Donald Trump Shows Why He’s Unfit for Office (Again)

Like millions of other Americans, Curmie learned this morning of the horrific, presumably terroristic, attack in New Orleans.  Obviously, we all grieve for the casualties and sympathize with their loved ones.  As this essay is being written, there are still lots of unanswered questions, but we do know some things with reasonable certainty.

Gentle Reader, you will notice the modifiers in the previous paragraph: “presumably,” “some,” “reasonable.”  Those words are there because Curmie really doesn’t want to claim as fact something that isn’t true.  If only the President-elect would be as honest circumspect… but then, he never was.

True, no intelligent person believes that Donald Trump is anything but a narcissistic, mendacious, blowhard.  His post on the ironically titled Truth Social is presented here in what Curmie presumes to be its entirety (you didn’t think I’d visit that site to check, did you, Gentle Reader?):

When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!

The first thing to notice is that whereas any normal person would lead with his sympathy for the victims, Trump always opens with political posturing; basic humanity is an afterthought, if it shows up at all.  Even if the conjecture about “criminals coming in” were accurate, the statement would mark Trump as an absolute asshole.  But we knew that, of course.  What we didn’t know but certainly should have suspected as a possibility is the fact that Trump’s bluster was 100% wrong on the facts… and that the so-called leftist media scrupulously avoided highlighting his bullshit. 

Yes, Newsweek does mention in paragraph five (!) that the suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born American citizen.  Oh, and he was apparently a US Army vet.  Ah, but the headline proclaims only that “Donald Trump Says New Orleans Terror Attack Proves He Was Right.”  Anyone not reading past the first two sub-heads might be led to believe that Trump was spewing something other than his usual brand of xenophobic drivel.  Well, anyone who has been asleep for the last dozen years or so might be so tempted.  Those of us branded as “Trump deranged” by the MAGA apologists, of course, knew better were prepared to disbelieve a serial prevaricator.

To be fair, The New York Times did (finally) headline their story as “Trump Falsely Suggested New Orleans Suspect Was an Immigrant.”  Of course, the MAGA crowd wouldn’t believe the NYT if they said NBA centers are tall.  But you can bet the ranch that the truth that Donald Trump yet again made a false allegation will be ignored by most and dismissed as either leftie propaganda or irrelevant by most of the rest.  Curmie, unlike Trump, doesn’t claim to be the sole source of truth, but he’s right about this one.

The discussion will (and should) focus on what could have been done differently and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.  The answer isn’t easy.  Better training for cops: needed, but not enough.  Stricter gun laws, even if none of the deaths were caused by shooting (the two wounded cops definitely were): useful, but not enough.  And no, smug asshole right-winger, no one is calling for tighter restrictions on rental trucks.  We need to recognize that we can’t solve every problem without creating worse ones, but we damned well better do a little creative thinking.

One side note: Curmie and Beloved Spouse are grateful for a friend who asked us to look after her cats while she spent the holidays in Maine with her partner.  We otherwise might well have tried to head to NOLA for New Year’s… and our go-to hotel is about 20 yards from where that truck crashed.  It was almost certainly one of the hotels evacuated by authorities.  Curmie is fine with missing that particular bit of excitement.

 

Observations on the Violence in Dublin

As those who know me personally know, Curmie has spent about four months in Ireland, mostly in Dublin.  I’ve led seven Study Abroad programs there and led walking tours from O’Connell Bridge in the center of the city up to Parnell Square, a kilometer or so to the north.  I’ve spent dozens of hours in that area—at the Gate Theatre, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Garden of Remembrance, the (alas, now defunct) Dublin Writers Museum.  The last time I was in Dublin, on a whirlwind research visit in 2019, I stayed at a b&b a few blocks east of Parnell Square.  It was a long walk to the National Library south of the Liffey, but finances dictated that necessity.

One of the first things I saw on my Facebook feed this morning was a statement from the Abbey Theatre, which is a couple blocks east and a block north of O’Connell Bridge.  It said they were “thinking of all of [their] neighbours in Dublin 1,” but that the evening’s performance of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow would go on as scheduled.  I wondered what happened in Dublin 1, went to the Google machine, and encountered a headline in the Irish Times saying that Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar had estimated “tens of millions” of Euro in damages caused by riots that started in the Parnell Square area and moved south as far as the area around O’Connell Bridge. “Whaaaaaat?  Riots in Dublin?  That hasn’t happened in decades.  Surely there’s some mistake,” I thought.  Alas, no.

In the early afternoon Dublin time Thursday, moments after the Macy’s parade was starting in New York, four people, including three small children, were injured in a knife attack outside the Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire, a primary school across the street from the Garden of Remembrance.  As of this writing (Friday evening in the US), one little girl and the childcare worker (it’s unclear whether she’s a teacher or other staffer) who launched herself between the attacker and the children remain in critical condition; the girl is said to be “fighting for her life.”  The only good news is that the perpetrator seems to have been acting alone.

This story is horrible enough.  But somehow this attack led to riots, with bus drivers pulled from their vehicles, petrol bombs thrown at refugee centers, public transport vehicles set alight, looting of over a dozen stores, and multiple injuries to gardaí (police).  The facts—or, rather, the closest we can come to facts—enumerated here are drawn from a variety of sources: the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Irish Mirror, RTE, ITV, the BBC, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.  I’m not going to bother to try to link every statement to a specific source: this is a blog piece, not an academic article.  You can, as they say, do your own research, Gentle Reader.

The principal rioters were young—in their late teens or twenties—but they seem to have been egged on by folks of an older generation.  Hundreds of people were involved in the violence.  As I write this, arrests from the riots number in the 30s; “many more” are promised after the authorities examine CCTV footage.  Curmie is no fan of the level of government surveillance that is common in Ireland and the UK, but if regular people have to put up with Big Brother, then at least that technology can be used to arrest and convict every one of these assholes.

If government sources are correct, the riots were a coordinated effort by what Garda (Police) Commissioner Drew Harris describes as a “complete lunatic faction driven by far-right ideology.” Varadkar added, “These criminals did not do what they did because they love Ireland. They did not do what they did because they wanted to protect Irish people. They did not do it out of any sense of patriotism, however warped.  They did so because they’re filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos and they love causing pain to others.”

Whether or not these characterizations are accurate, and indeed whether or not this kind of violence was predictable, as opposition pols have suggested, there does appear to be ample evidence that the riots can be traced to anti-immigrant animosity.

Posts on social media identified the perpetrator of the knife attack as an immigrant, and that was enough to enflame the loonies.  Trouble is, the assailant was an Irish citizen, albeit foreign-born.  He’d lived in the country for twenty years.  Oops! 

You know who really is a migrant?  The guy who stopped the knife-wielding attacker.  BIG OOPS!  Deliveroo is an Irish equivalent of DoorDash or Uber Eats.  One of their delivery drivers is a man named Caio Benicio.  He’d been in Ireland for only a year or so, trying to make some money to send home to Brazil, where his restaurant had burned to the ground.

He was riding his motor scooter past the area, saw the knife and the threat to children, and went into action.  He says he didn’t have time to be afraid; he just responded to what he saw.  He stopped his bike and ran towards the scene while removing his helmet, with which he proceeded to clobber the assailant over the head, knocking him to the ground.  Others grabbed the knife and restrained the perp.

(Side note: there’s a GoFundMe appeal called “Buy Caio Benicio a Pint.”  Folks are encouraged to donate the cost of a pint of beer at their local pub to Mr. Benicio.  At the time of this writing, the pot now stands at over €300,000, or over $330,000.  It would take a lot of overtime at Deliveroo and some very generous tips to make that kind of money.  Mr. Benicio doesn’t see himself as a hero, just someone in the right place at the right time: another reason I don’t begrudge him a penny of that GoFundMe haul.  I just wish the woman who was seriously injured while protecting her young charges would receive similar assistance.)

Of course, the riots were spawned by people believing what they saw on social media, an even riskier proposition than trusting journalists.  The temptation to indulge in a little confirmation bias borders on the overwhelming.  But that’s only part of the problem.

Back in the Dark Ages when I started college as an undergraduate Government major, one of the distinctions made between traditional liberalism and traditional conservatism was that the former looked for trends involving groups of people (sexes, races, religions, etc.) and the latter centered on the individual.  There are appeals to both points of view: the former stands more explicitly against racism, sexism, and the like; the latter points out that this particular person of a “privileged” class isn’t necessarily an oppressor and that particular person from a “disenfranchised” class isn’t necessarily a victim.  (Oprah Winfrey is actually a little less oppressed than the average white male Walmart employee.)

But I become increasingly convinced of the wisdom of the horseshoe theory’s suggestion that the far left and the far right share an interest in authoritarianism that makes them more similar to each other than to the more libertarian mainstream manifestations of either philosophy.  And that means a tendency to stray from the positive attributes of those political perspectives.  (So says this civil libertarian, at least.)  In this case, it appears that the far right disregarded the individual and classed all “foreigners” as the Other.  (Curmie struggles to resist the urge to say “as usual.”)  And, of course, getting the facts right was of secondary importance, if it mattered at all.

There is plenty of cause for re-evaluating the Irish government’s policies on immigration.  The same could be said for virtually any country, including our own.  Looting department stores and setting fires to police cars would seem a rather counter-productive means of achieving that end, however.

Of course, even if there were a few hundred rioters and even if they were all right-wingers, they still represent a tiny minority of the Dublin population.  The left needs to recognize that “not all conservatives” remains as legitimate an argument as “not all immigrants.”  Who knows?  Maybe they’ll actually understand that.  Just don’t bet the rent.

SCOTUS, the Travel Ban, and the Half-Full Glass

Curmie was not surprised that SCOTUS overturned lower court rulings to support parts of President Trump’s travel ban imposed against citizens of a handful of majority-Muslim countries, but confesses he didn’t expected unanimity. True, The Guardian, a reputable if left-leaning publication, tries to spin the ruling as not really unanimous: it was per curiam, meaning, if Curmie, who is no lawyer, understands the term correctly, that the decision was announced for the court, with no specific author and with the pretense of unanimity: the equivalent of a political convention’s nominating someone “unanimously,” even though everyone knows a sizeable minority of the delegates voted for someone else.

But, let’s face it, it has all the trappings of a unanimous decision, even if not everyone was completely on board (indeed, only three, very predictable, Justices—Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas—were all-in to the point of wanting the entirety of the ban to go into effect immediately). Certainly President Trump, who is nothing if not hubristic, bellowed his presumed overwhelming victory for all to hear.

Curmie thinks the glass is half full.

               

It is unquestionably safe to say that the constitutional arguments will continue until the Court takes up the case again in October—after (ever so conveniently) the 90-day ban on citizens from those half-dozen countries and the 120-day ban on refugees will have already expired. But it may just be that what Curmie has long viewed as an unconstitutional edict is in fact merely ham-fisted (the BBC’s term), stupid, Islamophobic, ill-considered, ineffectual, divisive, discriminatory, and smug.

Let’s start with who’s excluded: citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. And let’s compare that list to the 9/11 attackers, who actually did mean us harm: of those 19 men, 15 were from Saudi Arabia; two others were from the United Arab Emirates, and there were one each from Egypt and Lebanon. Let’s add to the latter list the Boston Marathon bombers: both Kyrgyz, with one also holding Russian citizenship and the other also a naturalized American. Ah, Gentle Reader, you’ve noticed something. The Venn diagram charting those two lists looks like Little Orphan Annie’s eyes: the overlap is precisely zero people. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some folks in, say, Libya who’d be more than happy to blow up a city block in New York City… but there are no doubt a fair number of native-born Americans who’d cheerfully do the same.

You’ll also have noticed, Gentle Reader, that it has now been over 90 days since even the revised version of the original January 27 travel ban was proposed. During that time there have been… wait a minute, that number was just here… where’d it go? Ah, here it is: there have been zero attacks in the US.  Curmie, of course, doesn’t attribute that number to the lack of a travel ban, but feels pretty confident that had the ban been enacted and there had been no pseudo-Islamic terrorist events on American soil, that the White House would have bellowed full-throatedly that their nasty xenophobic stratagem was the difference between peace and ontological annihilation.  [Note: Curmie’s recent trip to the UK was sandwiched between the Manchester bombing and the London Bridge attacks; this essay is not in the slightest intended to suggest that the threat of specifically Muslim violence is anything but real.] 

With the ban now partially lifted, Curmie fervently hopes that we do indeed need to endure the future preening of Chanticleer, who may truly believe that his crowing causes the dawn instead of merely announcing it. But the fact is that the Supreme Court’s partial lifting of the injunction is actually closer to what Curmie was hoping for than to what POTUS wanted. One way to tell that is to note that Mr. Trump declared “a clear victory.” If DJT says it, you can pretty well take it to the bank that it isn’t true.

You see, the key part of what transpired this week wasn’t lifting the injunction that prevented the US government from denying entry to citizens of those half dozen countries who had no demonstrable connection to this country. Rather, it was the explicit insistence that the borders be open to all those “who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”: students attending an American university, foreign nationals offered employment by a US company (or university, etc.), close relatives of American citizens, and so on. This level of sensibility, nuance, and restraint was (of course) altogether lacking in any proposal coming from the Trump administration.

Protestations, such as those from Justice Thomas, that such a criterion is unworkable are largely but not completely without merit. Expecting State Department officials to do their job in vetting prospective visitors to this country doesn’t seem unreasonable. Such a process already took place. One of the exchange students scheduled to be coming to Curmie’s university last fall, for example, couldn’t get a visa. Whether that denial was appropriate isn’t a matter for current concern. What’s relevant is that if that young man could be denied, there’s a mechanism already in place that might result in denial.

There are some anomalies in the SCOTUS decision, however. For example: let’s say that I have a friend of long-standing who happens to be Iranian. That person could not, under this ruling, visit his old pal Curmie while on vacation (we’re friends but not close relatives); if, on the other hand, Curmie convinced his university to invite old buddy Farooq to come give a lecture, well, that might qualify as bona fides… and if Farooq happens to spend a couple of extra days at Chez Curmie, then so be it. But SCOTUS also wants to ensure that the lecturing gig isn’t just an end run around the regulations so that Curmie and Farooq can reminisce. Exactly how that would work logistically is beyond my feeble ken.

So yes, there’s probably both too much and too little wiggle room for US government officials: entry into the country ought not to depend on which clerk reviews a file. Still, shifting the presumption from allowing a national of a country at odds with the US to enter unless there’s a specific reason not to, to denying such access unless there’s a specific reason to allow it… that’s not the end of the world, much as Curmie would have preferred the status ante quo. There’s still the rather perverse choice of targets for the ban—essentially Muslim-majority countries with whom good relations are not perceived by the Trump administration as being of sufficient geo-strategic importance to avoid pissing off potentially radicalized Muslims in those and indeed in other countries. Still, whereas the ban is bad policy, correcting executive branch stupidity that isn’t unconstitutional isn’t in SCOTUS’s brief.

Ultimately, the SCOTUS decision to grant a partial waiver of the injunction and to hear the case more formally in the fall is cowardly but tactically sound, whether or not it’s actually a good idea. Both sides of the case can (and do) claim at least partial victory, and the whole business will, one hopes, be moot by the time the fall session begins. That is, unless the short-term bans are extended, which would not surprise Curmie in the slightest, since those “temporary measures” sure look like the thin edge of the wedge. ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat agrees, fearing the Trump administration will use this week’s order “as a back door into implementing the full-scale Muslim ban that it's been seeking to implement.”

That’s a troubling prospect, but for now, the glass appears half full.

Flying While Islamic Is the New Driving While Black

One of the sadder legacies of 9/11 is the legitimization of cowardice in the name of prudence. True, both political parties are trying to out-macho each other with respect to foreign policy, but when it comes down to real, day-to-day existence, Americans behave like the schoolyard bully confronted with an antagonist who doesn’t just meekly hand over his lunch money.

We’ll drive way too fast for the conditions, even after having one beer too many. We’ll eat crappy “food” with levels of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar so high that just talking about them can cause heart attacks. We’ll swagger around talking about how tough we are because “we” managed to capture or kill the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

But ask us to get on a plane that might also be carrying someone named Mohammed or Abdul, and we’ll cheerfully relinquish all our Constitutional rights and meekly slink into the corner with our proverbial tail between our legs while some idiot with a TSA (which, contrary to popular opinion, does not, in fact, stand for “Terminally Stupid and Arrogant”) badge ostentatiously goes through the motions of “protecting the public.” The agency does this by invading our privacy, fondling us, proclaiming our toothpaste a potential weapon, and generally doing everything possible to instill a feeling of Exceeding Great Trepidation.

Trouble is, it’s all a charade. The system itself acknowledges that all the shoelessness and shampoo confiscations don’t mean anything: what else is a no-fly list, or a random (or not-so-random) search at the gate if not a tacit admission that any serious terrorist with an IQ above room temperature can get past the security screening without breaking a sweat? I’ve been saying this for years, of course. Here’s me in 2005:

The idea that someone who can pass through security can still remain a threat is in fact an admission that the security screenings don't work except as a cosmetic deterrent. It is difficult to go a month without the news that some test of security at some airport has demonstrated conclusively that the average TSA screener lacks the training, the intelligence, or the vigilance to actually thwart a real threat. We'd be better off hiring out of Central Casting: at least they'd look like they might be able to stop a terrorist. Of course, news reports that yet another fake bomb made it through security at a major American airport are slowly gravitating towards the back of the newspaper, because it no longer shocks us that airport security is intrusive and demeaning, but completely ineffective.

But we continue, as a nation, to pretend that the false security offered by TSA is “worth it” somehow. It is not.

Of course, our collective cravenness is really a manifestation of xenophobia more than anything else. Homeland Security and all its various permutations exist for the sole reason of feeding the populace’s quaking terror at The Other. Oh, sure, they’ll annoy the rest of us—virtually anyone who has travelled very much at all will have been subjected to some form of humiliation to distract the agents from what a pathetic job they have re-affirm the security of the nation. But it’s the spectre of actually sharing an airplane with (gasp!) a Muslim that can be counted on to legitimize the most outrageous over-reach of authority.

I remember flying home from a conference in New York several years ago. As it happened, I was seated immediately behind two men who clearly fit the profile of a “terrorist,” at least as conjured up in the fevered imaginings of a TSA agent: young, obviously middle-Eastern, male. One was bearded; the other had a thick mustache. I don’t recall their names, but they were stereotypically Arab: Ali and Farooq, or something like that. They were laughing about the difficulties they’d had in passing through security, based solely on the way they look. And, hearing them speak, I can assure you that the fear and trembling of the security folks was entirely visual: two more readily identifiable New York accents would be difficult to imagine.

But the latest victims of TSA over-reaction weren’t New Yorkers. They were students from the United Arab Emirates who were removed from a Charlotte-to-Washington flight and questioned for nearly five hours, embarrassing them (despite the fact that they had clearly not done anything to deserve this treatment) and—of course—inconveniencing every other passenger on that flight, not to mention the family, friends, and business associates of everyone who should have been in DC in time for dinner but didn’t arrive until close to midnight. And for what?

Well, according to WSOC-TV, U.S. Airways is calling it simply a “security issue” that led to the students’ being led from the plane and all their bags being re-screened. (Again, how about we screen them right the first time?) The story says that “passengers reported they heard the group talking about airplanes and the military while on board. Sources said that's when some passengers reported them.” It’s unclear exactly who initiated the process of removing the UAE students, but it appears to have been the airline, whose employees are perfectly well trained to distribute tiny packets of pretzels, but perhaps not to judge the severity or likelihood of a potential terrorist threat. Forgive me if I don’t choose to live my life based on the prognostications of the most wild-eyed, xenophobic paranoid in the room.

I do understand that a student named Yaqoob Al-Shamsi is probably a higher risk than a grandmother named Cindy Robinson would be. But there are literally hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who pose precisely zero threat. A little acknowledgment of that would not come amiss. What is troubling here is that the Islamophobia of the more ignorant members of society will eventually create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be the lesson of Guantánamo, which has apparently more than once transformed petty nuisances into card-carrying Bad Guys. And if we keep down the present path, the next Hadef Al-Dhaheri won’t simply be upset that “they treated us different than the others”; he’ll want to do something about it. It’s a delicate balancing act, and we need someone with a little more sophistication in charge of the operation.