TomFlannery.com

Raise your hand if you thought we’d be here.

Over 2000 children separated from their parents at the US-Mexican border, and put into, depending on your level of outrage…

Old Wal-Mart stores..
Federal detention centers..
Camps..
Cages

Many of the 2000 are infants. One was forcibly taken away from her mother as she was breastfeeding. When the mother resisted, she was placed in handcuffs. Inside the camps is a mural featuring the grinning face of President Trump, next to which is a quote “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.” The quote is written in both English and Spanish, a nice nod to the inclusiveness of our nation. Trump first used it to describe a NYC real estate transaction, in which he fought for the right to evict people from their homes and tear their building down. The quote appears in his book “The Art of the Deal”.

Does anybody else think this is a colossally fucked up quote to hang on the wall of a holding pen for children?

The children do not know where their parents are. Parents are not allowed to communicate with their children while in custody. And the government has not set up a system to reunite children and parents when one is released. In some cases, parents have been deported without their children, and children have been deported without their parents.

(A Texas detention officer has been accused of assaulting the 4 year old daughter of an undocumented immigrant and threatening to deport the mother if she went to the authorities. How many more of these stories lurk out there? It’s what happens when you play God.)

This is what it has come to folks.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers responsible for these separations are using the “just following orders” defense, which you may recall has been used before. Didn’t end well. Just saying.

The policy has been called a “deterrent” by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, but “not cruel” because “children will be put into foster care or whatever”. So take that, snowflakes.

White House officials have said that “the president has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate”, which certainly makes it sound like these children are being held hostage. Trump wants his wall, Bubba, and Mexico ain’t paying for it, in case you haven’t noticed.

The Attorney General of the United States has used Bible verse to defend the policy, despite cherry-picking a verse (Romans 13) that had been used previously to defend slavery. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, herself a mother of small children, also referred to scripture to defend the practice, which seems to obliterate the line between church and state that is supposed to, you know, be separate and stuff. WWJD. Who would Jesus detain?

When do we admit that Trump is not using the bible as a moral signpost, but in this case as some sort of demented justification for keeping his America as white as possible (sorta the same way slave owners used it)? Just because only some dogs can hear the whistle doesn’t mean it’s not hurting the ears of others.

What you are doing is saying God wants you to rip children from the arms of their parents. I mean….to even suggest this is monstrous….to believe it puts you in the category of a cretinous sociopath with the moral compass of a diseased badger.

A few of Trump’s Kool-Aid whisperers are having a hard time defending this one without getting drunk first, so they’re doing the next best thing and simply denying the situation even exists…

“There is no policy of separating families at the border”, says DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (as children are being separated from their parents at the border)

A Deputy Press Secretary called it “completely false” that children are being separated from their parents (as children are being separated from their parents at the border), then in the same sentence saying “this is all the Democrats’”….thus blaming democrats for something he just claimed wasn’t real in the first place…a neat verbal tick not possible until Trump became President and we entered Orwellian Memorial Stadium.

All of these goons are apparently using the Goebbels/Trump/Big Brother tactic that the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it….especially if these people watch Hannity or considered Winston Smith to be an unpatriotic whiner.

Or my personal favorite, calling the entire thing Fake News. Ann Coulter went on Fox and called the immigrant children “child actors” and warned Trump “don’t fall for it” (the same repertory theater where all those dead Newtown kids and David Hogg originated, perhaps?). Not sure if this was before or after Fox thought it prudent to argue that it was unfair to call the chain-link fences these children are locked behind “cages”, but in this case I didn’t think the timing was relevant. Just my liberal two cents.

Trump, on the other hand, frustratingly unable to blame children being held inside cages on Hillary’s emails, is repeating that the entire thing is the fault of the Democrats, conveniently forgetting, just this once, that he’s the fucking President and could stop the separations with a single word (or in his case, a hopefully not misspelled tweet). Even his own wife seems appalled, although she may be hesitant to speak up for fear of being deported herself.

This shouldn’t be that hard folks. It should be as easy as not calling Nazis “very fine people”.  

Are we really this far gone? Are we so entrenched in our own ideological bubbles that even admitting that ripping a child from the breast milk of his mother is wrong. That it is a sign of political capitulation? Of political weakness?

Honestly, how much lower can we go? I’m convinced this nation would never stand for 2000 dogs being separated from their owners at the border. There’d be a national uproar of biblical proportions, presumably the only kind of uproar that holy warriors like Sessions and Huckabee Sanders would pay attention to.

How much of an unempathetic douce-nozzle do you have to be to sanction this type of thing? There is nothing partisan about this. It’s basic fucking humanity. Out of the same book that says you should not kick puppies or rip the wings off flies or stick a lit firecracker into the mouth of your neighbor’s cat.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It sounds so goddamned quaint now, doesn’t it?

In a bit…

–tf