The Circus Is Coming to Town

Just when you thought you could exhale after a heinous 2018 campaign that featured Donald Trump and his merry band of GOP enablers playing to the cruelest, most vile tendencies of White American racism and xenophobia, it's time for the 2020 campaign! What better to kick off this election cycle than giving a tacit thumbs up to the murder of two innocent asylum seeking children. Not that anything like that would ever cause the white supremacist GOP to pause just for a minute...just for a minute...to consider their utter lack of morality in executing their Auslander Raüs! immigration policy, as custom crafted by Trump's favorite Fake Jew, Stephen Miller. Certainly not after Homeland Storm trooper Barbie Kristjen Nielsen reassured us through clenched teeth and pursed lips that the blame for these innocents' deaths laid with the victims themselves: 

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders,” she said. “Smugglers, traffickers, and their own parents put these minors at risk by embarking on the dangerous and arduous journey north.”

Pretty astonishing when you consider that the U.S. remains party to international treaties (read: U.S. laws) that obligate our government to provide safe, dignified treatment to all asylum seekers, regardless of where they're coming from or where they enter the U.S.. Why are Central Americans seeking asylum, anyway? I don't know. Maybe it's because their countries have devolved into a living hell after more than a century of U.S. imperialistic interference and commercial domination to secure transnational corporations' unfettered access to and exploitation of Central American labor, land and other natural resources. Used to be that the U.S. would offer just enough foreign aid to provide a veneer of "Giving a sh!t," a palliative band aid on the societal kneecaps we had smashed with our militaristic lead pipes (and phosphorus bombs and other military weapons, training and materiel).

And before anyone might start clucking their tongue and tsk-tsking me for picking on the Republicans, let's not forget about the role played by the party of the former Deporter-In-Chief, Barack Obama. Nancy "the Best Speaker of the House (EVER!)" and her affable slouch of a sidekick, Senate Minority Leader Chuck "Facebook is Our Friend" Schumer, have extended their "Stay on Message" discipline to squash any serious talk about the crimes against humanity being committed by ICE and the CBP. Remember, it's more important to stay focused on health care and jobs for disaffected (read: racist) working class white men than to bother yourself with any moral dilemmas you might encounter over the treatment of brown folks trying to exercise their basic human rights. 

I'll pause and dispense with the snark just for a minute to remind folks that any reasonably objective read of recent American political history will show that people of color and the poor are only marginally less worse off under Democratic Party rule than that of the GOP. The Democratic Party, in response to getting its fanny regularly spanked by the GOP during the 1980s embraced a Neo-liberal policy agenda that shifted its moral center from representative government to the free market (Thank you, Bill, Hill and all the DLC corporate sellouts!).  Basically, what the Democratic Party has been offering up for the past 30 years has been a gentler, kinder version of Milt Friedman's trickle down economics with a feeble embrace of the need to preserve some form of a social safety net and modicum of environmental protections. 

How that translates into immigration policy has been to appease economically insecure whites with border crackdowns while still mouthing fidelity to international humanitarian norms. No wonder the GOP is so much better at staying on message. It's not hampered by having to talk out both sides of its mouth. It's enough to make you cry, but I'd prefer to laugh. And what better place to do that than the circus. The big tent awaits! Bring on the clowns!