The biased hypocrite twist

♫ C’mon baby, let’s do the twist. C’mon baby, the biased hypocrite twist. ♫

 

The “biased hypocrite twist” is the attempt by a guilty party and/or his acolytes to shift the conversation about his guilt to a conversation about the bias and hypocrisy of his accuser. For example:

Mother: “Donald, you created a fake university to steal money from those innocent students.”

Donald: “Where were you when little Timmy took a nickel from your purse? Why didn’t you criticize him? You’re a hypocrite.”

Mother: “But I did criticize him.”

Donald: “And, you’re biased against me.”

Note how Donald uses his claims of bias and hypocrisy to twist the conversation away from his guilt to a conversation about the guilt of his accuser.

Right-wing columnists like the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass and those from Breibart or Fox “News” use this device all the time. The concept is this:

If I can point to anything at all that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton did wrong, this proves Donald Trump is innocent and his critics are biased hypocrites.

Here are excerpts from a recent Kass article:

If there is one thing worse than that photograph of a little Honduran boy breathing through an oxygen mask after being hit with tear gas on our Southern border, it’s this:

Using that image as a sentimental weapon to fend off or obliterate clearheaded immigration policy.

No, Mr. Kass, tear-gassing hundreds of innocent men, women, and children is worse. Your and Trump’s lack of compassion is worse. And as for “clearheaded immigration policy,” kindly explain what Trump’s policy is.

As best as I can discern, the “clearheaded” policy is to exclude everyone from Central and South America, and to enforce that policy by separating thousands of children from their parents and keeping the children in jail. The “clearheaded policy” seems to be to keep as many out as possible, and to make people wait endlessly for a decision about their applications.

That’s a “clearheaded immigration policy”?

But that’s where we are now, aren’t we? The caravan of thousands of Central American migrants is finally at the border. Mexico is keeping them back. The other day, after rocks were thrown at American border officials, several hundred migrants bolted through, trying to illegally rush their way into America, and some were hit with tear gas.

Wrong. The gas was shot illegally into Mexico, not at those who “bolted through.” And “some were hit with tear gas” makes it sound almost accidental, rather than intentional.

The left has no answers to what’s going on along the southern border. Instead, we’re given shrieks of rage at President Donald Trump. They conveniently forget that under President Barack Obama, migrants who tried crashing the border and threatening border officials were hit with chemical agents.

Some journalists conveniently forgot this, or perhaps didn’t even bother to look at what Obama had done.

And there it is: The “biased hypocrite twist.”

So long as Obama did it, then it’s O.K. for Trump to do it. Up ’til now, the right has been telling us that everything Obama did is wrong. Isn’t it ironic how the right wing now has made Obama the example of what to do? 

Now I can’t think of any responsible person who likes the idea of children suffering. I don’t think you like it either. Parents brought the little ones into that chaos on the border. I wouldn’t have done it, and perhaps you wouldn’t subject your children to that danger. Yet still, it tears at the heart to see it.

And what would you have done, Mr. Kass? Would you have stayed in your failing nation, and doomed your children to lifetime victims of crime and misery? Or would you have tried to escape to where your children could have better, safer, more productive lives?

And if Trump doesn’t like the idea of children suffering, why does he separate them from their parents, put them in a huge jail, and keep them there for months?

Is there anything wrong with mandating that immigrants legally apply for asylum rather than break into the U.S. and fade into America? I happen to think that’s fair, and it’s legal.

Nothing is wrong with mandating they legally apply,  except Trump has rigged the system so that waiting times are not in the days, weeks, or even months, but years. It is a system rigged to exclude. A fake system.

Yet where are the liberal Democratic solutions to address those in the migrant caravans determined to push illegally across the borders?

How about processing them faster. That would be fairer, cheaper, and easier than sending thousands of troops to the border, firing tear gas across the border, separating children from their parents and doing everything possible to exclude everyone with brown skin?

Political asylum is reserved under law for those who are threatened or attacked because of who or what they are. Asylum doesn’t apply to the majority who’d like to come here for better paying jobs and social welfare benefits.

The Trump/Kass solution is to exclude everyone and to torture children and their parents.

What we have in place of Democratic policy is a steady stream of wailing, anger and virtue signaling. 

Yes, the stone hearts of the right wing wail and anger only when the white rich have to pay more taxes.

Remember that for several weeks leading up to the midterm elections, as the migrant caravan formed in Central America and made its way north, Trump, in his typically heavy-handed and overstated Trumpian fashion, kept loudly insisting that the caravan was a danger, replete with “criminals” and “Middle Easterners.”

Are there “Middle Easterners” among them? It sounds far-fetched. Are they all “criminals”? No. Some are thugs, but many want a better life.

“Heavy-handed, overstated, far-fetched, not criminals” — yet Kass defends it.

The Democratic response to the caravan as it trudged north was also cynical. Democratic politicians insist they’re not for open borders, but they don’t support strict border enforcement. Theirs is a let-them-in-and-sort-it-out-later approach. This is a de facto open borders policy.

No, there is a “follow-existing-law-and-process-the-applicants-faster” policy. It is Trump who has instituted a cruel, mindless, “heavy-handed and overstated” policy — an unAmerican policy. 

And just weeks ago, those who dared suggest that a country should have secure borders were subject to media shaming. Caravan? What caravan? They’re just women and tiny children in strollers. How dare you say otherwise?

But that wasn’t true either, was it? You read the pundits, you heard the snickers over the radio, and saw the smirks on TV. Americans got the point: Shut up about securing your own borders or be shamed.

And that’s not sound policy, either, is it?

And in typical right-wing, Kass-speak, it isn’t honest either, is it? We can have secure borders, while showing compassion and allowing entrance by valuable contributors to America.  Those are the people who built America.

Immigrants are the real people who “made America great,” not the criminal phonies like Trump and the Trumpian apologists like Kass.

History will remember you, Mr. Kass, as one of those who supported the Trump lies and insanity. Your legacy is well-established.

Now, tell me again how it’s O.K. for Trump to do anything so long as Obama did something even vaguely similar — but Obama was a bad President.

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell