To Fascists Everything is a Nail

All you need is a hammer...

From a Google Image Search - NBC News

There are reasons that people are protesting ICE activities, use of the National Guard against peaceful demonstrations, and using warriors against citizens. There are also reasons that other Americans may have found it a bit overwhelming that so many immigrants were pouring across our Southern border. Everyone may have understood that our immigration courts, which decide about whether someone needs asylum or not, are unable to handle the number of people who want to be granted refugee status and a right to work in America.

However, we did not all necessarily believe that hundreds of criminals, gang members, and drug dealers were "invading" our nation We also realized that data did not exist to accurately classify or track immigrants arriving at our borders.

Republicans blame Democrats for allowing too many undocumented (or, in their words, illegal) citizens of other nations to flood the border. Democrats do accept that some immigrants have good reasons to flee changing environmental conditions, cruel governments, or a lack of jobs and that they come to America to make a better life. Republicans have pushed to close borders and stop all immigrants from entering the US. Democrats are still on the page that honors what it says on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Republicans have used jealousy and fear to incite less than half of the nation to express vehement anger that Democrats have undermined Republicans efforts to end the flow of undocumented humans across the border. They told their listeners that their taxes dollars were being used to give immigrants housing, food, cars, health care, and schooling. Americans, who had seen their own fortunes wane, were not feeling generous. Republicans also insisted that these immigrants were criminals escaping the law by fleeing their countries of origin and were coming to exploit us. ("Invade" us.)

Americans were thus primed to favor shutting down all immigration by building "a big, beautiful wall, although Democrats, Republicans and Trump knew that our Southern border is long and that there are geographical challenges to building such a barrier.

Trump, who wants to be a big, beautiful hammer, sees everything as a nail. He has no delicacy, no finesse, no patience with getting down in the weeds to collect proper data. He is not a bureaucrat. He does not surround himself with bureaucrats. He's a hammer.

Trump's strategies remind me of the Purdue Chicken commercial where the narrator says you can't treat every problem with antibiotics, as a woman with a smoking engine throws pills at the hot metal.

Perhaps we wouldn't mind enforcing our immigration laws if someone did their due diligence and checked on the stories of those being targeted. Perhaps we don't like that that we went right to Gestapo tactics with no foreplay. Trump knows that we don't use our armed forces domestically. He knows he does not command the National Guards of individual states. He thinks brutality is strength. However, to resort to violence without adequate provocation is weakness. He thinks of using fear as his weapon of choice, regardless of who he thinks is defying his authority.

Homan's absolute loyalty to Trump and his rather bestial approach to law enforcement doesn't make deportation a simple matter of law, which might be acceptable. Kristi Noem's delight in cosplaying a female warrior who will brook no defiance angers us rather than convincing us that deportations are being approached with some kind of objectivity. Threatening to place California under military law because you don't like the governor is something that is not allowed in any US Constitution that we ever read.

Everything is not a nail, but our hammer-in-chief wants to do his "Me Hulk" thing and pound Democrats into oblivion. You can't solve a complex equation, one with many variables, with bluster, muscle, and brute force. Perhaps the problem is not so much what is being done, but how it is being done.

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