Thursday, January 10, 2019

William Rivers Pitt: Donald Trump Is the Damn Emergency

An excellent spot on piece by William Rivers Pitt. — Molly
 


Donald Trump still has vast power at his immediate disposal. He can hire the worst people to fill vital posts. He can sign Executive Orders that allow the dumping of toxic chemicals into aquifers. He can continue to rip families apart at the southern border. He can ruin longstanding international relationships and cuddle up with despots and dictators. He can ignore the climate even as it comes crashing down around him. He can order an airstrike against any point on the map. He can peel the crust off the Earth with nuclear weapons if he so chooses.
 
That is an emergency.
 
Trump’s Oval Office address last night was yet another national humiliation. The administration will grind on until Congress finally locates its purpose and the rule of law has its turn. The man himself, however, has been exposed — more so than ever before — as a desperate liar, injudicious, petty, a dangerous small fraction of a president who will say anything to please that dwindling slice of the population which, somehow, still doesn’t wince when he opens his gob.
 
That is also an emergency.
 
The absence of a massive, expensive, legally dubious wall at the US-Mexico border is not an emergency, nor is Trump’s inability to browbeat Congress into paying for a campaign promise that began in 2014 as a mnemonic device to help him stick to the campaign script; the fact that the government is shut down because of this is an emergency. The fact that the Democrats have offered billions for border security minus the useless wall is not an emergency; the fact that Trump keeps lying and blaming them for the ongoing fiasco of his shutdown is.
 
Trump’s address last night did not last 10 minutes, but the folks doing the fact-checking at papers like The Washington Post had smoke pouring out of their ears before the five minute mark. It was a campaign commercial Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have endorsed: A tattered tapestry of fear, old lies and bluster from a broken-down hustler trying to bluff his way out from under a busted straight. It was a disgrace to the office from beginning to end.
 
As ever, behind Trump’s lugubrious read-through of all those teleprompter words, behind the ersatz empathy he tried and failed to convey with lines like “so sad, so terrible,” lurks the White House’s #1 racist white nationalist adviser: Stephen Miller. White House reporter April Ryan, speaking to Don Lemon on CNN, confirmed that Miller was the author of the address. Further, she explained, the address was not meant to offer solutions for immigration policy or the shutdown crisis, but was tailored solely to telegraph racist fearmongering as far as the broadcast could reach. Mission accomplished.
 
Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/donald-trump-is-the-damn-emergency/       

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