Godwin's Law?

     You're Goddamned right I'm going there. Here's why:
     The man who's allowed to employ his criminal daughter in the White House has, with the collusion of his embattled Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, stolen 2000 children or more from migrant families in just six weeks. That comes out to nearly 50 a day.
     If 50 white children of respectable (or outwardly respectable) conservative families were abducted on a daily basis for a month and a half, there would be a hue and a cry on Fox "News" and perhaps all the other dinosaur networks. Right wing bloggers would be foaming at the mouth and the Weekly Standard, National Review, Breitbart, Twitchy and Pajamas Media would be calling for Trump's head.
     But they're not. Because these are just brown kids whose parents are just seeking asylum. And you have to ask yourself:
     Considering that the United States is rapidly turning into a dystopian, fascist nightmare you used to see in B sci fi movies in the 80s and 90s, how bad does it have to be in Honduras, Guatemala and other strife-torn nations that even this fever dream of a country still looks better. What the hell is going on in central America?
     And what the hell is going on here? The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, the place that piously says,
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."?
     Technically, Emma Lazarus' poem isn't a good one but it's a great one given what it had represented for countless tens of millions of immigrants that have come here since the 19th century. In its slightly anachronistic way, it perfectly sums up America's professed attitude toward immigrants sailing to America in that ageless, universal quest for a better life.
     Obviously, it's impossible to visualize an America without immigrant labor and innovation. And anyone who disagrees is a delusional ignoramus.
     It's unforgivably barbaric and fascistic what we're doing to families who both cross the border without visas and especially those who surrender themselves to Border Patrol agents when they're just seeking asylum. And the right wing's response to this travesty as it gains more and more traction in the media is at least as horrid.
     Simultaneously, Republicans like Jeff Sessions and even Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders justified it with a Bible verse beloved of Nazis and slavery proponents. Then, when that didn't look as if it was going to fly, the Trump administration admitted it was a horrible idea then blamed Democrats for the forced separations.
     Let us be very, very clear about this: This was not an initiative of the Democrats but Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. John Kelly defended it then shrugged his shoulders when reminded that the US government had admitted to losing 1475 of these kids. "Morally, we're not responsible for finding them."
     Then morally, we never should have taken them in the first place. Whether they're fleeing the paramilitary death squads in Honduras or the drug cartels in Mexico, these people have the right to seek asylum for a better, safer life for them and their families. They're entitled to such no less so than Kelly's or Trump's ancestors.

     Instead, this is what these children see: More of the same, essentially the same type of men they flee. The Mexican drug cartels kidnap children for a monetary motive. The United States apparently has none save for sadism and spite. The paramilitary death squads in Honduras have an agenda, rancid as it is. When we kill people such as Claudia Gonzalez, a 20 year-old Guatemalan girl who merely wanted a job in forensic accounting, we kill them out of frenzied paranoia.
     We are officially no better than the hell holes from which these people are trying to escape.
     We now have 100 child detention facilities all across the nation. The people of San Diego, California's most right wing city by far, recently held a demonstration protesting these wanton kidnappings. One of them didn't even know until recently that one of these detention centers that ICE refuses to call detention centers was just a few miniute's walk from his house. In Brownsville, Texas, 1500 children are being imprisoned in a former Walmart, where, when Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon tried to gain admittance, the guards called the police on him.
     On the rare occasions they allow the press in, they are not allowed to take pictures or talk to the child prisoners. Why? What are they hiding? Why do they require 24 hour's notice before letting in the media?
     And, save for blaming the Democrats or blathering Biblical platitudes telling us we need to obey a government that "God ordained", the Republicans are silent. If there was any one thing those hypocritical right wing cunts would never waver on, it would be "family values." But obviously when they mean family values, they mean respectable, white middle class or wealthy families, not the huddled masses who, against rhyme or reason, still come to our southern border.
     Federal agents even lie to these people as they kidnap their children and tell them, "We're giving them a bath." Anyone who knows a blessed thing about the Nazi death camps knows that's exactly the line the Nazis used before herding Jews and other undesirables into large concrete buildings before dropping the Zyklon B. Now we're hearing news reports that somehow these kids are fleeing some of these detention centers and are even trying to kill themselves. At least one parent already has.

     When General Patton's 3rd Army liberated one such Nazi death camp (Buchenwald), he forced the neighboring villagers with armed escorts to tour the facility, to bring home what the Nazis did in their names. What Patton saw on April 11, 1945 actually made him vomit. They told Jew and Gentile alike they were being merely relocated. At Nuremberg the following year, the German and Polish people learned the full scope of the horror that was going on right next to them. They learned the full scope of the Nazis' lies.
     And now, 72 years later, we're doing much the same thing to people our Germanic strongman had fingered as undesirables the very day he announced his candidacy three years ago yesterday. We are separating families by force just as they had at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald and lying about what the detention facilities really are, about whose idea it is. These are horrible, craven people who lack the moral courage to even own up to their immorality.
     And perhaps some day we'll also be forced to tour these facilities posing as mere detention centers to which now very, very few people have access. But what will happen between now and then? And will we as a nation have the moral fiber to stand up to this humanitarian crisis and take steps to ensure it never happens again?