Opinion | How Low Can Republicans Go? - The New York Times
But the contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”
The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.
He injected obscenities into The New York Times's White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.
The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.
Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.
His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.
In some ways, it's easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.
In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American "values" are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. "I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1," he replied, "and I said, why don't I just keep the same thing going?"
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he's indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be "problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before. I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it."
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there's something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha's Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha's Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris's home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, "on this little island."
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people's misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don't want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The argument that migrants coming across the border have a more severe impact on border states is obviously valid. You can't have a nearly unchecked flood of people coming in — an average of 8,500 a day, according to Axios.
It is also a valid criticism that Democrats — both in the White House and Congress — are going out of their way to avoid what they see as a third rail with progressives. The border is just the tip of the spear. Democrats are too afraid of angering the base to bear down and overhaul the system, including tackling the backlog of court cases and fixing how those cases are adjudicated.
President Biden ignores the border, giving it to Kamala Harris to get under control. We all know that's not happening. Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham who once tried to work on solutions have now just degenerated into using the border issue to bash Democrats as flaccid.
But the contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they're being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who "made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as 'criminals' and 'rapists' during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower."
The callousness of DeSantis's manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
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There is no bottom to how low the GOP can go.
Their already in need of a periscope, just to get a look not of the interior of Trump's rectum, butt, what did we actually expect of em....
to play nice, like a girl spice with a nice rack of ribs plucked from adams now five PAC rack on an early eve, till she was late, after just one date, raisin the question that exclaims a point, not followed by , a point, pointing to the GOP being as far & low as i can't see, as they wade into the murky waters broken, in a boat, without an oar to tow and roe against the current waded into, asz up shitz creak without a paddle, oare, any clue about how to undo what they thermselves did do, asz inn a tempting to dictate procreation in our once 'free' Nation, with many echoing the Special Ed Cult Liter, that our quartz can't seem to control, due to his reverent following being too , dense , to admit their mistake, so fckn A IMMENSE ! Asz the bedrock of our Nation has been fractured like a compound bow tie fracture wearing thin on microscopically thin skin, inn the game, they are causing , ALL of US, to lose, and lose we have as led to be bled, out"right" WRONG by conspirators desecrating an idea that so many, gave so much to, in their accomplished, attempt at creating a "more perfect union" that divides further daily, via Q tips from Dons' subliminal, as in criminal, enterprize that a spooky Spock might mock, as "illogical". as its' present path persists to impale our priorities that plunge deep into depths we've not a precedent, as our trajectory path could possibly be followed by a Wrath, of a different Kahn
i spent $6 on a hard copy bout 2 hours ago, cause the headline caught my eye. For me, an accurate depiction in our world unfortunately not of fiction
Sorry pal....the sins of the hypocritical Democrats are being exposed for all the world to see. The voters are going to punish them severely..
Until Democrats and leftists get Brandon to do his fucking job and close the border and enforce our immigration laws they can all STFU and go away.
No one cares that these leftist elitist racists are bitching about dealing with just a small portion of the illegal immigrants coming into this country. Their virtue signaling is being exposed for the whole world to see.
Human trafficking? Democrats encourage that by their wide open southern border. What happens to girls and women coming across it is the real human trafficking. Democrats and leftists don't say boo about it.
This is the real reality of our wide open southern border. Not some butt sore leftist upset that the virtue signaling elitists at Martha's Vineyard were outed for being the racists they really are.
51 immigrants die in truck, lured to America by Biden's lack of enforcement and the lure of sanctuary cities and Democrats are silent.
50 immigrants volunteer to go to a supposed sanctuary at Martha's Vineyard, and rich white liberals like Maureen Dowd issue a declaration of a humanitarian crises, call in the national guard, and bus them off their protected island within a handful of hours.
So much for their "warm welcome" somebody claimed here on NT.
I guess white liberals DON'T accept everybody as they claim.
Homeland Security estimates that around 750 migrants have died along the southern border during this year to date. Guess that number isn't large enough for Dems to consider it a crises.
Kind of weird considering that a mere 50 immigrants managed to throw them into fits of anger.
Apparently, live ones can be more of a hassle than dead ones.
One must admire the alacrity that Martha's Vineyard got them off the island with.
Maybe Joe and Kamala could take some lessons from Martha's Vineyard??
"50 immigrants volunteer to go to a supposed sanctuary"
So you just make this up as you go along?
Like everything else in that statement?
It does seem that there is an actual crime that took place here when people were given pamphlets filled with lies in order to get them onto a bus headed for a destination hundreds, or thousands of miles away.
Martha’s Vineyard Migrants Were Handed Brochure Filled With Lies About ‘Benefits’
I am reminded of how Jews in WWII were told that they were headed to work camps when they were in fact headed to death camps.
There are some people who would object to bringing the discussion of Nazis into this topic so quickly but once you start loading people th at you hate onto buses in order to subject them to misery you are walking down a path that has been well traveled before.
An asylum seeker in a New York City shelter has already committed suicide:
Mayor Adams' Statement on Tragic Death of Asylum Seeker Yesterday
Only a monster could think any of this is funny.
What crime would they be charged with?
This is arguably burying the lede:
At least this author is willing to acknowledge that there is a valid set of complaints driving the busing of migrants. On the other hand, it’s buried near the end of the article and absent from the headline.
Wait a second. So, the argument here is that life in New York or Massachusetts is somehow “worse” than life in southwest Texas? These people may not have known that they were specifically going to Martha’s Vineyard or Kamala Harris’ house, but I’m betting they still probably think their situation is improved from the desert border zone.
You want to talk about political disingenuousness? You want to talk about straight up bullshit? Claiming these people are worse off - or that moving people out of the desert and into New York or Massachusetts is somehow cruel - is a shining example.
That was one of the reasons I chose to post this particular opinion piece.
Although I check most of the boxes for being a bleeding heart liberal there is no part of me that thinks 8500 border crossings per day is a sustainable situation. Nor do I think the financial and other burdens of the crisis should be borne by border states while being swept under the carpet and otherwise avoided instead of dealt with.
A broken immigration and refugee system is doing none of us any good, particularly the economy. This high inflation we are seeing is in no small part being driven by a labor shortage of exactly the kind of labor demands that immigrants often fill: jobs Americans don't want to fill.
Domestic oil production has a labor shortage. Agribusiness has a labor shortage.Retail and restaurants have labor shortages. A lot of the labor shortage could be filled with immigrant labor.
The sad thing about busing or flying immigrants to a place like New York as a sort of practical joke is that if we had a national solution in place New York would be more than happy to take in its share of asylum seekers.
And it is not just a national solution we need. We need a solution involving our entire hemisphere.
This is not something that is impossible to do. We already meddle in the politics and governments of every nation in our hemisphere. We need to make this issue a priority like we have already made trade a priority.
Shipping illegal immigrants to Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, and Martha's Vineyard makes life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position? Why would shipping illegal immigrants, who voluntarily entered the United States illegally, dread being sent to Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, and Martha's Vineyard? Why would illegal immigrants feel they have been mistreated by being sent to these cities?
The political message that has been adopted by liberals really does suggest that these cities are bigger shitholes than Texas. Shipping illegal immigrants to these cities is inhumane, after all. Kinda illustrates the problem of people having two left feet. They can't walk the talk.