¡Fuera de acá, todos!

The Washington Post reports a rather disturbing meeting between the director of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus:

"Trump, Sessions and Kelly want to take 800,000 DREAMers with DACA and hundreds of thousands with TPS who are registered with the government and in compliance with the law and make them into criminals, felons, and deportees in the next few months."

We've been over this before and you know my position. But here's another thing to think about;

How, physically, do you DO all this?

I mean...almost a million people? Rounded up, "processed", shoved on planes and buses and dumped in airports and border towns across Latin America and, presumably, the world?

The sheer number of military/"law enforcement" bodies alone you'd need to do all this are just staggering. This is the sort of thing that changes entire organizations. Hell, it would change the entire country.

And...what do those bodies do once all these scary, dangerous "aliens" are gone?

Think about that for a moment.

So not only will the "...promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals..." it will also include tens of thousands of armed paramilitary troopers with time and weapons on their hands and nothing else to do.

Hmmm.

I wonder how THAT could go wrong..?

The NORK Nukes - 2017 International Tour!

In what may well be the most NORK-y Fourth of July fireworks display ever, the Pyongyang regime appears to have successfully tested a nuclear-capable missile with the range to reach the western portions of North America; by definition an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The linked article does a good job discussing the strategic implications of this success, but the tl:dr version is "there are no good military options".

Simply put, the DPRK appears to have obtained what Stalin's Soviet Union did in the 1940s; a successful defense against U.S. military strongarming. Never a particularly good idea, given the NORK capabilities for inflicting nasty mayhem to American-aligned nations in northeast Asia, if the NORKs have the capability to directly threaten the U.S. mainland this option goes from "barely conceivable" to "off the table".

What's more, the strategic calculus of potentially-holding-U.S.-population-centers-hostage changes the relationship between the U.S. and Asian allies such as Japan and South Korea. If Trump wanted the Japanese government to start building its own nukes Pyongyang may well have given it the same push that the Soviets gave the British and French governments during the Cold War - the worry that the Land of the Big PX would be hesitant to risk its own civilians in the face of a possible nuclear exchange.

Where does the Tangerine Toddler fit into all this? Swinging the Big Stupid bat, of course. The King of the Deal is discovering what diplomats and potentates throughout history have discovered, albeit at his own, short-bus-slow-reader speed; that polities with interests that conflict with your own can't always - and often won't ever - be coaxed, swayed, or bullied into acting against their own interests. China fears a NORK collapse more than anything the U.S. can threaten. Figuring out a way to adjust U.S. geopolitical approaches to the new northeast Asian realities will require a hell of a lot more patience, creativity, and intelligence than either the current Chief Executive - who seems more interested in ginning up a "Blut und Ehre" white nationalist agenda - or his people have shown to date.

Nukes are funny things. Technically they are "weapons of war"...but they work well only as potential, not kinetic, energy. When the first nuke is thrown at a nuclear-armed adversary they have effectively lost much of their usefulness. If war is the "continuation of politics by other means" the problem with nuclear war is that, unlike politics, there is no real way to plan or predict or strategize what happens after the fallout settles. A single warhead getting through to a single city will mean that even the "winner" will suffer. There is little consolation for the "winning" public knowing that the northern portion of the Korean peninsula is a glassy wasteland.

Maintaining the nuclear balance was a difficult task for U.S. leaders like Truman and Eisenhower. What happens when the launch codes are clutched in the stubby fingers of a man whose primary education in conflict was as a WWF wrestling heel is something that I'm not sure I want to find out.

Enemies

A friend of mine (hi, mike!) posted something to his Facebook feed the other day about having turned on Joe Scarborough's Morning Joe after His Fraudulency had launched an attack-tweet on Joe and his co-host/paramour Mika, but that the content of the radical reactionary glurgefest was so vile that he lasted no more than a quarter-hour or less before having to kill the video feed.

I commented that this was a lesson, should we need it, that despite the saying the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend.

At which point I stopped, with my hands poised over the keyboard.

Enemy.

Enemy?

This..?

...is my "enemy"?

Which got me thinking further. This woman is an American citizen. A "fellow American". She is, so far as I can tell, patriotic and honorable by her own lights. Presumably a decent loving daughter, wife, and mother. A hard-working journalist.

How could she, or Scarborough...or Mitch McConnell, or Paul Ryan, or Newt Gingrich, or Donald Trump, for that matter, be "enemies". They're all "fellow Americans". All, presumably, patriotic, hard-working, (okay, maybe not Trump...) decent, loving, (okay, maybe not Trump again...) citizens of my country.

And then I thought about the definition of the word "enemy";

1.1 A person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something.
‘the traditional enemies of his tribe’
‘Nigel made many enemies’
‘this man was her sworn enemy’

1.2 A thing that harms or weakens something else.
‘routine is the enemy of art’

And then I thought about what sort of things that Ryan and McConnell and Trump are proposing. What sort of things Scarborough and Brzezinski and Limbaugh and Murdoch are supporting.

A return to the economics and social stratification of the Gilded Age?
A place in the public square for theocrats, and racists, and fascists?
More than that; deference and authority for those sorts of traitors to the aspirations of my country?
The return of publicly shameless nepotism and graft to the White House that would have embarassed Warren Harding?



And then I thought: Are those things actively opposed and hostile to everything I believe about my country?

Would those things harm or weaken me, and those who are important to me?

Would they, in my opinion, harm and weaken my country?

Yes.

Therefore, the logical conclusion is that, yes.

These people are my enemies.

And there can be only one way to meet the hostile, harmful designs of one's enemies: