Recollection Deficiency

Are out memories really that bad?

In a Politico article entitled "Has the Left Lost Its Cool," Marc Caputo and Daniel Lippman begin

Two senior Trump administration officials were heckled at restaurants. A third was denied service. Florida GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi required a police escort away from a movie about Mister Rogers after activists yelled at her in Tampa — where two other Republican lawmakers say they were also politically harassed last week, one of them with her kids in tow.

The Sarah Huckabee Sanders incident at Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia on Friday night has received the most attention. However, also on Friday night, Florida attorney general Pam Bondi was approached at a movie theater and

According to Bondi, she and a friend were confronted at least four times — while buying tickets, entering the theater, standing in line at the concession stand and then on their way out — and that activists were aggressive in each instance, with one yelling so loudly at her that he spit in her hair, either intentionally or because he meant to expectorate on her. She said they also taunted her friend as “blue eyes” and asked him in a threatening manner if he was going to protect her as if they wanted to fight.

The activists tell a different story.

“Pam Bondi’s version of events is inaccurate and don’t reflect what happened,” said Tim Heberlein, Tampa Bay’s regional director for the progressive group Organize Florida. He said he and a handful of fellow activists coincidentally ran into Bondi at the movie.

Heberlein said the videos the group released don’t comport with Bondi’s version of events. Bondi says the reason for that is that the activists only released the videos that showed what happened as they were leaving the movie, when Tampa Police were there and everyone was on their best behavior.

Maybe there is something in the water or air in Pennsylvania, which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and where former Representative Paul Kanjorski- a Democrat- told the Politico authors

the increasingly confrontational politics is counterproductive. In 2010, before he lost his seat to Republican Lou Barletta, Kanjorski cut back on holding town halls, which he used to enjoy, because it just became “cannon fodder” for opponents.

Nowadays, he said, he worries about the signal sent when the president’s spokeswoman is denied service at a restaurant or when the Florida attorney general is chased away from a movie.

“I don’t know why they picked on the attorney general from Florida. I don’t like her or her political positions but she has a right to travel and be around without being harassed,” he said. “We’re limiting real conversation and discussion in this country and it’s a problem.”

"I don't know why they picked on the attorney general from Florida," he says. You might- unlike either Kanjorski or Caputo/Lippman- recall from Trump's "look how corrupt I am, everybody" files:

 * Late August 2013: Bondi reached out to Trump, seeking financial support for her 2014 re-election campaign in Florida.

* Sept. 13, 2013: Bondi’s AG office acknowledged that it was investigating fraud allegations against “Trump University.”

* Sept. 17, 2013: Trump’s charitable foundation, which is legally prohibited from donating to political campaigns, cut a $25,000 check for a group supporting Bondi’s campaign. (The foundation later paid a fine to the IRS for the illegal donation.)

* Oct. 15, 2013: Bondi’s office reversed course and said it wasn’t pursuing allegations made against “Trump University.”

* March 2014: Trump offered Bondi’s re-election campaign a generous deal while renting out his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

 Now the president has extended a new benefit to Bondi: a role on a high-profile federal commission, which happens to be nearly finished with its work.

Were the shoe on the other foot, Donald Trump would remark "some have called that pay-for-play," and it's a reasonable explanation for picking Bondi out of the lineup of Trump co-conspirators. 

Maxine Waters probably did more for the Trumpists than the Resistance when she recommended "If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere..." 

Still, the call from the right (if not from the mainstream media) is a little rich, not only because it elected a President who has chosen incivility and hatred as standard operating procedure but also because the preponderance of his Party has fallen in right behind him.  We may not remember Pam Bondi being bought off by Donald Trump. But it was only last week- albeit prior to the Bondi and Sanders events- that an evangelical preacher, former GOP presidential aspirant, and father of Mrs. Sanders brought to the public his increasingly popular interpretation of Christian values:

Nancy Pelosi introduces her campaign committee for the take back of the House. pic.twitter.com/yKDhkVubck

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) June 23, 2018

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Hoisted By Her Own Petard

Under the category "things I wish I had tweeted":

Restaurant owner says to Sarah Sanders: “Hobby Lobby.” https://t.co/SD62kfJPbg

— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) June 23, 2018

Employees of Red Hen restaurant in southwestern Virginia had called owner Stephanie Wilkinson to report that President Trump's press secretary and her party were dining under a reservation made in the name of Sanders' husband. After arriving, Wilkinson polled her employees, some of them gay, then spoke to Mrs. Sanders, who was politely ejected.  Early the next morning, Sarah Sanders broke federal law with

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) June 23, 2018

Sarah Sanders earns her pay ardently defending a President who had made over 3,000 "false or misleading claims" as of May 1.  A nasty piece of work, she is a good match for a boss who has made clear his contempt for Democrats, Republicans, ethnic minorities, women, veterans, and gays (and practically everyone else not named "Trump.")

Yet no one should be denied service simply because a business owner or professional, citing conscience, is offended. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration doesn't agree and in January we learned

Health care workers who want to refuse to treat patients because of religious or moral beliefs will have a new defender in the Trump administration.

The top civil rights official at the Department of Health and Human Services is creating the Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom to protect doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to take part in procedures like abortion or treat certain people because of moral or religious objections.

"Never forget that religious freedom is a primary freedom, that it is a civil right that deserves enforcement and respect," said Roger Severino, the director of HHS's Office for Civil Rights, at a ceremony to announce the new division.

The establishment of the division reverses an Obama-era policy that barred health care workers from refusing to treat transgender individuals or people who have had or are seeking abortions.

That Obama rule was challenged in court by the Franciscan Alliance, a Christian health care organization in Texas, and a judge in 2016 blocked enforcement as the case played out in court.

The new division appears to be primarily aimed at preventing health care workers from participating in abortion services that go against their religious beliefs. The division cites a 2011 federal regulation guiding the enforcement of conscience protections that mentions abortion more than 30 times.

There is an obvious term for that: discrimination. 

What goes around, comes around. When a bakery owner who identified as Christian alleged his religion supports the right to discriminate, Sanders supported him, though without identifying any New or Old Testament verse.  The owners claimed providing service to a gay couple affronted their conscience; so, too, did serving President Trump's press secretary affront the conscience of the employees of Red Hen restaurant. The dangerous "freedom of conscience" door swings both ways.

Mrs. Sanders has been given a perfect opportunity to profess a change of heart or mind, explaining that she now recognizes that a business or a professional is obligated to serve its paying customers, whether a gay couple, a woman seeking an abortion, or an individual dining out on a Friday night.

She will not, of course, because she is Sarah Huckabee Sanders and she works for Donald J. Trump. And therein lays the problem.

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Not What Leadership Looks Like

You got that right, Osita.

Writing in Slate, Osita Nwanevu has former President Barack Obama pegged. He writes

As Obama no doubt expected himself, Donald Trump has not fostered unity, a sense of inclusion, or respect for American institutions and the rule of law in post-“scrimmage” action. He has been true to the American way of life only in his revival of strains of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and open corruption that many assumed, before his rise, would not return to our national politics.

And that's why it's particularly disappointing- albeit not surprising- that the former President's statement on Facebook Wednesday about World Refugee Day was one medium-sized meaningless platitude. "Part of what makes us human," Obama wrote, is "our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of others." He came up terribly small in a time of great moral crisis.

Nwanevu cites Gizmodo Media's John Cook's tweet "I think that when the history of this presidency is written, Barack Obama's strategic and willful silence in the face of a national crisis will be seen as a shameful error, "  "This statement," Nwanevu realizes, " could have been made in reference to any number of events since Trump's inauguration that the former president has avoided commenting on publicly."

Noting "defenders of Obama's reticence generally argue that he richly deserves a long respite from his time spent at the front lines of national politics," Nwanevu explains

They’re wrong. The medically trained person is obligated to run to the collapsed man in the street. It doesn’t matter how rough their day has been, or how much abuse they have endured in their career. They have an ethical responsibility to help in any way they can—to, at the very least, see and say what might be done by others, if not themselves. They cannot simply walk by. Barack Obama is the most gifted political orator in at least a generation, a man who commands the respect and instant attention of half the country. He cannot opt out entirely of a public life that he chose, not at a moment in our history that so obviously demands political leadership and moral clarity.

Nwanevu recalls that the morning after the presidential election, President Obama released a statement reading in part

everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after we have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We're not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We're patriots first.

That was shades of Senator Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention in which Democrats were enthralled by "We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America." That was eleven years before candidate Donald Trump: remarked that tortured prisoner-of-war John McCain was no hero; twelve years before candidate Trump urged Russia to conduct cyber-espionage against hispolitical opponent and stated that Vladimir Putin "has been a leader farmore than our President has been;" thirteen years before President Trump gave confidential information to Russian officials in the Oval Office; and twelve years before Trump started turning the White House into a vehicle for personal and family profit, while lying to the American public nearly daily.

It has been fourteen years since Barack Obama brought the crowd to its feet with soaring rhetoric which most of us assumed expressed the Senator's hope, a vision of what he thought the nation could be.  We didn't realize at the time that he believed it was a portrait of America and that he would, after eight years as President, still believe it.

Maybe he doesn't; it's hard to believe anyone could be that naive. Still, Nwanevu observes

Barack Obama is personally committed to the realization of the civic American dream—an America where all are united by a common interest in the well-being of all, despite our differences. He believes that this dream can be realized without bitter political conflict. It cannot. He believes that the Republican Party can be shamed by the indignation its actions arouse in Democrats and the majority of the public into changing. It will not.

The Republican Party should be destroyed. It should go the way of the Whigs. With any luck, historians will record that after a madness took hold within the GOP from the mid-1970s through the first part of the 21st century, the American people, led by the Democratic Party, rallied to put it down forever—as it became clear that beyond its attempts to undermine the right to vote, its work to immiserate the already struggling and enrich the already wealthy, its unwillingness to address open public violence, its willingness to countenance the sexual abuse of women and children, and its frustration of efforts to address an ecological crisis that poses an existential threat to civilization itself, the Republican Party would additionally, by openly embracing racial and religious persecution, march the country toward fascism if left unchecked.

The Democratic Party should be working to erode the power of the Republican Party at least as successfully as the Republican Party has eroded its power. This would require both a long-term electoral vision and ambitious structural reforms, some of which Democrats can pass as soon as they next hold Congress and the presidency. But making the case for this is beyond the capacities of a man who sees heightened political rhetoric and political conflict itself as nothing more than cheap emotional catharsis.

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Over-Promoting Economics

Prominent amidst the innumerable explanations for Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton was the widespread notion of the primacy of economic discontent.  One was advanced by a Myriam Renaud of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, named after a great Lutheran theologian.  Renaud did not tackle the Trump vote as a whole but did give careful thought to the motivation of a critical bloc, the Christian evangelical voter. In January 2017 she noted

Why bother to try to understand the motivations of white evangelical voters? Because, according to Pew surveys, they make up 26% of the American electorate, giving them significant political clout. (That percentage has held since 2008.) Of course, white evangelicals do not constitute a single voting bloc. They cover the spectrum of political affiliations. But the fact that more than four out of five placed their trust in Trump deserves attention.

She argued

Actual financial struggles, along with the memory of better things, may explain why more white evangelicals voted for the Republican candidate than in previous elections. It may also explain why worries about the economy took precedence over distaste for Trump as a person. Surveys showed that many white evangelicals objected to Trump’s sexism, racism, anti-Muslim-ism, anti-immigrant-ism, and other ugly-isms. Barna Group found that 49% of white evangelicals felt that Trump lacked a strong moral character. Only 15% saw him as “authentically Christian.”

Still, Trump successfully tapped into their economic anxiety—justified or not—with his slogan: “Make American Great Again.” Hillary Clinton, with her insistence that America was already great, probably appeared horribly out of touch. Trump, in contrast, agreed with the new poor that the nation’s economy was in trouble. He promised seemingly quick fixes like eliminating trade agreements that appeared to favor foreign companies over American ones, forcing U.S.-based companies to keep jobs stateside instead of shipping them overseas, and reducing competition for jobs with a tough stance toward illegal immigrants. In his first press conference as President-elect last week, Trump pledged to be “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created.”

Renaud saw in many non-evangelical Trump supporters similar motivation as in his evangelical fans.  She writes that six years since the economic recovery from the Great Recession began

the U.S. Census Bureau reported that incomes in the middle range—when adjusted for inflation—were still 1.6% below the previous 2007 peak of $57,423 per household. Also problematic, these incomes remained 2.4% lower than the high reached during the late 1990s. Most of the registered income gains have bypassed middle-income workers, like the average white evangelical Trump voter, and gone to those at the top of the income ladder. Seen in the broad context of the past few decades, the average wage earner has failed to get ahead. Though more people are back at work, the New York Times’s Binyamin Applebaum wrote, “many of them are still struggling to maintain their standard of living.”

Patricia Cohen, also writing for the New York Times, echoed these grim assessments. Despite recent good news about the economy, she said, “tens of millions of Americans understandably feel that the recovery has passed them by.” Many without skills are stuck with low-paying jobs plagued by irregular and unreliable schedules and by little or no security or benefits. Others, laid off from the well-compensated manufacturing jobs that left the U.S. for other countries, have had to accept lower-wage positions, if they found work at all.

Economic insecurity played its role- but one which has been significantly overplayed. 

Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump because she was pummeled in what Thomas B. Edsall, in an op-ed in The New York Times last October, recognized as "sparsely populated areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania"  (three Midwestern and one similar state). He observed "what Democrats missed was the profound political impact recent immigration trends were having on the more rural parts of the once homogeneous Midwest- that the region had unexpectedly become a flash point in the nation's partisan immigration wars."

Edsall, with the benefit of greater hindsight than Renaud, quotes director of the Michigan Economic Center John C. Austin, who found

The "rural” voters here are some farmers, but more likely, as in the hinterlands outside Flint, Monroe, Toledo, Erie, or Janesville, Wisconsin, they are mostly white, working class blue collar workers or retirees, many, sadly, who fled their small cities to escape blacks. They are anxious about the economic prospects for their future, their aging communities (the kids have fled), making folks mad. And now all these immigrants come and are changing the society!! Just as Macomb County, where working class white voters fled Detroit in advance of blacks, now sees nearby communities like Hamtramck becoming (in their view) a Bangladeshi bazaar — and they don’t like that. And they are easily fanned to blame those folks.

Edsall explains

... as recently as 2000, many of the key Midwestern counties that moved from blue to red in 2016 had very few minority residents. Since then, their immigrant populations began to increase at a rapid rate well above the national average. Second, at the same time that immigrants are moving in, younger native-born residents are leaving in droves to seek employment elsewhere, while the remaining white population is aging and is often hostile to change. It is the perfect formula for cultural conflict, and Trump proved to be the perfect candidate to exploit it. Finally, these changes are taking place in a region that Austin points out is home to “15 of the nation’s 25 major metro areas with the sharpest black-white segregation,” making it even more unreceptive to nonwhites than other sections of the country....

At the same time, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and, to a lesser extent, Pennsylvania, have each experienced a net out-migration of native-born residents. The effect of this exodus is twofold.

First, the people leaving tend to be younger and more open-minded, willing to risk moving to a faster growing section of the country. Second, those left behind tend to be older, more closed-minded and more set in their ways.

A demographer at the Brookings Institute informed Edsall

These "left-behind" populations tend to be older and more backward rather than future oriented- less likely to embrace the nation's new diversity and the emerging global economy. This was surely the case among 2016 voters in rural parts of swing states that helped to elect Trump as president.

It's a complicated argument, one which avoids the temptation of romanticizing the Trump vote as a response to economic discontent. Communities disproportionately centered in the Midwest experienced a decline in young people and an increase in diversity, threatening the security of the older population which remained. Less complicated:

Fox & Friends host: "These aren't our kids. Show them compassion, but it's not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas"https://t.co/VWYB5hRPif pic.twitter.com/CMO9oTLIEX

— Media Matters (@mmfa) June 22, 2018

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Working

Shermichael Singleton, a black, somewhat anti-Trump Republican strategist:

About two-thirds or more in urban & rural areas say people in other types of communities don’t understand the issues people face in their communities. A Majority of urban & rural residents say people who don’t live in their type of community have a negative view of those who do.

— Shermichael Singleton (@Shermichael_) June 15, 2018

As Singleton learned- to his dismay- on the June 8 edition of Bill Maher's Real Time, a lot of Americans have a negative view of American workers, urban and rural.

As this video indicates, Singleton was fighting a losing battle with the audience and Bill Maher.  In an exchange which lasted from 39:15 to 42:50, Linda Chavez began

I'm sorry we are at a 50-year low in terms of illegal  immigration in the country. We are losing more Mexicans. We have fewer Mexicans today coming in than are leaving. We do a wonderful job of assimilation.

This conversation took place before the recent influx of immigrants and refugees trying to enter the nation through our southern border from central America and the controversy ensuing over the Trump Administration to separate parents and children. It is understandable, therefore, that Sanchez would remark that there are fewer Mexicans entering than exiting.

Understandable- but disingenuous. The primary reason for the net outflow is that there is a lag caused by the recovery from the Great Recession, which is what deterred so many Mexicans from migrating.

But Sanchez's claim (given that she's referring to immigrants rather than refugees) that "we do a wonderful job of assimilation" is fatuous. Many immigrants are not assimilating- and for precisely the reason she gives- they've come here to work- for welcoming them.

Sanchez is no fan of diversity. After a comment from Fareed Zakaria, she remarks

Part of the problem that the Democrats have- you use the word "assimilation," I've been using that word for thirty years and I will tell you it's a dirty word in the Democratic Party. They don't want to talk about assimilation; they'd rather talk about multiculturalism.

After a little pushback from Singleton, Sanchez continues

And we need immigrants. We need more legal immigrants. We need more immigrants in the United States. We have a tremendous labor shortage right now. And it's not just the STEM workers. It's people who work in poultry processing plants, people who clean toilets and buildings, people who take care of other people.

It is true that the USA is approaching full employment, in part because many individuals have dropped out of the job market. Some jobs are available- jobs in the gig economy are increasingly low-skilled, wages are not growing, and benefits are declining. Unions are being undermined by GOP governments and judges and the quality of jobs has declined. The concept of a "labor shortage" is greatly misunderstood. There is a shortage of jobs with a livable wage.

After Singleton asked "but can we not prioritize jobs for our own people?'" Sanchez responded "No, because our people don't want those jobs. Trust me. They don't want those jobs."

We know Donald Trump is lying when he says "trust me." Sanchez isn't lying; she's merely misguided. She contends

I'm sorry. If I'm an employer I don't necessarily want to hire somebody who has been on disability, who hasn't worked in the last, you know, 15 months. I would rather have somebody who comes here, who sees the bottom rungs of the ladder as a stepping-stone and wants to...

Darn those employees who get injured on the job! Who wants them, anyway?

I understand the resentment of people- workers- who at some point in their working life get something for nothing. It is, of course, not something for nothing- they've paid into it; they've worked; and now they're in need. And Linda Chavez assumes they're now lazy.

But Chavez likes the worker who "sees the bottom rungs of the ladder as a stepping-stone and wants to" work his or her way up. They are unusual these days because most workers realize that upward mobility is not what it once was or what they were taught that it is. If you can get people to believe that advancement is likely, you can get them to work for meager wages and benefits. Those are the workers Linda Chavez craves.

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Sucker

The late, great Phil Ochs, who met a tragic and untimely end, once wrote "and now it can be told, I'm a quarter of a century old."

 And now it can be told: Hillary Clinton is a sucker.

At Keene College in New Hampshire in 1996, First Lady Clinton defended the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1994, signed by her husband, by stating

They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.

At a fundraiser in April, 2016, Mrs. Clinton was interrupted by gay black activist Ashley Williams, who brought out a banner reading "we have to bring them to heel" and confronted Clinton to "explain for the record" why she "called black youth 'superpredators.'" The candidate offered to address it but Williams left before she had a chance. Afterward, Mrs. Clinton told Jonathan Capehart

In that speech, I was talking about the impact violent crime and vicious drug cartels were having on communities across the country and the particular danger they posed to children and families.  Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.

My life’s work has been about lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by society.  Kids who never got the chance they deserved.  And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids, especially in African-American communities.  We haven’t done right by them.  We need to.  We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.

As an advocate, as First Lady, as Senator, I was a champion for children.  And my campaign for president is about breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of all kids, so every one of them can live up to their God-given potential.

Looking back, I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today. Not only would she not use those words in these times, Clinton conceded, but she went a step further. She apologized, stating "I shouldn't have used those words." She acknowledged being wrong.

And she was wrong, because human beings shouldn't be compared to animals- "superpredators." She shouldn't have done used the term, even though the individuals she was referring to were violent gang members. Viewed in context, she had remarked in 1996

But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs. Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob, we need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore- they are often the kind of kids that are called "superpredators." No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about how they ended  up that way but first we have to bring them to heel. and the President has asked the FBI to launch a concerted effort against gangs everywhere. They are often connected to big cartels- they are not just gangs of kids anymore.

In April, 2015 Hillary Clinton gave a speech commending "law enforcement leaders who are calling for a renewed focus on working with communities to prevent crime, rather than measuring success just by the number of arrests or convictions." She attacked "mass incarceration" and advocated community policing, as well as "reduced prison terms for some drug crimes."

Sucker.

In a stunning upset, Mrs. Clinton was defeated in the presidential race by the guy who proclaimed "We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent. We will cease to have a country. I am the law and order candidate.”

In late May, the President commented “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in—and we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

We see what he is doing on the southern border to the "animals," including the women bringing their young children. He cites nonexistent law: "Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws!" He's still the "law and order candidate."

Trump spokespersons claimed he was referring solely to MS-13 members. Despite his history, some people bought it, giving him the benefit of the doubt Hillary Clinton never had. However, on Tuesday of this week:

Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

The Atlantic's David A. Graham responds

Trump left himself no such plausible deniability in Tuesday’s tweet. The infestation he refers to isn’t simply illegal immigrants per se, though he mentions the gang as well. Nor is this merely the pious language of enforcing the law, though Trump uses that elsewhere.

 “Infest” is the essential, and new, word here. (Also popping up in the tweets is the older coded word “thugs.”) It drives full-throttle toward the dehumanization of immigrants, setting aside legality in favor of a division between a human us and a less-human them. What are infestations? They are takeovers by vermin, rodents, insects. The word is almost exclusively used in this context. What does one do with an infestation? Why, one exterminates it, of course.

Even without the context of Trump's other racially-tinged remarks, it was obvious to anyone who lived through or knew the 1960s and 1970s what Donald Trump meant when he bragged about being "the law and order candidate."

President Trump means to quash the "animals" and the insects. But Hillary Clinton, reacting to the surge of street crime in the late 1980s and 1990s, had the temerity to refer to gang members as "super predators."  That was a mistake.  The election later that year indicated it also was a mistake to admit it was a mistake.

"We need to put each candidate under this scrutiny,” Ashley Williams said during the primary campaign. I suspect it was precisely Hillary Rodham's willingness to adjust and accommodate that no other candidate, not even Donald Trump as President, that she was singled out for one improper remark. She has been, it turns out, a sucker.

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Sacred Cows

On Tuesday, President Trump maintained his "the bestdefense is a good offense" politics:

Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

#CHANGETHELAWS Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

Keep in mind- as Trump or his Ghost Tweeter would put it- that the President herein does not defend his policy, instead blaming it on Congress and Democrats.

Keep it in mind, especially, upon reading the CNN Politics headline "Every living first lady has spoken out against familyseparation."

There are two problems with the headline.  The more obvious is that Mrs. Trump not only did not criticize the President's policy, she reinforced one of the media's continuing themes: both sides do it. She "hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together..." She also wants a "country that follows all laws," which is one of the Administration's (misleading) talking points, and "a country that governs with heart," which the President himself has periodically advocated.

Far better were the statements of Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Bush. Mrs. Carter stated in part "the practice and policy today of removing children from their parents’ care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country." Mrs. Bush wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which she observed "this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. "

These two were the most eloquent and courageous responses of the five to a bad and very unpopular policy imposed by President Trump and Attorney General Sessions and carried out by Homeland Security secretary Nielsen. Then we come to the wives, one of them a presidential candidate, of the two most recent Democratic presidents.

Michelle Obama struck a bipartisan note, favorably retweeting a portion of Bush's article and added "Sometimes truth transcends party."  President Trump's policy was enacted in May, 2018 and differs substantially and significantly from the one imposed by Mrs. Obama's husband, who was condemned by Mr. Trump as "one of the worst Presidents ever," who "co-founded ISIS." As recently as late last year, Donald Trump doubted that Barack Obama was born in the USA. But "sometimes truth transcends party."

And "crooked Hillary," whom candidate Trump vowed would be incarcerated were he to become President, stated "what is happening to families at the border is horrific."

Like Mrs. Trump, Mrs. Bush, and Mrs.Carter, Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama assiduously avoided mention of the name of the individual- Donald J. Trump- who is responsible for what appears to be, and what they (save possibly Melania) believe, is a ghastly policy.  It's understandable in the case of Melania (who should have remained silent), Republican Laura, and Rosalynn, who was First Lady over 37 years ago and, truth be told, is 90 years old. (I would say age is the elephant in the room but that would be partisan.)

None of the women uttered the words "Donald Trump," but otherwise give credit to Laura Bush and Rosalynn Carter. Melania Trump's remarks, which were not demanded by the media, politicians, or the public, were at best neutral. Given who they are, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were no more impressive.

The bar is set low for former First Ladies, as CNN's headline demonstrates Two of them cleared it: two of them did not. The unimpressive remarks of those two might go a bit in explaining the current state of the Democratic Party.

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