also are opening up warming centers to help asylum-seekers who have been released from the Department of Homeland Security but have nowhere safe to go as a frigid blast of Arctic air is expected to move into the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday.

By the way, here's the weather in El Paso: 

So it's no wonder that Catholic organizations, aided by local governments and other institutions of good will, are mobilizing to shelter homeless refugees who have crossed the border into the U.S.:

Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez told Border Report that officials are working to convert the Mercedes Civic Center into a warming center.

“There’s been a coordination between all the different partners dealing with this matter,” Cortez said. “I’m concerned but the good thing is we have Catholic Charities and a large group of Catholic churches and centers and we’re trying to prepare.”

At the same time, other Catholic relief agencies, such as the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), inspired by what they believe are Catholic values, are providing legal counsel to penniless refugees seeking to establish their legal right to asylum:

CLINIC’s Catholic identity infuses every aspect of its work—how it is governed, who it serves, how it treats its clients, the way it works, and why it does the work that it does.

CLINIC was founded by the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and is governed by a board comprised of a majority of bishops, along with women and men whose professional backgrounds provide helpful context for our work. CLINIC serves as a legal support agency for diocesan immigration programs.

Second, the kinds of cases and advocacy positions taken by the network—involving family reunification, protection of the persecuted, empowerment through work, authorization, legal status and citizenship—have their roots in Catholic social teaching.

Third, CLINIC views newcomers in their full human dignity, not solely from a legal service perspective....

Fourth, CLINIC takes the Catholic view that advocacy draws its legitimacy from service. Service allows advocates to give voice to newcomers, not to speak “for” them.

Fifth, CLINIC has adopted a principle of Catholic social teaching—subsidiarity....This allows CLINIC to focus its limited resources on needs that local programs cannot meet. In this way, CLINIC seeks to leverage maximum legal representation for low-income newcomers.

Sixth, the CLINIC safeguards the rights and promotes the dignity of all newcomers. The network does not distinguish among prospective clients based on race, religion or ethnic background. 

These gratifying humanitarian efforts are surely worthy of praise from anyone with an ounce of human decency or empathy, and certainly from anyone who proclaims themselves a Christian, right?

As others have pointed out, though, there's a world of difference between Jesus and Republican Jesus.   Following the teachings of Republican Jesus, the supposedly Christian Governor and Attorney General of Texas (the latter under criminal indictment) have threatened Catholic relief organizations and anyone else with the temerity to provide aid and succor to sojourners at our doorstep:

Faith-based groups in El Paso rejected claims by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that they may be aiding unauthorized border crossings. Hope Border Institute and Jesuit Refugee Services defended their work, calling the accusations a threat and danger to their work.https://t.co/K4LfplqzpY

— CLINIC (@cliniclegal) December 20, 2022

Threatening Catholic volunteers who have chosen to spend their holidays feeding, sheltering, and representing freezing refugees with criminal prosecution – it's Christmastime in Texas:

In announcing his call for an investigation, [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott cited reports that NGOs assisted in illegal border crossings near El Paso, and that those same NGOs and some in other border sectors also orchestrated other border crossings “through activities on both sides of the border.”

“In light of these reports, I am calling on the Texas Attorney General’s Office to initiate an investigation into the role of NGOs in planning and facilitating the illegal transportation of illegal immigrants across our borders,” Abbott said, adding that he is ready to craft legislative solutions aimed at solving the border crisis and the role of NGOs that Paxton’s office proposes.

[Texas AG Ken] Paxton swiftly replied to Abbott’s call saying he will launch the investigation, and pledging to take action against organizations found violating the law.

Rupert's yellow press sez it's a crisis

Now maybe crooked Attorney General Ken Paxton thinks that indicting Catholic relief workers is no big deal.  After all, he's been under indictment for five years and he's nowhere near facing a jury. 

The organizations aiding refugees, perhaps having read about other Catholics who suffered even worse fates for acting on their religious principles, were undaunted:

El Paso faith-based immigration organizations were quick to rebuke the claims, and the investigation.

Dylan Corbett, executive director of the HOPE Border Institute, said...that Abbott’s call for an investigation “is a vile threat to all of us on the border working to pick up the pieces of a broken immigration system, to create legal pathways for vulnerable migrants and to offer a dignified welcome.”

Fair and balanced CNN says so too.

“This intimidation is beneath the dignity of public service,” he said.

Not in Texas.

Of course, state interference with the lawful practice of providing representation to asylum seekers, a right guaranteed by federal law, violates the Supremacy Clause as well the civil rights of refugees. If only the United States Department of Justice had a division devoted to protecting civil rights, something might be done about this obviously illegal intimidation.

You won't hear much about this outrage in media coverage of the looming “crisis” at the border, which crisis consists of the specter of harmless refugees crossing into El Paso without safe temporary accommodation until they can arrange transport to their intended destinations.  The crisis is supposedly that they are sleeping on the streets, within eye-shot of white Texans.

Axios for the crisis hat trick!

Since the illegal and patently fraudulent invocation in 2020 of spurious public health grounds to bar asylum seekers by the bigots and plug-uglies of the Trump Administration, there has been an ongoing crisis at the border.

The Mexican side of the border, that is.

That's where desperate refugees, unable to cross, are living out in the cold on the streets of cities like Tiajuana and Ciudad Juarez.  Their suffering over the past two years does not constitute a “crisis”because white Americans don't see it.

Suffering south of the border: not a crisis!

And the suffering on the Mexican (non-crisis) side of the border is by no means limited to mothers and babies camping out in the freezing cold.  It's so much worse, according to Human Rights Watch:

Last week, I spoke to Amelia H. (not her real name) in Juárez, Mexico. She told me that after she entered the United States in September, US border agents stopped her and sent her back to Mexico just before midnight, even though US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) claims it doesn’t expel people after dark. They ordered Amelia to cross despite her pleas to make the trip in the morning. A group of men raped her on her way to a shelter in Mexico that night.

This horror was foreseeable and all too common. I’ve interviewed others who endured rape, abduction, or other violence after US border agents expelled them. Human Rights First has documented nearly 10,000 attacks on people summarily expelled. 

Republican Jesus must be so proud.

This Christmas Eve, it's freezing outside across the country, with a few annoying exceptions (like California).  But no matter how blustery it is outside, it's nowhere near as cold as the hearts of Republican anti-immigrant bigots.

Feliz Navidad. 

 UPDATE, December 25:

Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him (cf. Jn 1:11), that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) December 25, 2022

 

Dispatches from the COVID wars. Dateline: Compiegne.

By Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.
Medical Editor

The war on COVID is over.

And, with apologies to The Onion, COVID won.

That's right, the pandemic that has claimed more than 1,100,000 American lives and continues to kill over 400 of us every day has vanquished all opposition in America, causing all parts of government to surrender unconditionally to the virulent menace.

Despite the fact that deaths from COVID have soared 65% in the last two weeks (see below)

America has thrown down all mandatory measures to save lives and left the battlefield.

Among the likeliest near term victims: our brave men and women in uniform. Just this week, the Congress and the President accepted a bloated defense spending act that specifically allowed recruits to opt out of receiving the COVID vaccine.  Although the idiotic idea came from pro-insurrection Republicans, Democrats caved like the French Army in 1940:

Democrats were forced to capitulate to GOP demands to curtail the vaccine mandate after a large segment of the party threatened to withhold their support for the legislation otherwise. Republican leaders who cheered the deal to strike the mandate have since pledged to seek retribution for its existence, demanding reinstatement for service members discharged for refusing to take the vaccine, and warning they will investigate President Biden and his advisers for having ever instituted the requirement. 

That's nice. So a proven tool said by the CDC to be vital for all of us will no longer protect either U.S. armed forces or anyone they come in contact with.

In repealing the mandate, Congress also overrode the views of military professionals, who viewed the requirement as an important part of readiness and force protection: 

During a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said vaccination is still a military readiness issue, and said a repeal could be harmful to the health of the armed forces.

“What is important to the readiness of the force is getting the vaccine,” she said.

“So, yes, it would impact the readiness of the force. You’re more prone to getting COVID-19 … and we certainly know that the vaccine will save your life.”

By the way, the intolerable intrusion on liberty (or what the f***ever represented by mandatory COVID vaccination) doesn't apply to the other 12 vaccinations the military requires.

Why?  No one knows.  

Check that – the Washington Post's bats**t crazy consulting doctor Leana Wen knows: “ while protection against severe illness appears strong, effectiveness against infection is not.”  So it's OK in her mind to let soldiers and sailors get severely ill with COVID? 

It kinda depends on which piece you read in the Post, whose COVID home page splashed directly contradictory guidance:

 

So reducing military hospitalization rates by 50% isn't worth anything, according to her?  After all the downside to getting the vaccine is – what, Dr. Wen?

Proponents of continuing the vaccine mandates argue that, for the military and schoolchildren, many other vaccines are already required. But other vaccines are nowhere near as polarizing as the coronavirus vaccine. Equating this to others could have an unintended consequence of extending the backlash from covid-19 to other inoculations. 

Or it could be that surrendering to anti-vax extremists re COVID will only encourage these dangerous nuts to extend their campaign from opposition to mandatory vaccination to trying to undercut COVID vaccination efforts among their credulous base.

That couldn't happen, you say.  If you believe that we've a got a pair of white go-go boots for you:

Which has led that well-known wild-eyed radical formerly employed by the American Enterprise Institute to conclude that a slew of Republican vaccine deniers are – let's let him do the honors:

It makes it clear that a slew of Republican governors, from DeSantis to Abbott to Reeves to Stitt, are accessories to mass murder. https://t.co/DPyJj0jK8C

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) December 17, 2022

Whoa, tiger.

The real question is why Republicans so cavalierly disregard the recommendations of the military and civilian professionals tasked with keeping our men and women in uniform fit to fight. To repurpose an old-timey Republican slur, why do Republicans hate our troops?  And why won't they support efforts to keep them safe and healthy?

Republicans: you can't trust them to protect our military.  Of course, that clear and potent political message was obscured by Democratic acquiescence, another in a long series of politically savvy moves by Democrats dating back at least to 2002. It's the old Democratic appeasement two-step: (1) throw away a position that's both correct and politically advantageous in exchange for (2) nothing. And it never, ever works.

But the bipartisan push to endanger our troops is of a piece with a similar effort to sicken all of us, by refusing to consider mask mandates in a time of rising pandemic COVID, flu, and RSV.  

Even Dr. Wen admits that masking in crowded public places, like those buses in the sky, makes good sense:

To Republicans, it's the face mask of tyranny

Instead, consider which situations are highest-risk for virus transmission. I’ve been traveling a lot for work recently, and I’ve been surprised by how few people are wearing masks in the middle of crowded airports and train stations where they’re standing shoulder to shoulder with many other people. Even if you have returned to all pre-pandemic activities and normally don’t wear a mask, consider keeping one in your purse or pocket and deciding, moment to moment, about whether to mask.

You might decide, for example, not to wear a mask in an airport’s empty security lines or while walking through spaces where people are spread out, but then slip one on during boarding, when dozens of people are packed together in an unventilated jet bridge. And you might keep the mask on before takeoff and after landing, when airplane ventilation often hasn’t kicked in, but then take it off during the flight, when ventilation is running.

Maybe you put one on if the people around you are symptomatic. On my last flight, I sat behind a parent with two young kids who both had runny noses and were coughing. This family probably shouldn’t have been traveling, but since they were, and I had no choice but to sit near them, I made sure to mask during the entire flight.

But measures like masks work best when everyone wears one, according to The New York Times:

while masks are most effective at stopping the spread of these viruses when the infected person is wearing one, masking to protect yourself from disease is still beneficial,  

This indisputable scientific fact is known even to Dr. Wen, but she can't bring herself to state the obvious conclusion: for the duration of the pandemic, the best protection is universal masking in crowded indoor spaces. And the only way to get that is to require it, like stopping at red lights.

So why not require masks?  Is it the terrible downsides of masking in indoor public places like – having to wear a mask? Let's ask the mad Dr. Wen:

Masking has become a major source of controversy during covid, but it shouldn’t be. A better approach would be to take mandatory masking out of the equation and empower people to make reasonable decisions based on individual circumstances.  

“No masks.  No vaccines.  D'Accord!”

Now Dr. Wen knows full well that an effective mask strategy depends on everyone wearing them whether they want to or not.  She only claims now that masks are bad because they are controversial. 

And why are they controversial, the worried well may ask.

The answer is short but tragic: because the immediate past President was a corrupt narcissistic heartless grifter who didn't want a mask to smear his greasy orange makeup.  So he invented a story about how Mexico was shipping us their rapists and masks.  (His actual claim was less plausible.)  Next thing you knew, there were fistfights on planes because the freedom of his enraged white base was being assaulted.

And it doesn't end with Trump.  Science denial and the supposed right to refuse low-risk low-downside public health measures like vaccines and masks have become, like needless COVID deaths and moppets mowed down by gunfire as they learned to tell clock time, a central part of American life.

So America has decide to unilaterally disarm against its most lethal adversary, and its allies in the Axis of Respiratory Evil, flu and RSW.  The result will be endless preventable agony and tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

And in exchange we will get nothing.  

Such a deal.  Marechal Petain couldn't have done better.

Latest Brainwave from the Problem-Solvers: Screwing Desperate Refugees!

By Immigration Reporter Emma Goldman
with Izzy Stone in Washington

Perpetually annoying and shape-shifting Senator Kyrsten Sinema is back, like a speck of dust, in the public eye with her announcement that she is now Independent.  Not of integrity or shame (we knew that already) but of political affiliation.

Billions of pixels have been excited with speculation about what this means.  The answer to any casual observer is clear: she is desperately trying to cling to her Senate seat by extorting the Democratic Party.  Facing certain defeat in the Arizona Democratic primary at the hands of any real Democrat, she now will run as an independent in a three-way race.  If the Democrats run someone plausible against her (hi, Arizona congressman Rubin Gallego!), the threat is that she will split the non-lunatic vote and allow Kari Lake to take the Senate seat with maybe 40% of the vote.  

The gun-at-the-head-threat to Democrats is clear: if you don't support me, you get a lunatic and possibly lose the Senate.

It's obvious enough to Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent:

Sinema’s gamble appears to be that Arizona Democrats would be loath to run a candidate against her. Under this thinking, with Sinema running in a three-way race, the Democratic vote would split and a MAGA Republican (such as Lake) would more likely prevail.

But Arizona Democrats are signaling that they won’t let that pressure dictate their actions, making a three-person race more likely....With our politics growing ever more polarized, a Kari Lake-type Republican could hold most of the MAGA and GOP base and a Gallego could get most Democrats. Independents (most of whom lean one way or the other, despite their fabled image, especially these days) could mostly split between those two, leaving Sinema with little support, even as an incumbent. 

The Arizona polling data seem to bear out the emptiness of Sinema's threat:

Kyrsten Sinema has an 18% favorable rating in Arizona right now.

Democrats: 5% fav, 82% unfav
Independents: 25% fav, 56% unfav
Republicans: 25% fav, 45% unfav

(Normally this is paywalled here so just screenshots) pic.twitter.com/kC54Iy6hwL

— Drew Linzer (@DrewLinzer) December 9, 2022

18%.  That's a favorability rating somewhere between those twin Arizona plagues: scorpions and STD's.

But we're not primarily interested in how soon Kyrsten can pursue her true calling of selling homemade ben-wa balls at the Scottsdale Crafts Faire.  The matter before us is her efforts to pursue her supposed vocation as a non-partisan “Problem Solver.”  If you can't wait to get back to a bunch of skinny guys running around Arabia in their footer bags, we'll give you the spoiler: they suck.

Greg Sargent has re-entered the chat, this time not to his advantage:

A big question is whether 10 GOP senators will support reforms being negotiated by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). The compromise would create a path to citizenship for 2 million “dreamers” brought here as children and invest a lot of money to speed the processing of the asylum seekers overwhelming infrastructure at the southern border.

Right now, negotiators are discussing including $25 billion to $40 billion in funds for border security and other border-related reforms, sources familiar with the talks tell me. Will Republican senators really forgo this opportunity? 

Now that we've learned what's really in the bill, we sure hope so.

The “Dreamers” are of course the people brought here as children by their desperate parents fleeing poverty, violence, and oppression in any number of mostly Western Hemisphere hellholes like El Salvador or Haiti.  They're adults now with a tenuous immigration status: able to work and live without fear of being rousted by the ICE body-snatchers, but without any path to citizenship or long-term protection from future depredations by white bigots like Stephen Miller. Our failure to resolve their uncertain status by letting them become citizens is undoubtedly on the top-ten list of national shames.

In 2018, Democrats offered a compromise: citizenship for the Dreamers in exchange for big bucks to build Trumpy's idiotic vanity wall.  The wall was a waste of money and resources and an environmental disaster in the making, but maybe worth it to protect the futures of these Dreamers.

Now “Problem Solvers” like Sinema and garden-variety white plutocrat Thom Tillis have a new compromise.  Instead of a wall, they want “other border-related reforms” to use Greg's innocuous vague description.

There's no bill text to analyze yet, but it appears that Sinema et al. are trying to gut the already-collapsing asylum system in exchange for protecting Dreamers whom everyone knows are never leaving the country anyway.

Tell us more Greg:

One of the Tillis-Sinema framework’s most fundamental goals is to reduce the incentives for the very type of migration that Republicans rail about. Conservatives often claim that many migrants seek asylum mainly to be released into the interior while awaiting hearings, and then disappear. 

Bar asylum seekers from entering? What could go wrong?

Conservatives also often claim that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of a Connecticut Avenue pizzeria, but that didn't persuade Greg to outlaw pizza.

In fact, asylum seekers released into the country with future hearing dates show up for their hearing (when they are properly notified of their time and place, which happens sometimes) 83% of the time, and 96% of the time when represented by counsel.  If they don't show up, they are ordered removed anyway and their names given to the body-snatchers.

So there's no problem to solve here.  Not that that would deter the Problem Solvers.  Their plan involves locking up asylum seekers (including women and children) because of what conservatives “claim.”  Or, in Greg's sunny summary, “Asylum seekers would be detained at the outset while benefiting from increased legal representation and being subject to quicker processing.”

Asylum cases are like other cases: they are complex, fact-intensive, and involve extensive efforts to marshal evidence They also provide no right to counsel so for example an unaccompanied five-year-old can be and is represented by her blankie.  The current system isn't doing a good job adjudicating asylum claims, to put in mildly, and the experiments with quickie hearings have proven disastrous. 

But wait – as with anything entrusted to the Problem Solvers, it gets worse:

While this system is built out, the government would retain for at least a year the power to expel migrants — similar to the authority regarding covid under the federal Title 42 health rule — without letting them apply for asylum at all. 

At least a year?  That sounds ominous, given that after 100 years, the immigration system has yet to be satisfactorily “built out.”

What was Title 42?  Besides a flagrant violation of international law, that is.  Let's ask the American Immigration Council:

The United States has long guaranteed the right to seek asylum to individuals who arrive at our southern border and ask for protection. But since March 20, 2020, that fundamental right has been largely suspended. Beginning on that date, both migrants seeking a better life in the United States and those wanting to apply for asylum have been turned away and “expelled” back to Mexico or their home countries. These border expulsions are carried out under...section 265 of Title 42—which the former Trump administration invoked to achieve its long-desired goal of shutting the border to asylum seekers. Over 1.8 million expulsions under Title 42 have been carried out since the pandemic began....Despite the claim made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that this order was necessary from a public health perspective to protect the United States,..[r]eports indicate that CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was no public health rationale to support it.

So repeal in fact of the right of asylum is the price the Problem Solvers want us to pay to protect Dreamers (who aren't going anywhere anyway)?

We think not (even if Greg seems intrigued by the deal).

We think that true compromise can't be based on tormenting desperate asylum seekers and violating international law.  Fortunately at least a few Democrats are wise to the scam:

Chuck Schumer has at least indicated he is open to the Problem-Solvers' immigration reform travesty.  Maybe he should think about what would have happened to Anne Frank had it been in effect in 1938, which is exactly what did happen to her: she was barred from refuge in the United States.  

We'd like to think we're better than that now, but if the Problem Solvers have their way, they will have proven we are not.

Broken News: Peter Baker Discovers that Trump is a White Supremacist

 

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

Nothing gets past the ace political correspondent/pundit/bloviator/expert for The New York Times, Peter Baker.  Just this week he breathlessly revealed the shocking truth about the corrupt depraved bigot and leader of the Republican Party, this Donald Trump guy:

Former President Donald J. Trump once again made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.

He stands with the mob. 

You don't say.

Huge Times scoop: Trump sides with mob

The “once again” is doing a lot of work because if you have been a faithful reader of the Times since Trump stuck his finger in the nation's political eye in 2015, you might not have heard the truth about his extremism and his embrace of white supremacy and fascism before. 

The untutored reader might have reached this conclusion when Trump announced his candidacy by claiming that Mexico was sending over rapists and assassins.  But to the Times, this was NBD. Their announcement story treated Trump's candidacy as a source of hilarity:

Donald J. Trump, the garrulous real estate developer whose name has adorned apartment buildings, hotels, Trump-brand neckties and Trump-brand steaks, announced on Tuesday his entry into the 2016 presidential race, brandishing his wealth and fame as chief qualifications in an improbable quest for the Republican nomination.

Improbable.  Trump's racist attack on Mexican immigrants made it into paragraph never of the story.

Peter Baker wasn't available in the summer of 2015 to weigh in Trump because he was traipsing around with Barack Obama as the Times's Chief White House Correspondent.

But the Times reached into its endless bench of hacks to declare that Trump was no threat, no problem, and just comic relief from true Republican statesmen like ... Jeb Bush.

Here's Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman handicapping his chances in June 2015:

Good one, Maggie.

A couple of months later, Times pundit Joe Nocera, having rigorously reviewed Trump's views, including his racist anti-immigration lies, concluded:

I wonder, in fact, whether even now Trump is a serious candidate, or whether this is all a giant publicity ploy....

I’m not alone in wondering this, of course. Several Republican consultants I spoke to openly questioned whether Trump is in it for the long haul. “You would see him spending a lot more money if he were putting together a true national infrastructure,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist [Whatever happened to that guy? – Ed.]. ...

He’ll be out before Iowa. You read it here first. 

We sure did, Joe. 

Let's fast forward two years, after pantloads of lies and sexist and racists smears that led him to an Electoral College victory, to Trump's open embrace of neo-Nazi racists after their rampage in Charlottesville. Here's Maggie Haberman again:

President Trump reverted Tuesday to blaming both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down Confederate statues would lead to the desecration of memorials to George Washington.

Abandoning his precisely chosen and carefully delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis from a day earlier, the president furiously stuck by his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. He drew the very moral equivalency for which a bipartisan chorus, and his own advisers, had already criticized him.

“I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said in a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” 

The story treated Trump's embrace of violent white extremism as yet another of his famous “controversies.”

Fortunately, Peter Baker was now available to weigh in:

Intentional or not, many of his most divisive comments charge directly into one of the most delicate issues in American life, race, whether it be his attacks on illegal immigrants, his “both sides” equivocation after the racial violence in Charlottesville or now his blasts at African-American football and basketball stars like Mr. Curry, the Golden State Warriors player who said he did not want to visit the White House for a traditional champions ceremony.

Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted race was not the issue. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s approach does not necessarily seem polarizing so much as animating. In an us-and-them world, he is speaking to a part of the country that has long felt ostracized by those who seem to have everything, whether it be Washington politicians or high-paid sports stars.

“Polarizing” and “divisive,” like cheering for the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium.

The obvious defect of this characterization is the equation of the two sides: the pro-Nazi side and the anti-Nazi side.  If the problem is polarization and not Nazis, then the solution advocated by clowns like Soprassata Dave Brooks and Andrew Yang – reducing divisiveness – make sense.  If the problem is Nazis (spoiler alert: it is!) then the Brooks/Yang line is dangerous gibberish which only distracts from the crisis at hand.

We perseverate on the Times's years-long failure to recognize the true nature of Trump not because it is great fun to rubbish pompous thin-skinned hacks like Baker and Haberman (although to be honest, it is), but because the failure to call out extremist white-supremacist fascist-adjacent subverters of democracy is a continuing threat.

The Times, seven years late, has finally understood the menace of Trump and Trumpism.  But what about the party he leads and the base who remain faithful to him?  And what about the equally odious Republicans who are setting themselves up as the safe non-addictive alternative to the Tiny Toadstool?

Is the Times recognizing the threat they pose to our constitutional order and our remaining liberties?

What do you think?

Please give a warm welcome to the loathsome and just re-elected Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.  Ron works harder than anyone (and certainly harder than the low-energy Tangerine-Faced Grifter) to undermine democracy and free speech and promote hatred and bigotry.  He hasn't said boo about his rival's Turkey Day dinner with Nazis and Jew haters.  He hasn't condemned them or their views.

Just before that debacle but after DeSantis's fascist and bigoted politics were known to the meanest intelligence, the Times offered up this breathless analysis:

Polarization and divisiveness can lead to bad things

Fears of a divided field are why some have embraced Mr. DeSantis as the Republican who appears, in extremely early polling, to be the most formidable potential challenger to Mr. Trump, though political history is littered with early front-runners who fizzle.

“One of the reasons why Florida has done well is because over the last few years, we stood out as the free state of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. He never mentioned Mr. Trump by name but contrasted his approach to the pandemic with that taken by the Trump administration and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist. “We refused to let the state of Florida descend into some type of Fauci-ian dystopia.”

The Times saw no reason to note that Florida's COVID death and disease rates were terrible or that Dr. Fauci's advice has always been rooted in the best available science. 

To be fair one opinion columnist (Frank Bruni) has been willing to tell it somewhat like it is:

It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.” 

But the 76 trombones of drivel blaring in the Times's Opinion section tend to drown the occasionally sensible comment. So far the hard-boiled savvy journalists on the news side haven't let the readers know just how dangerous and crazy ol' Go-Go Boots DeSantis is. (Hint: Worse than Trump.)

We hope that they catch on faster than was the case with the Tangerine-Faced Fascist. But we're not optimistic that we'll get the real story anytime soon.

Based on his past performance, we expect Peter Baker to let us know what a menace DeSantis is by . . . 2029.