THE UNVARNISHED, UNTAINTED, UNCENSORED TRUTH ABOUT DONALD TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER
To successfully pull the wool over the eyes of the population, it takes dissembling politicians, sociopathic media proprietors, dishonest activists, and naive audiences.
I can’t recall how many times I’ve written about this syndrome in the contemporary cesspit of politics through media, but it must be three score and ten by now. And yet all it takes to reveal the truth – in some, but not all, cases – is for the calm observer to get back to the primary source material that preceded the spin.
Admittedly, the ‘Total Muslim Ban’ bollocks we’ve all been fed over the last two days was a cacophony of coincidence that even today is relatively rare, whereby all sides stood to gain from the muddying of waters. But even so, the collective knee-jerking of Trendies Against Trump has been that of a Hate Meeting straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
There are five elements involved here:
- Trump wants to live up to his campaign rhetoric
- A lot of Trumpets lap this up and retweet for America
- Simplistic half-truths sell more papers
- Establishment media want to solidify the Trump Is Mad image
- Libleft activists tend to believe anything supporting their beliefs.
You can read the actual Executive Order signed by President Trump in full at this CNN page I took a look at (and then stayed with) just after lunch CET today. These are the keynotes:
- The Order DOES NOT ban all Muslims indefinitely. It bans immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen temporarily. Here, Trump is reacting to his own experts who tell him these are “countries of concern”. Of these countries, only Syria involves an indefinite ban. I understand that the other six will be subject to quarterly reviews based on monitoring of the situations there.
- The ban on refugees anyway is for four months only – until such time as the President’s own team can reach a view about where the danger is real or imagined.
- For those not calling themselves refugees and with Islam as their religion from other parts of the world, cases will be decided on merit. That represents no change from what pertained before.
As to the judgement criteria under this last category, here is the Executive Order’s text reproduced without editing using a page capture:
I would challenge any feminist, law-abiding Muslim, religious minority or oppressed racial group to argue with either the logic or the values of that underlying principle.
To some extent, Trump has brought this opprobrium upon himself by being happy to keep up the rhetoric. I would imagine he will continue doing so, because it is in his nature to be confrontational, dramatic and simplistic in public. For example, much of the work he proposed to do on the Mexican border was already completed by Obama during the 2014-15 period: he will need to do very little on it during 2017 to live up to his promise of “a fully sealed border”. Obama kept quiet about this because it (quite correctly) showed up his hypocrisy on the subject…and it cut Mexican illegal entries by 15%.
As I keep trying to explain, I’m not an apologist for Trump. What I think is that the current Groupthink milieu is to spit out Trump before they’ve tasted him. If the British people had behaved like this in 1940, Halifax would’ve succeeded Chamberlain, and the Nazis would’ve won. See here for my recent blog parodying this reality.
We have had three nicey-nicey boys in the last twenty years: Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, and David Cameron. All of them turned out to be nothing like their image….to the detriment of all but a privileged few.
Remember: Bill Clinton made similar remarks about the Mexican border in the context of drugs and was cheered to the rooftops by Democratic congressmen. He was another clean-cut nicey-nicey good ol’ boy who turned out to be an asshole with a penchant for sex through the medium of Cuban cigars. In the Oval Office.
Some of the tweeted “debating points” over the last 48 hours have limboed beneath puerile on their way to braindeath. It takes a lot more than 140 characters to describe what this admittedly unconventional President is up to. He may yet bitterly disappoint – and if he does, you will read it here first. But in the meantime, the moment has come to don some long trousers, accept he’s there, and judge him based on governance for the greater fulfillment of the great majority.
On pretty much every dimension, Barack Obama failed that Benthamite litmus test. That’s why over 50% of African Americans didn’t vote this time.
The Slog 