And I listened to Harvey Wasserman today who wonders why the Democrats
haven't had people out there making speeches to counteract every one of
Trump's speeches that he's been making at rallies in order to influence the
midterm elections. The only person doing any of this is Bernie Sanders.
Wasserman says that all the Democrats do is send out emails, asking for
money. Their important people could have been providing the public with a
very different vision, if they actually had one. But they, the Corporate
wing of the party, doesn't. They certainly aren't saying anything meaningful
about immigration and asylum or about nuclear weapons. What they do is talk
about what a terrible man Trump is or how the Russians are responsible for
his being President. That is not going to win any elections.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2018 6:46 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Shouting Fire in Crowded Theatre, President
Courts Votes With Lies
Yes, the lack of a narrative from the Democratic party is unfortunate. The
Economist magazine has an article about this in its most recent issue
subtitled, Donald Trump Is Wrong about Central American migrants, The
Democrats are Incoherent.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2018 6:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Shouting Fire in Crowded Theatre, President
Courts Votes With Lies
Shouting Fire in Crowded Theatre, President Courts Votes With Lies By
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
25 October 18
The fact that this president has been so obsessed with immigrants and
immigration as a key component of his message, from the day he announced his
desire to become president of the U.S. in 2015, should not make any one of
us surprised that he's using the caravan, essentially, to further advance
his well-established line against immigrants by demonizing them, by
dehumanizing them.
. we should not be surprised-if I regret one thing, it's that there is no
strong counter-narrative from the Democratic Party about an event like this
caravan or migration altogether. And I believe that that's a flaw that we
need to deal with and find a way of fixing in the U.S.
- Oscar Chacon of Alianza Americas on Democracy NOW, October 23
The madness of the day is this: thousands of peaceful migrants are headed
toward the US to seek humanitarian asylum and the US president reacts by
inciting panic, rage, and hate. The president warns hysterically of a
"national emergency" as his deceitful ranting works like a self-fulfilling
prophecy, stoking a real emergency from the fevered imaginings of his
soul-deep bigotry.
The migrant caravan has been demonstrably peaceful. Mexicans along the
caravan route provide food, water, and support. The caravan is estimated at
7,000 people of all ages, mostly whole families. No one has even tried to
make an accurate count, but it's reasonable to believe most of the migrants
are fleeing from Honduras.
Honduras presents another face of the present madness, but a much older,
bipartisan, imperial face. The US has been kicking Honduras around since
before the US government in Honduras was just an extension of the foreign
policy of the United Fruit Company. The current state of Honduras as a
country that terrorizes its own population dates from the Reagan presidency,
when ambassador Negroponte was running Salvadoran death squads out of
Tegucigalpa. There followed a brief and uneasy Honduran flirtation with
democratic government and an excess of national independence that came to an
abrupt end in a military coup. Satisfied with that outcome, Barack Obama and
Hilary Clinton officially certified that no coup had taken place (wink
wink), and that the US would continue helping the Honduran government to
militarize itself, a policy that continues today. The US is happy with the
state of affairs, but Hondurans by the thousands can't find a safe and
decent way to live there, so they head north, much to the annoyance of our
el Presidente, who, in a remarkably obtuse response, threatens to cut off US
military aid to Honduras.
However demagogic politicians may misrepresent this caravan, it has
literally nothing to do with illegal immigration. The president falsely
claims the people in the caravan are trying to come into the US illegally.
They are not. These are asylum seekers. They have standing under
international law to seek asylum in another country. The irony is that
they're seeking asylum in the country most responsible for creating the
conditions that drove them from their homes.
A sensible leader with a human concern for other human beings might have
seen something like this coming, since it's been happening more or less
twice a year for decades. To be fair, the current caravan is one of the
larger ones, but still not the largest ever. But the US doesn't act in good
faith when it comes to immigration. The US has a legal obligation to process
claims for asylum fairly and promptly. Instead, the US uses force to keep
migrants in Mexico, leaves them exposed at border crossings for days,
understaffs asylum courts whose backlogs are out of control, and kidnaps
children from their parents in a thuggish attempt at deterrence. Now the US
president is threatening to meet peaceful asylum seekers at the border with
military force. And he's lying about the migrants, providing no evidence to
support his lies:
Go into the middle of the caravan, take your cameras and search. OK? .
You're going to find MS-13. You're going to find Middle Eastern. You're
going to find everything. And guess what. We're not allowing them in our
country. We want safety. We want safety.
And more of the same demagoguery with no support in fact at another campaign
performance, where he refers to a caravan that is more than 1,000 miles from
the US border, where it might arrive in late November or much later:
That is an assault on our country and in that caravan you have some very bad
people and we can't let that happen to our country.. I think the Democrats
had something to do with it.
The president's rhetoric is of a piece with official Republican bigotry in
defense of white people. His surrogates accuse George Soros of funding the
caravan, of course. Examples of hate speech abound at the state and local
level, wherever there are Republicans running scared. The two Republicans
indicted for corruption, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of
California, have made especially racist appeals to get re-elected. And when
they're not overtly bigoted, Republicans are busy lying about policies no
Democrat supports (open borders, more crime). When called out for their
dishonest tactics they whine about civility.
Legitimate coverage of the caravan reveals no gang members, no Islamic
terrorists, no violent people at all. Oh yeah, what about the internet
coverage of those "Mexican Police Officers Brutalized by Members of a
Migrant Caravan?" It's a lie peddled by people on Facebook and Twitter
without reliable sourcing. Turns out the police were brutalized several
years ago (2011, 2012, 2014), but by Mexican students and teachers, not by
any immigrants in any caravan (as documented by Snopes). The false meme
purveyors are presumably the Republican equivalent of Russian bots. One of
those spreading this garbage online was Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In Mexico, official treatment of the caravan is civil and helpful. Popular
response has been mixed, but mostly sympathetic along the caravan route. One
Mexican along the route, Ana Gamboa, offered a more sensitive, textured
response than anything we've heard from the US president:
The only thing I can say to people is that they should be more human, that
we should look into our hearts and imagine ourselves in the migrants' shoes,
because it isn't easy, what the migrants are doing. We Mexicans like to
criticize Donald Trump for the way he treats Mexicans in the United States,
and now we're acting just like him. We don't have any walls on our border,
but sometimes we ourselves are the wall.
Americans are all too often swayed by fear of imaginary threats. The migrant
caravan is an imaginary threat. It's easy enough to find the facts about
this caravan at this time. It's probably easier to find the falsehoods and
the lies, given the media megaphone attached to the presidential tweeter.
Once more we're at the perennial crisis of American democracy: whether
enough voters will both learn the truth and vote on it.
Email This Page
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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