Hey, have you heard that an illegal immigrant killed a nursing student in Athens, Georgia? Maybe not, says Bob Somerby:
On one channel, this topic drove eight hours of primetime reporting and discussion. On the other channel, the topic doesn't exist. However you may assess the dueling news judgments, our tribes are now living in two different worlds with respect to topic selection and delivery of information.
Immigrants, both legal and otherwise, commit crimes at lower rates than natives. Still, they do commit crimes, and if you force feed your audience hours of news about every one, they'll naturally think that crime from illegal immigrants is out of control. It's all theater.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican attorneys are still trying to disqualify Fani Willis from overseeing her voter fraud case against Donald Trump and others. It won't work, but everyone is paying attention because it's about sex and romantic relationships. In other words, it's all theater.
Up in Washington DC, Republicans are trying to subpoena the tapes of Robert Hur's interview with Joe Biden. This is not because they expect to discover evidence Hur missed of Biden taking classified documents from the White House. It's because they hope to leak excerpts from the tapes that appear to show Biden stumbling over his answers. More theater.
The impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas? Theater. The "Biden crime family"? Theater. Razor wire in the Rio Grande? Theater. Claiming to support IVF without being willing to actually do anything about it? Theater.
It's nothing but endless theater from Republicans these days because they have nothing else left. It's hard to remember the last time they had a serious, substantive discussion about something.
Remember, this is the "government is a joke" overlay. Its a separate issue with respect to the anti-taxation issue. But:
1. The anti taxers are not devoid of any issues, they have made up their substantive mind.
2. The life begins at conception crowd made the political mistake of getting what they wanted. Don't think for a nanosecond that they do not believe that life begins at conception. I would wager that for a very depressing number of millions, they also believe that sperm and eggs ought not to be "wasted" - so get ready for that one.
3. Razor wire is not theater, if they could get away with machine guns they would do it. "Theater" implies that they might actually feel bad if someone dies in the razor wire, no, they are probably disappointed only a couple of people died. Sheesh. Stop treating Republicans as if they do not say exactly what they are going to do.
4. Its not like all the rest of the nonsensical conspiracy theories they spout are not things that they actually believe.
None of us want to believe what these 70 odd million doofuses believe. But that's the reality.
Yesterday's post on what is wrong with rural America was, in a way, naive, there is nothing to figure out. Its not as if rural America is made up of a bunch of people who are for reasonable gun regulation, want to protect abortion, want comprehensive immigration reform, are for universal health care, etc, but for some reason that requires column inches in they NYT vote Republican.
Come one. Yes, the actually believe the crap Trump spouts every day. Yes, there are like 70 million of them. Yes, unless we outvote them we are well and truly screwed.
These are people who by and large believe that Jesus is the King of America and Black people should be grateful to be sharecroppers or should self-deport to Africa. For decades they demanded rigid racial segregation.
Jesus was always a bit soft, handing out free healthcare to the poor and that sort of thing. Most Republicans seem to think Donald Trump now has the direct line to God and is a surer route to salvation than through J.C.
"Free healthcare to the poor". +1
"Stop treating Republicans as if they do not say exactly what they are going to do."
Right? I keep telling people to go back and watch "Elysium". They'd have a very long waiting list to volunteer to man the machine guns at the border.
Sainte Ayn and the Gulch. A fevered dream if there ever was one...
My favorite was the ChemRail rifle.
Regarding your third point’s note about gunning down migrants: a Republican in the Arizona legislature has apparently proposed legalizing exactly that
Trump proposed shooting them in the leg while he was president.
First, their supporters LOVE the theater. It's not merely performance; it's performance of hatred directed at people they hate. And second, they don't WANT an alternative. They don't believe in governance, except perhaps some vague childish notion of "people should do what *I* want!!"
Their politicians are giving them what they want: hateful Kabuki and governmental paralysis. And then when they don't get what they want, they will blame the people they are told to blame, lather rinse and repeat.
They're not very bright.
I do not think the judge works be holding hearings on Wills sex life of Trump was automatically going to lose on a matter of law.
Immigrants may be more law abiding than US citizens but the debate here is about illegal immigrants who have already demonstrated they are criminals but that get released by sanctuary cities instead of being handed over to ICE for deportation. Are you really going to claim that criminal illegal immigrants commit future crimes at lower rates than natives?
Um ... wut?
Indeed undocumented immigrants DO "commit ... crimes at lower rates than natives." Statistics from the Deep State FBI confirm this consistently. Now, the word "criminal" is doing some heavy lifting in there, so not entirely clear what it means in terms of the argument, although it does make clear the beliefs behind it.
1. Please provide your evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than three general population. I am unaware of such stats.
2. Jose Ibarra, Laken Riley's apparent killer, was previously arrested for child endangerment but then released instead of being handed over to ICE for deportation.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsbtv.com/news/local/clarke-county/jose-diego-ibarra-court-documents-reveal-immigration-criminal-past-united-states/SPXOP242MNF3NPCCRCCB4DZSQU/%3foutputType=amp
I am unaware of such stats.
Evidently. I am not a research assistant. Look them up yourself. And anecdotes are not statistics (You may also have been unaware of that.)
1) 2 second google turns up:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12175
This likely has no impact on your views, so why pretend to even care? Odd isnt it?
2) The 'child endangerment' was driving an unregistered car.
You are a moron.
"the debate here is about illegal immigrants who have already demonstrated they are criminals but that get released by sanctuary cities"
Stop lying. In the real world, a *misdemeanor* conviction is enough to revoke a green card. Granted, most judges won't do that for minor crimes, but for serious crimes it is practically automatic, and deportation is immediate. Unless it's a REALLY serious crime, like murder, in which case the immigrant is tried and imprisoned rather than deported.
However why do we need to wait?
In most of the world (I have been an expat in multiple countries over the last 30 years) the rules for foreigners are simple. We are allowed to live in host countries as long as we are a net positive. If we become a problem, or visa can be revoked and we must leave or be deported. This requires no conviction and for minor issues host countries often do not bother with a trial ace punishment - you will just lose your visa and have to leave.
Note BTW that sanctuary cities refuse to have criminals over to ICE upon release.
Sanctuary cities have different policies. Most decline to require witnesses or victims of crimes to present documents proving their right to be there. most refuse to hold prisoners past their release date just because ICE asks (in that situation the city has no legal right to hold the person, and some cities who did so have been successfully sued, iirc) I'm not sure any fail to turn convicted felons to ICE, but I'm ready to be educated if you have a reliable source for your claim.
As an expat from Holland who has lived in other countries in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America for 50+ years, I have not once seen a person with a residential or work visa being deported from any country for becoming a net negative. I have known lots of people who worried they'd lose residency status after losing their jobs, after minor contacts with the police, after Brexit and even after having been found to abuse welfare, but none of them did. Not that it's never policy; just that it seldom seems to be put into practice.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
There you go…
It's sad to see the state of the modern R Party. I remember the days when they were rational. I mean, they were racist as hell, and sexist pigs, but they gave serious thought to economics and foreign policy, and could usually be trusted to listen to experts.
Yes, I'm old.
The Bull Moose party?
The Bullshit Party works better, I think.
Bobby Jindal asked them if they wanted to be known as the "Stupid Party", and their answer was an overwhelming "HELL YES!!".
The claim that tax cut would pay for themselves, adopted by Ronald Reagan, marked the start of the decline. George W. Bush made the same claim despite the evidence from the Reagan tax cuts because, well, if you want to push a policy agenda designed to primarily benefit the top 1%, but you need more like 50% of the voters to win election, you gotta lie.
Bush's explanation of why we had to invade Iraq (“The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.”) was not serious, and not just because Iraq didn't have any WMD. I'd say that the party's claim to serious thought on either economics or foreign policy died under Bush.
Many Republicans eventually admitted that invading Iraq was a bad idea, but they apparently said, “Sure, electing a President who went to politics because he couldn’t succeed in business might not have worked out so well, but the problem is that Bush wasn’t incompetent *enough*.” So the elected Trump.
It is tragic that this woman lost her life, but it is no less tragic than the deaths of roughly 13 women per day who are murdered (https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offender-relationship-2021). The fact that a brown person in the US illegally was the murderer in this case is a statistical aberration.
133 gun-related deaths per day, of which 57 were classified as murder, in 2021.
But conservatives tell us we can't do anything about all those daily gun deaths.
Well we can. Throw criminals in jail for longer and execute murderers.
Very few murderers are first offenders.
Actually, a high fraction of murders are intra-family (always have been), and generally not done by repeat criminals. Very likely an arrested burglar is a repeat offender, but you make a facile over-generalization here.
MF just making up some conservative BS? I'm shocked.
It's hard to remember the last time they had a serious, substantive discussion about something.
Was it . . . about the time Eisenhower sent the National Guard into Little Rock?
The Modern Republican is a professional performative culture warrior artist. Dig below the surface and there's just an empty vessel.
They are trying to protect a world that they are perfectly happy with from change and the march of time. Folly, of course. They have to be content with just slowing it down in certain places.
... and within the vessel below the surface, there is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, within which is a burning sun of hatred, powered by an eternal engine of resentment and ignorance, standing on a shaky foundation of belief ...
Republican hippies. They're the WORST.
This all day long. One enormous gaslighting con job.
I guess what I have to say about that is...
Of course it's theater. Politics is theater. It always has been and probably always will be. Republicans aren't doing it because they have nothing else left, they're doing it because it works and they dropped all the other ancillary stuff that was never really part of it in the first place - it was always just a facade.
TBH, Democrats could learn a lesson there. They don't have to be inauthentic, but they should embrace that it's theater.
"... It won't work, .."
I would say the odds are at this point that it will. That is Willis will be disqualified.
No way. There never was a financial incentive in the outcome of the case, which is necessary to establish grounds for DQ. Dating a guy who took a pay cut to work on the case isn't really enough of a nexus.
"No way. .."
Time will tell. I think the judge will conclude that it is more likely than not that Willis lied in her testimony and that will be enough for him.
I liked what Jon Tester said about thist shit on CNN tonight. He called it bullshit.
I believe the term is bread and circuses, except the Republicans seem to want to keep the bread
+1!
It's nihilistic theater - when your worlds real or imagined are seen as disintegrating around you, or you feel your privilege being eaten away, or when your worldview and mindset are almost entirely a fabricated retreat from and redoubt against material reality, when your actual and felt agency is not up to the task of managing the growth and change inherent to existence, and when the forces controlling you eat at your soul for their life's blood, what's left except the death instinct? Nothing. What is authoritarianism at its core? The broken, decayed self that projects the death of the soul onto the world.
This country's greatest weakness is its deeply internalized sense of exceptionalism, that somehow we are not subject to what makes humans human, that in our uniquely American, perfectly imperfect way, we're different. If anything positive comes out of the death throes of our antiquated systems, I hope it's the death of this.
The problem is, at least half the country *wants* theatrics rather than substantive governance. Republicans know that; they're just giving voters what they want. It's also why every time a Democratic administration actually passes important legislation, like the ACA or the Infrastructure bill, or work to avoid a government shutdown, they get absolutely zero credit for it.
Prancing, mugging, sneering, and dissing all beat working. And if you've got that big "R" after your name, that is literally all the voters want from you.
"It's nothing but endless theater from Republicans these days"
True.
BUT let you me ask you a question. Was Trump some sort of Russian plant/agent?
We got four years of this particular claim with, as far as I can tell, zero actual evidence of any sort.
This seems to me basically isomorphic to the Hunter Biden nonsense.
The Matthew Shepard story seems to me more or less isomorphic to this Athens Georgia case, ie massive pushing by one team of a claim (killed because gay) that seems extremely incidental and irrelevant to the story.
Is this what-about-ism? Well yes, in the sense that I have contempt for both sides. But I'm not sure that there's value in continually insisting "the republicans are poopyheads" when so much nonsense also happens on the left.
IF your goal is more educated, better thinking, electorate, I honestly think there's more value exposing the flimsiness of the stories on your own side. The left already think (justifiably so) that many Republicans are crazy; what they need is to be informed about (and work to purge) the crazies on their side.
"that seems extremely incidental and irrelevant to the story."
BS
It's highly telling that your one example of D disingenuousness is from 25 years ago.
Well, of course there is theater. It's politics. It's always had theater as an element.
And said theater is fine if at some point you buckle down and solve some problems. That's the thing these Republicans aren't doing.
They had the deal of the century offered to them on immigration and they turned it down for no good reason. Because they are not interested in actually solving problems.
I think attacking them for theater is not going to get us anywhere. We're human beings, we love stories, theater is everywhere.
We can get a lot of mileage out of "they don't solve any problems". Americans are in fact fairly pragmatic. Even ones that are pretty conservative.