#antiAmerican | #WhatTheyVotedFor
Joe Conason asks the obvious question:
What if the purpose of the Trump administration’s travel ban is not to protect America from terrorist infiltration, as the president and his top advisers insist? What if the true aim of their anti-Muslim rhetoric, articulated over and over again, is actually to offend Muslims—and intensify their alienation from the West?
The big variable here is why. That part makes no sense.
Then again, why should it? Truth is stranger than fiction, and at some point axiomatic reminders become tiresome. Consider the idea that we might refuse a notion because it seems undignified; Conason’s question essentially proposes that President Trump and his closest White House cohort openly schemes against the wellbeing of the nation. And quite frankly, countenancing the GOP has felt this way, to some degree, for years: It seems rather quite obvious what they’re doing, except, well, it’s really, really unkind to talk about other people that way.
This is the difference ‘twixt acknowledging human frailty or calculating and laboring to exploit it. And this is a metatwist: That applies to the rest of us, too. At some point, we need the courage to acknowledge that this is really happening; the best explanations for why the Trump administration behaves as it does function outside any conventional ranges of acceptable discourse or even commmon decency.
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Image note: Detail of cartoon by Matt Bors, 9 February 2017.
Conason, Joe. “Intolerant War Mongering: Why Trump (and Bannon) Mirror ISIS”. AlterNet. 11 March 2017.
This Is 