SCOTUS upholds Trump’s revised travel order

The New Neo Posted on by

In the end, the vote went as so many SCOTUS decisions do, 5-4 with Kennedy being the swing vote.

I am almost certain that had Garland been confirmed at the end of Obama’s administration, instead of waiting for Trump and Gorsuch, this decision would have gone the other way.

However, it also seems completely obvious to me that the majority here was correct: the order as presently worded is completely in line with the powers granted the executive by statute and by the Constitution. That four SCOTUS justices saw it differently is a demonstration of the fact that a person—and particularly a lawyer—can find arguments that seem logical and correct to that person, in order to reach a desired endpoint. But the minority’s analogies to Korematsu (the case involving the detention of ethnic Japanese citizens during WWII), are inappropriate, because, as the majority has pointed out:

Whatever rhetorical advantage the dissent may see in doing so, Korematsu has nothing to do with this case. The forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission…The entry suspension is an act that is well within executive authority and could have been taken by any other President—the only question is evaluating the actions of this particular President in promulgating an otherwise valid Proclamation.

IMHO, the present case would have been decided unanimously for Trump had the law been properly applied. If presidents are not allowed to make immigration decisions like Trump’s, the power of the executive to regulate immigration becomes meaningless.

I truly believe that, years ago, even liberal justices would have acknowledged that power and would have upheld this travel order—especially, of course, if a Democratic president had issued it. But times have changed.

That change reflects a trend on the left that is easy to see, which is the attempt to blend the categories of legal and illegal immigrants, of immigrants and visitors, and of all those categories and citizens, and to equate their relative rights to enter the US no matter what the executive might say—particularly if that executive is trying to restrict immigration of any kind rather than to expand it.

That ideological blending is purposeful, and although it is partly rhetorical it is not meant to stop at rhetoric such as “undocumented” (a change in terminology that began some time ago and was meant to soften the public for later and more radical arguments). The open-borders crowd, the more extreme of who push the idea that there should be no difference in the rights afforded citizens, legal immigrants, illegal aliens, and temporary visitors, are determined to convince people of the rightness of their cause.

[ADDENDUM: Predictably, the left is unhappy with the ruling.]

Uncivil war: plenty of people must think the Red Guards were a really nifty idea…

The New Neo Posted on by

…because they’re advocating going down a road that would have an excellent chance of leading there.

For those unfamiliar with the Red Guards, please see this.

And for those who think I’m engaging in hyperbole, please read an essay appearing today entitled “This is just the beginning.” One of the many interesting things about that sort of call for action is that if the right was anywhere near as power-mad and oppressive as the author seems to think it is, he and his fellow-travelers would already be in prison or worse. But they’re not.

As Orwell said, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

That quote is often offered without its context, but if you go here you’ll see the Orwell essay from which it came. Orwell was a politically complex man himself (I wrote about his socialism here), but he was certainly more aware of the dangers than most people.

Here is an except from his essay that shows you the context of the quote, which is about why British writers of the ’30s gravitated towards Communism. I think it’s instructive to take a look:

…[W]hat do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.…

I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Füehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises….

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.

Orwell goes on to quote a poem by W. H. Auden, who during the 30s was a Communist supporter. It contains the phrase “necessary murder” (of the type that is necessary under Communism), and of this Orwell writes [emphasis mine]:

Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia [on the left] gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of personal immunity.

The left in America today thinks it’s already the target of enormous persecution. On the contrary; it enjoys freedoms and liberties only dreamed of in most societies. Fomenting a civil war is a kind of playing with fire by people who may know that fire is hot, but who don’t think it ever will burn them.

Men and women, attraction and humor

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article purporting to tell us what makes men more appealing to women. The list (apparently in no particular order) is supposedly based on research and contains seemingly contradictory things like “wear a scented deodorant” and “eat garlic.” Who knew?

But what I was looking for was “have a fabulous sense of humor.” For me, the bottom line for any man I might want to date was that he had to be funny. Very funny. And not banana peel humor; true wit.

It wasn’t and isn’t something about which I was and am especially proud, because somehow it seems superficial. And it’s led me to some difficult relationships with some rather complex people. But it’s not really a trivial thing because a sense of humor and shared laughter is bonding, and humor tells you a great deal about a person’s way of looking at life. When things are rough, it can also take you out of the gloom.

So I’m not at all surprised to see “make your partner laugh” on the list:

Multiple studies indicate that women are more attracted to men who can make them laugh. Interestingly though, men generally aren’t more attracted to women who can make them laugh…

…women valued both their partner’s sense of humor and their own ability to make their partner laugh; men valued only their own ability to make their partner laugh.

Preach it, brothers and sisters, preach it. Don’t I know it!

Now, I’m hardly a laugh a minute, but I’ve been known to come up with some off-the-cuff humorous remarks, probably more than most women do (although I’m a terrible teller of set jokes). But alas, one of the observations I’ve made over the years is that men always say they want a woman with a sense of humor, but what they actually mean is that they want the woman to appreciate their sense of humor and laugh at their jokes. The vast majority don’t want a woman to be funnier than they are.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but that seems to be a general rule of life. But as I said, the men I’ve been involved with (and the one I married) have been exceedingly witty, considerably more so than I. And that doesn’t seem to be an accident.

The writer Calvin Trillin was a witty man in print, and he wrote a very touching tribute to his wife after her death. In it, he described their meeting and initial courtship this way:

She was…so very pretty, but that wasn’t the first thing that struck me about her; it might have come as much as two or three seconds later. My first impression was that she looked more alive than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed to glow. For one reason or another, I hardly got to speak to her that evening. Two weeks later, though,…I dashed back from a remote suburb to a party that I figured she’d be attending. So I couldn’t claim that I just wandered into that second party; in romantic matters, even those who need to depend mainly on dumb luck are usually up to one or two deliberate moves. At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. In fact, I must have hardly shut up. I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for the “Tonight Show” was in the audience. Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, “You have never again been as funny as you were that night.”

“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” I’d say, twenty or even thirty years later.

“I’m afraid so.”

But I never stopped trying to match that evening—not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later—after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown—I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way—if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I asked her if we could have dinner sometime—I would have been devastated.

They had an exceptionally happy marriage.

Romney: not a NeverTrumper

The New Neo Posted on by

Mitt Romney—‘member him?—is running for Senate from the state of Utah. Here’s his stance on supporting Trump:

One of the questions I am asked frequently on the campaign trail is whether as Senator I will support the Trump agenda…

I will support the president’s policies when I believe they are in the best interest of Utah and the nation. I have noted, the first year of his administration has exceeded my expectations; he made our corporate tax code globally competitive, worked to reduce unnecessary regulations and restored multiple use on Utah public land. In addition, I am pleased that he backed away from imposing a 35 percent tariff on all foreign goods…

But I have openly expressed my disagreement with certain of the administration decisions such as the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); I want more markets open for Utah and American goods. I also oppose broad-based tariffs, such as those proposed on steel and aluminum, particularly when they are imposed on our allies. I agree, however, with narrower penalties levied on companies or nations that employ unfair trade practices, such as China.

I have and will continue to speak out when the president says or does something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions. I do not make this a daily commentary; I express contrary views only when I believe it is a matter of substantial significance.

Sounds rather reasonable to me.

George Will urges voters to oust the Republicans in November

The New Neo Posted on by

George Will has been writing columns for a long, long time, and has been considered a highly influential columnist on the right. But I never have read him much; I’m not sure why, but he just never appealed to me.

You’d think he would appeal to me. After all, when I experienced my political change, I considered myself (and still do consider myself, in certain ways) to be a relatively moderate conservative. Will was supposedly a moderate as well. But I found his writing boring and uninsightful for the most part.

Just now I wondered whether I just wasn’t remembering correctly. Maybe I liked him better or paid more attention to him than I recall. But when I did a search for posts in which I’ve mentioned Will on this blog, I only came up with eleven mentions in close to 14 years of blogging, and most of those turned out to be short takes such as quotes from other people mentioning Will in passing, or quick links to a column of his without much discussion of it, often on specific topics such as rent control rather than larger issues.

I found this, however. Written shortly after the 2012 election, it seems to be a foretaste of things to come:

This election has undermined the reputation of a lot of pundits on the right who confidently predicted a Romney victory, sometimes even a large one. What were George Will and Michael Barone (to name just two of many) thinking? I find it hard to give them any credence now when they say things like “cheer up,” when they’ve been proven not to have had their fingers on the pulse of anything except their own hopes.

George Will now appears to be vying for the leadership of the NeverTrump movement, and he’s taking it out on the entire GOP. His column from yesterday is behind the WaPo firewall, but here are some excerpts:

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

There’s much much more, all of it dripping with highfalutin disdain and crafted with wordsmith care and pride. The message is that the GOP should never cooperate with the vile Trump. Even though Will admits that the Democrats are awful, he doesn’t think they can do much harm. As for the need to approve the appointment of conservative judges, which requires a Senate controlled by the GOP—well, this Pooh-bah poo-poos that, because they’re not as important as showing the GOP a lesson.

In all of this, Will reminds me a bit—although the style and ultimate goals were very different—of the people on the far right I used to argue with during the 2012 election, those who hated Romney (and/or the GOP establishment) so much that they said they’d be voting for the Democrats. It seemed destructive then, and it’s destructive now.

Along the way, Will makes some glaring errors (in addition to the big error of asking people to vote in a Democratic Congress to teach the GOP a lesson). He references this:

Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Pence’s political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.” Meaningless noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

First of all, for what it’s worth, Lewandowski replied “womp, womp,” not “wah, wah.” It may be all the same meaningless noise to the lout-phobic Will, but it’s not the same phrase and doesn’t have the same meaning. What’s more, Lewandowski explained he directed the remark at a fellow guest on a cable news program, not at the child:

Lewandowski claimed the “womp womp” was directed to his cable news opponent, a Democratic strategist named Zac Petkanas, for using a child to “politicize an issue.”

“I never meant to insult anybody with Down syndrome. And who I was talking to was [Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas]. And I understand what the perception is here and what the media wants to talk about,” he said.

“What Zac was attempting to do was to use a child with Down syndrome to politicize an issue,” Lewandowski said.

By the way, “womp, womp” means that a person is losing, as in a game show (I’m not the expert on this, since I never heard of the expression before this incident). “Wah-wah” would have been a remark that was far more likely to have actually been a way to mock the child’s feelings, but that’s apparently not what Lewandowski said.

But that mistake of Will’s pales in comparison to another one Will makes (or at least a point he totally ignores). Lewandowski added:

But what [Petkanas] didn’t tell you, what you need to understand was that person, that poor child was not taken from her parent because she came to this country illegally. That poor child was taken from her parent because her mother has been suspected of being a material witness in a child smuggling ring. And so we have to understand the difference.”

This is the case, and it was reported four days before Will’s column came out:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said Wednesday that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome was not separated from her family under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

The agency said in a statement obtained by CNN that the girl was separated from her mother and detained in a Texas facility because her mother is a material witness in a human smuggling case.

CBP added that the mother was “not prosecuted.”

It is typical of people who are incensed about the family separation issue to outright lie or at least be so sloppy with the facts that they mislead, and to ignore the dangers faced by illegal immigrants on their journey. Therefore Will’s failure to have noticed the true story or to mention it is not the least bit surprising. He’s become a propagandist himself. And he’s got plenty of company.

The detainment of ethnic Germans in the US during WWI and WWII

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments to this post a discussion emerged about whether any Germans living in this country were interned in camps during WWII. Most people are well aware of the US internment of ethnic Japanese, but no one seemed to realize—it’s apparently a little-known fact—that yes, some ethnic Germans residing in the US were detained in camps in this country during both world wars:

With the US entry into World War I, German nationals were automatically classified as “enemy aliens.” Two of the four main World War I-era internment camps were located in Hot Springs, N.C. and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer wrote that “All aliens interned by the government are regarded as enemies, and their property is treated accordingly.”

By the time of WWII, the United States had a large population [including many citizens] of ethnic Germans. Among residents of the United States in 1940, more than 1.2 million persons had been born in Germany, 5 million had two native-German parents, and 6 million had one native-German parent. Many more had distant German ancestry.

During WWII, the United States detained at least 11,000 ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly German nationals. The government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few in internment camps run by the Department of Justice, as related to its responsibilities under the Alien and Sedition Acts. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained. Similarly, a small proportion of Italian nationals and Italian Americans were interned in relation to their total population in the US.

Some interesting details of the WWI group: a total of 2,048 were incarcerated, including “the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt and 29 players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Their music director, Karl Muck, spent more than a year at Fort Oglethorpe, as did Ernst Kunwald, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra…”

During WWII:

In the 1940 US census, some 1,237,000 persons identified as being of German birth; 5 million persons had both parents born in Germany; and 6 million persons had at least one parent born in Germany. German immigrants had not been prohibited from becoming naturalized United States citizens and many did so. The large number of German Americans of recent connection to Germany, and their resulting political and economical influence, have been considered the reason they were spared large-scale relocation and internment.

Shortly after the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, some 1,260 German nationals were detained and arrested, as the government had been watching them. Of the 254 persons not of Japanese ancestry evicted from coastal areas, the majority were ethnic German. During WWII, German nationals and German Americans in the US were detained and/or evicted from coastal areas on an individual basis. Although the War Department (now the Department of Defense) considered mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians from the East or West coast areas for reasons of military security, it did not follow through with this. The numbers of people involved would have been overwhelming to manage.

A total of 11,507 people of German ancestry were interned during the war. They comprised 36.1% of the total internments under the US Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Control Program.

A fairly considerable number. But the numbers for Japanese nationals as well as Japanese-ethnic citizens were much higher: about 110 to 120 thousand in all. Included were many citizens.

The internments involved most of the people of Japanese ethnicity living in this country, who were far less numerous than people of German origin and who were also highly concentrated on the west coast, the area from which they were evacuated (after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was considered particularly strategically important).

I’ve looked at many sites describing the Japanese interments here, searching for the answer to this question: what percentage of the citizens of Japanese ethnicity in the camps were minor children being interned with their non-citizen parents? I’m sure that somewhere is the answer, but I haven’t been able so far to find it online. All I have found are sites like this one, which state that the majority of those interned were citizens and the majority of those interned were children, but which treat these as two separate statistics rather than discussing the overlap and saying whether the vast majority of the citizens were the children.

At any rate, I do believe that racism was at least part of the reason that far more people of Japanese descent were interned than those of German descent. But it was hardly the only reason. Other reasons were the smaller numbers of ethnic Japanese living here as compared to ethnic Germans, their concentration on the west coast, and probably the emotional reaction to an attack on the US itself at Pearl Harbor.

Were some American citizens of German ancestry detained? the answer is yes:

In the United States, however, the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Program also targeted numerous American citizens, with J. Edgar Hoover publicly expressing concern over what he termed “the naturalized citizen whose cloak of citizenship is a sham and is dangerous to the nation’s security.”…

Justice Department officials opted for a policy of selective internment of ethnic Germans and Italians, irrespective of citizenship status. Arrests of civilians whose names appeared on custodial detention lists—including numerous American citizens—commenced on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States had declared war against Germany and Italy. Detainees received hearings following their arrests, but those arrested on the U.S. mainland were not allowed legal counsel. In Hawai’i, twenty-one of the 106 ethnic German and Italian civilians arrested within forty-eight hours of the Pearl Harbor attack were U.S. citizens…

On the U.S. mainland, refugees and naturalized citizens from countries annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany also came under suspicion, resulting in the confinement of Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians. Those apprehended in the Territory of Hawai’i included a handful of Jewish refugees and people of Danish, Finnish, Irish, and Norwegian descent. Several of Hawai’i’s Caucasian detainees had even served in the U.S. Armed Forces…

…Federal authorities concentrated this eclectic and multinational mix of enemy aliens in at least twenty-one different Justice Department and Army camps far removed from coastal areas, typically in facilities that also held Japanese detainees.

One other thing—at the time of WWII, Japanese-born residents of the US had not been allowed to become US citizens, although their American-born children were citizens. In contrast, people of German and Italian birth had been allowed to become citizens, so that was another difference.

Palestinian propaganda in the Newton schools

The New Neo Posted on by

Newton is a wealthy Boston suburb that is known for its great school system, among other things. One of those “other things” it’s known for is that it contains a large percentage of Jews among its residents, approximately one-third.

And yet for five years there has been a controversy that pits many parents and students and community members against the school administration for the teaching of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. It reached somewhat of a crescendo (so far, anyway) recently at an angry meeting in which citizens excoriated the school board.

The following is taken from an email I received from this organization with material from an article that doesn’t seem to have a link yet:

Angry parents and citizens dominated the first hour of a scheduled Newton Public School board meeting on Monday night, in an effort to show their disgust and rage at the continued teaching of bias against Israel that has been the focus of controversy in this leafy, heavily Jewish suburb for more than 5 years.

Waving signs of “Fire Fleishman!” and “Replace Goldman!”, around 70 angry citizens protested the mistreatment of the Jewish community by city officials the evening of June 11.

Ruth Goldman, Chair of the Committee, restricted discussion of the controversy to only 7 speakers from among those who came to protest the on-going defamation of Israel and Jews in Newton’s school rooms. More than 15 had signed up to speak.

Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, reminded the board that Mayor Ruthanne Fuller had promised the Jewish community “transparency” in what is being taught at the schools, but she has not delivered. This, after the school system was forced to remove from its curriculum the Arab World Studies Notebook, which falsely taught students that Jews torture and murder Arab women in Israeli prisons; and after the School Superintendent David Fleishman had promised Jewish community leaders this past October that he would remove the schools’ entire World History section on the Middle East until scholarly, vetted material was found to replace it. Instead, Jacobs said, Fleishman broke that promise and continued to use material that was pro-Arab, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.

Most of the anger was directed at a May 2 all-day event at Newton North High School called Middle East Day, during which Electronic Intifada proprietor Ali Abunimah’s non-profit group screened several anti-Semitic films for the Newton North students.

It seems that the material was not labeled or discussed as propaganda but was presented as fact to the students. It also seems to me (from the names involved, anyway) that the school administrators doing the stonewalling are also Jewish. My guess is that most of the people involved are of the liberal political persuasion, although I don’t know for sure.

A great deal of the history of the problem can be found at this website. Also, the organization CAMERA has offered some material, including the efforts of PBS to spread Palestinian propaganda:

*Beyond the documentaries themselves, the lessons encourage students to identify with the Palestinian/Arab protagonists, and accept their stated positions as the starting point for the included exercises. None of the films selected by PBS present the conflict from a primarily Israeli point of view, nor do any of the lesson plans provide the students with the information or tools to examine the conflict from Israel’s perspective.

This is hardly limited to Newton. If you have a child in the public school system in your community, you might want to learn what they’re being taught about the Middle East. Increasingly, the next generations are being trained out of America’s traditional support of Israel.

Crying poster child for family separation wasn’t separated from her family

The New Neo Posted on by

Another iconic photo of a child that doesn’t document the situation it claims to illustrate:

She has become the poster child for family separation at the border — and the subsequent moral outrage against the Trump administration — but the crying Honduran child held up as a heartbreaking example of family separation at the border was, in fact, never separated from the parent with whom she illegally crossed the border into the U.S.

The two-year-old girl, Yanela, and her mother, Sandra, were detained in Texas after attempting to cross the Rio Grande river, and were held together.

“I know now that they are not in danger. They are safer now than when they were making that journey to the border,” Denis Javier Varela Hernandez told The Daily Mail of his daughter Yanela and wife Sandra. Hernandez also said the two were doing “fine.”

Photos of crying children tug at the heartstrings. And I have no doubt in this case that there are indeed plenty of crying children who have been separated from parents at the border. However, it is not the usual policy to separate children under 5, and Yanela is 2. But it makes a good story, doesn’t it? So what of journalistic integrity?

More here of the real story:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to CBS News the mother and daughter are being housed together at a facility in Texas and her immigration proceedings are ongoing.

“We were patrolling the border. It was after 10 o’clock at night,” Border Patrol agent Carlos Ruiz told CBS News’ David Begnaud. He was the first to encounter Sandra Sanchez and her daughter after they allegedly crossed the Rio Grande River into Texas illegally.

“We asked her to set the kid down in front of her, not away from her, she was right in front of her…So we can properly search the mother,” Ruiz said. “So the kid immediately started crying as she set her down. I personally went up to the mother and asked her ‘Are you doing OK? Is the kid OK?’ and she said, ‘Yes. She’s tired and thirsty. It’s 11 o’clock at night.'”

So it was late, the journey had been long, and the child was tired, hungry, and thirsty. What a journalistic coup!

In a previous post I wrote the following:

Appeals to emotion and the desire to protect children are time-honored propaganda methods. The details may change, but the tactic remains. Think Mohammed al-Durah (see this and this). Then there was the photo of the napalmed South Vietnamese girl (see this and this). The first incident was almost certainly staged and fake, but was highly successful in turning European opinion against Israel. The second was true, but the underlying facts were distorted by the press to increase popular opposition to the Vietnam War.

The stories about the children separated at the border are in the latter category: true, but the underlying facts, as well as the law, are being distorted by the MSM in its fervor to appeal to emotion. Emotion is—well, it’s emotional, and children are a sure-fire way to stir it up.

[NOTE: Another case of news about a child at the border that was distorted to make an anti-Trump story, when in fact the entire incident was one of the government trying to prosecute a smuggler:

“The mother and her five children were in a vehicle driven by a U.S. citizen,” Border Protection said in a statement Wednesday. “Upon questioning, the mother admitted to being illegally in the United States. Three of the children are U.S. citizens and were released to an aunt. The mother was not prosecuted, but is instead being held as a material witness to support the prosecution of the smuggler, which precipitated the separation of the two other children, both Mexican citizens.”

Could it be that much of the turmoil and trauma these children are facing comes at the hands of the illegal immigration journey itself, as well as the exploiters they meet in the process, rather than the US government? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.]

[ADDENDUM: But perhaps the inundation of propaganda isn’t working?]

[ADDENDUM II: More from Ace):

She wasn’t a first time border crosser: she’d already been caught illegally entering the US in 2013. A second offense makes her a felon.

She had left three other children back with her husband.

Her husband confirms she wasn’t fleeing any sort of political persecution, but was just looking for a job.

One can surmise she brought the tot along as her Get Out of Border Jail Free card.

Right on schedule, Time magazine offers the expected excuse for its mendacity:

TIME defended its cover and its reporting Friday, essentially claiming the facts are irrelevant because of the propaganda value of the piece. The photo and story “capture the stakes of this moment,” the editor in chief told reporter Hadas Gold.

Time is a sad simulacrum of what it once was, long long ]ago.]

Should reporters sleep with their sources?

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course not.

But sometimes they do, and apparently they have since time immemorial.

At the link you’ll find two colorful quotes on the subject. The first is from NY Times editor A.M. Rosenthal in the late 70s, who said to a female reporter on learning of her affair with a source and demanding her resignation: “It’s OK to f*** the elephants — just don’t cover the circus.” The second is from Jay McMullen, one of those old time reporters who wrote for the Chicago Daily News and said, “Anybody who wouldn’t screw a dame for a story is disloyal to the paper.”

Former FBI agent theorizes on Spygate, and other articles of note

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Wauck writes a guide to Spygate, and connects a few extra dots. Interesting.

This article about the elusive “stop him” text of Strzok, and the process by which it was ultimately excavated, is also worth reading.

And energizer bunny Andrew C. McCarthy has a new article up, on what should happen to the Mueller investigation at this point.

And here are some predictions on the probable results of Trump’s EO. The scenario is certainly plausible, and is very much like my own notion of the next steps. But one caution I would offer is that Trump often finds a way to surprise.