“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.” – Emma Lazarus.
“A nice piece of brass.” – Donald Trump.
Understand: That first depiction of the Statue of Liberty is for real; the other is only an attempt to track the gerbils churning in one man’s mind.
The first words are lesser-known from the poem that included, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”
They’re just words, of course — and so dismissed by clinically bizarre Trump adviser Stephen Miller at a press conference.
Miller, not even fit to preside over a high school key club, nonetheless lectured the Capitol press that Lazarus’ passage was an add-on to the factory model. So disregard.
Whatever his brain trust might think of Lady Liberty, Trump’s actions have sapped her of her might, her light – at least until we elect someone else as her steward.
Of late, we’ve had the horror of children’s pleading for their parents from behind chain-link.
Then we had a one-vote majority in the Supreme Court ruling a travel ban spun of pure racism is within Trump’s power.
Curious: The ruling five called the policy race-neutral, ignoring such hints as, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” from Trump on the campaign trail.
However, when the same court ruled that the Colorado Commission on Civil Rights was wrong to rule against a Denver bake-shop owner for refusing to prepare a cake for a gay couple, it cited the language of commission members which showed “clear and impermissible hostility” to people who use their religion to justify said discrimination.
Curious.
OK. Those rulings are behind us, with discrimination the winner.
So, Time magazine asks, have matters like these come to define us as a nation? “The story we tell the world is the story we tell ourselves,” writes Karl Vick.
What are the American people saying? The fact is that poll after poll shows most of us do not agree with most of what Trump is doing.
As the president is putting the clamps on immigration, a new poll by the Los Angeles Times finds “support for tighter immigration has steadily declined” to only 25 percent.
When Gallup asked Americans last week if more immigration is a good thing for the country, 75 percent said “yes,” the highest number Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 2001.
And while polls had shown a “Trump effect” building antipathy toward Muslims in general (what a legacy, Mr. President), 66 percent of Americans polled by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding agreed with the statement that negative statements by politicians about Muslims are “harmful to our country.”
It is significant, indeed, that in writing the majority for the court that deemed the travel ban legal, Justice Anthony Kennedy had some words that analysts judged to be a scolding of the president.
Kennedy wrote that Trump’s job is to adhere not just to the letter of the law – that equal treatment stuff in the Bill of Rights — but to also its “meaning and promise.”
He wrote, “An anxious world must know that our government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.”
Extending outward, like a lamp held out over the ocean’s waves.
By the way, the Statue of Liberty isn’t made of brass but copper, 62,000 pounds, which if sold as scrap could fetch a pretty penny on the international market.
Russell Nelson (@touch128) says
Yes I always thought we were better than this. Yes the blue collar workers did think that immigrants came here to take work from them and cause lower pay, I was one of them. 58 years as a blue collar Union worker. Then I finally woke up. No those people were NOT the ones that were driving down wages at all. There were never enough of them to do that. IT WAS THE crazy blue collar workers, in the right to work for less states. They were the ones that were costing millions of good hard working American Union workers to start the downward trend in wages. NOT the emigrants at all. Fro the most part they were good people that wanted to escape poverty and corruption and wars. Can you blame them? I think most Americans understand this. Nationalism has been around since man first set foot on this earth. In the long run it never worked and manny millions had to die. America has for the most part stayed away from this cancer. It has been very stable democracy except for a short time when we all woke up and saw slavery for what it was. It was a form of nationalism. Vote this terrible thing out of our country come November. You will feel better about yourself.
Russ
John Mcgee says
It is absolutely horrible that our so-called president, our GRIFTER IN CHIEF AND HIS CABINET OF DEPLORABLE GRIFTERS PLUS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, would take it upon themselves to juice up their deplorable base by demonizing immigrants. They seem to ignore what the Statue of Liberty stands for that we are a nation of liberty, freedom and welcoming immigrants all over the world who yearn to be free and practice whatever religion they want without being harassed by others.
When they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim they have the right to deny birth control to their employees by claiming it goes against their religious freedom, it has opened the floodgates for others to claim religious freedom so they now have a right to discriminate against anyone they want especially the LGBT community and claim it is their religious right to discriminated!
And now with the Russia investigation, the complicit Republicans are standing by and watching their nominee for President collude and conspire with Russia, a foreign entity, to unlawfully become president even though Hillary had almost 3,000 votes more than him! I truly believe they and Trump are committing TREASON by their inaction to do something even though Mitch McConnell knew in the summer of 2016 that the Russians were tampering with our election but decided to ignore it wanting to get Trump elected so he could rubber-stamp their horrible agenda
Now they refuse to admit that his campaign colluded and conspired with Russia and even though the Senate has determined there was collusion and conspiracy with Russia the house Republicans decided after a short investigation there was not even though they locked the Democrats, the other part of the bi- partisan committee out of the investigation by refusing to interview the witnesses the Democrats had wanted to call.
Now they profess that Trump is innocent of collusion and conspiracy even though they did not follow up on leads to witnesses who could prove otherwise. Now they bend over backwards demanding documents from the DOJ and FBI to prove their theory that this was an unlawful partisan witch hunt to prove Trump was guilty. Now they want to see documents that they could have investigated themselves but chose not to so they can cherry-pick them and pass them on to Trump so they can figure out a way to contradict the facts. The majority of words out of Trumps mouth are lies so how can we believe anything he says?
Now as an additional slap in the immigrants’ faces his administration is going after immigrants in the armed services who had chosen to fight for their adopted country and doing so-called extreme vetting to make sure they are safe to have in the military. President Bush had begun the program allowing immigrants to serve in the armed forces and promised them a pathway to citizenship and President Obama expanded it, now Trump is canceling it and going after immigrants in the armed forces who are undocumented and deporting them. They have even begun pulling many of them out of the armed services with no explanation.
It’s an embarrassment to have a president who has no respect for the rule of law or the office of president, He has ignored all the things that an intelligent president would do by governing by the seat of his pants without any input from those who have much more knowledge than he has!
NOW HE IS LIKE “A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP” DESTROYING ANYTHING HELTER SKELTER NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT IS! HE IS ESPECIALLY TRYING TO DESTROY PRESIDENT OBAMA’S LEGACY REPLACING IT WITH HIS OWN LEGACY AS THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER WHO HAS CREATED CALAMITY NOT ONLY IN THE UNITED STATES BUT ALL OVER THE WORLD! Will he be proud of his legacy of destruction?