Thoughts on comments; comments on thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

The comments section here offers food for thought, and lots of it. So here’s a post based on a few comments and my reaction to them.

(1) “The Other Chuck” wrote of all the GOP presidential candidates in 2016: “It’s interesting how Trump makes them ALL seem reasonable in retrospect.”

Well, true. But most of them (maybe all) seemed pretty reasonable at the outset. Some were a lot more reasonable than others, of course. But if any of them—and that includes the ones I disagreed with most—had ended up the nominee, I would not have hesitated to have voted for that person.

(2) “Julie near Chicago” says “One of the things I find interesting is the number of people coming out from behind a bush to say that their first pick was Scott Walker ”” including me.”

I think I said it long before the campaign began. I initially thought Walker would be the one to beat. Courageous, experienced in the executive branch, with conservative bona fides, he had a proven ability to earn votes in blue states. Unfortunately he was too bland for the fired-up and angry electorate of 2016, and his foreign policy inexperience showed. But the latter problem wouldn’t have mattered to voters so much, I think, if it hadn’t been for the former. No, this year, the candidate who stomped his/her feet loudest was the one a plurality of people seemed to want. And because of the size of the pack, a plurality rather than a majority of the voters were able to decide the outcome.

(3) “AesopFan” quotes an article that claims, “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

I am heartily sick of the common but misleading Russian roulette analogy. I wrote an entire post describing its inappropriateness to the situation we face with these two candidates.

(4) “Sergey” asks a very interesting question:

I can’t understand why authoritarian ruler is always considered to be a bad choice. It entirely depends on personal virtues of this ruler. Singapore and Chile are clear examples how authoritarian ruler can save his nation on the verge of catastrophe and do the job which no democracy can ever accomplish due its inherent weakness and impotence.

Certainly some people acknowledge that as a dilemma, because it’s well understand here (at least by those who think about such things) that authoritarian rule can be more efficient. But in this country it has been rejected, at least so far. It has to do with our special heritage about liberty.

We are very touchy about our liberty—at least, we used to be, and many of us continue to be, probably more than any other group of people on earth. Liberty is considered a good thing in and of itself, even a necessary thing. Also an American thing. Of course, our liberty is compromised in certain ways. But there are still many Americans who consider it very important and even vital, the key to American exceptionalism and to American culture itself

Hitler made the trains run on time [*see NOTE below]. We really don’t care. At least, most of us don’t. We’d rather they were a bit late and we kept our liberty. That’s why we don’t sing “God Save the King” any more, although we use the same tune for a different sentiment:

My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrims’ pride
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring.

[*NOTE: A reader mentioned to me that it was Mussolini who is said to have made the trains run on time. When I Googled it, I found a few references to Hitler having done it in Germany, but the majority of the references were to Mussolini. So it’s likely to have been him.

The analogous saying about Hitler was that “he built the Autobahn.” Apparently, I got the two types of transportation mixed up in my mind, but the idea being expressed is the same: increased efficiency. Of course, in other ways, dictatorships and authoritarian rulers are not necessarily efficient at all. Five-year plans, anyone? How often does authoritarian rule actually “save” a country on the brink of catastrophe, as Sergey posits occurred in Chile and Singapore, and how often does it lead a country further down the road to ruin? I maintain the latter is far more common than the former.]

Happy Labor Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is a three-day-weekend, but today is the actual Labor Day. What are you going to do?

I’ve got a $25 credit at a store that expires after today, and it’s burning a hole in my pocket. So I’m going shopping now.

Then this evening I watch the first of two finales of this season’s TV show “Bachelor in Paradise.” I won’t even try to argue for the show’s redeeming social importance (probably doesn’t have any). But it does have Shakespearean overtones, as I described here.

So, what are you planning? Have a happy one, whatever it is!

Infighting on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, why rehash the bitter disputes that led us to where we are right now in September of 2016? Sometimes I think it’s impossible—or at least highly unlikely—for people to learn from their errors, or even pay attention to them. We don’t even agree on what those errors are.

But this Red State article by Kimberly Ross entitled “Cruz vs. Rubio Hindsight in the Dark Days of Trump” got me to thinking about it.

Red State is very much an anti-Trump site. But it’s got a lot of good writers and it also covers news that has nothing to do with Trump. You don’t have to agree that these are “dark days of Trump” (although I certainly tend to think so) in order to wonder what happened in the Cruz vs. Rubio battle, or how it’s emblematic of what has so very often gone wrong on the right.

Ross writes:

As Trump was continuing to rack up primary victories, there remained a deep division among those who supported Rubio and those who supported Cruz, the only two (apart from Trump) who really had any shot at becoming the nominee. The divide was vicious and filled with attacks, strange accusations, and some legitimate grievances. I guess the mood from both sides was desperate as they saw the disastrous, embarrassing Donald Trump suddenly lead the pack.

Emotions continued to boil over until Rubio dropped out following the Florida primary loss. Suddenly we were left with Cruz and Trump. While plenty of Rubio supporters obligingly backed Cruz, many did not. Their loyalty to Rubio just couldn’t be shaken. Once Cruz was gone, reality began to sink in. This is who we are left with? Donald Trump??

There’s a lot more at the link. I read the whole thing, and although I agree with some of it (and think it does fairly represent a certain mindset at the time), it wasn’t anything like what I was going through back then. For example, I don’t think that what drove the bitter, nitpicky accusations between Cruz and Rubio supporters (or, for that matter, Trump supporters and both) had all that much to do with Donald Trump. The phenomenon of bitter division on the right long predated his rise. Anyone on the right who was dissatisfied with the nomination of alleged RINOs McCain and Romney understands that I’m talking about a split on the right that long preceded 2016 and which has made it difficult for a conservative alternative to be nominated.

Perhaps it is because I came to this crowd as an outsider—and to a certain extent am still an outsider—that I have always observed and been very concerned about the destructive bitterness of the disagreements on the right. Just before the 2012 election I wrote that the right would tear itself apart in the next four years, and though I certainly didn’t foresee all the ins and outs ad backs and forths of those years, the main outlines were clear and have been for a long, long time.

Not just clear to me. Clear, period.

My immersion in politics online coincided with my political conversion and was part of what made it possible. So I don’t recall being part of political discussions online (or even in person very often) back when I was a liberal. But to the best of my recollection, plus a certain amount of reading I’ve done in the last fifteen or so years on liberal and leftist blogs, there is a big difference in the way left and right approach candidates.

Simply put, the left accepts its candidates and unites against the common enemy, the right. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule (remember the pro-Hillary PUMAs in 2008? or some of Bernie Sanders’ die-hards now?). But they just aren’t all that numerous.

On the right, however, the focus is different. The right agrees that the left is an enemy, but somehow the left seems to fade way way into the background for many people, and looming huge and insurmountably in the foreground are the candidates on the right and their imperfections.

Sometimes it’s because the voter is a one-issue voter who uses an absolute litmus test—for example, on abortion. The rage against Rubio on immigration was another. It had nothing to do with the advent of Donald Trump, either. I watched it build for years in the blogosphere, and every now and then (not often) I also tuned in to talk shows and heard the spitting rage there. Against Rubio it focused on the Gang of Eight. Against Cruz (arguably the smartest and most conservative GOP candidate to come down the pike in a long long time) it seemed even odder, based on some form of visceral dislike for his face or his voice or his inability to get enough other senators to agree with him on issues on which they disagreed.

These things always seemed small to me. I am pretty sure that statement will rouse the ire many of my readers, who will ask how I can think that Rubio’s immigration betrayal was small. Well, “small” is a relative term. I’ve never idealized candidates, once I reached adulthood. I’ve always expected some problems with any candidate I basically like, but it’s a question of the overall picture among a very flawed lot. With Rubio, there was only that one thing, and although it was somewhat of a biggee, I carefully read all the explanations and apologia for it, and decided it was a big mistake but that on the whole Rubio was conservative and smart.

About Cruz’s conservatism there was no doubt. So either candidate was fine with me (my favored candidate at the very beginning had been Walker). But you know what? All of the rest of the candidates were okay with me, too, to different degrees, except for one: Donald Trump. He was not okay for reasons I’ve delineated in about 200 posts so far, but I’ll summarize by saying (a) I disagreed with him on many issues, not just one (b) he had changed his mind on so many of them and was sometimes still changing it, so often that I found what he said to be deeply untrustworthy (c) he seemed ignorant of a great many relevant facts (for example, the nuclear triad) and completely uninterested in learning about them (d) he had a liberal recent past and failed to adequately explain why or how he’d changed his mind (e) his character was profoundly narcissistic and vindictive; and (f) he lied not just sometimes, but constantly, and even about minor things.

That’s why, as I wrote in this post on the subject, objections to Trump are different in kind, scope, and number to objections to previous nominees.

But to get back to Rubio and Cruz—the problem was always that they split the un-Trump vote somewhat evenly between them (in addition, of course, to the huge number of other candidates who kept limping along), and that kept them both going way too long, long after one should have dropped out. I almost didn’t care which one it would be, because I thought Cruz was the most ideologically consistent and trustworthy, but Rubio the most likely to win against Hillary. Based on polls, however, both seemed like they could win, and both consistently did better than Trump.

But throughout the entire campaign season one thing that especially puzzled me was that so many pundits thought Trump couldn’t win the nominiation. It was obvious by August of 2015 that he definitely could, and might. As I wrote that August:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

So here we are. Why did more people not see where it was heading? A prognosticator didn’t need a crystal ball; it was glaringly obvious. Was this wishful thinking? Denial? Yes, and yes.

But I see the main problem mostly as the propensity of anti-Trump voters on the right to nitpick about their candidates, and their inability or unwillingness to unite behind one. Who would organize that uniting?

Don’t rely on the RNC, that’s for sure; they have their own agenda. I’m not even sure what that RNC agenda was this year. At first it seemed to be Jeb Bush, but his candidacy was such a failure that after that they seemed to throw up their hands in despair. The one thing they did seem united about after Bush was gone was their hatred of Ted Cruz.

But the main problem was something else, and that’s this tendency toward extreme divisiveness on relatively minor disagreements (again, I see Trump’s problems is being of a different number and type compared to all previous GOP candidates, and not the least bit minor). It’s not for nothing that for years the GOP has been called a “circular firing squad.”

Philae: like finding a needle in a haystack

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then I lose something and can’t find it, or it takes me a long time to find it.

My favorite earring fell off in my car, and seemed to completely disappear. Several years later I found it under a mat.

My bluetooth is continually leaping out of my ear and wedging itself in the strangest of hiding places.

Right after my husband and I were married, we were moving cross-country and we stored most of the wedding presents in my parents’ attic. He also lost some eyeglasses, although we never connected those two events. It took about three years for us to get a big enough place to be able to ship our stuff from my parents’ attic to where we were now living. When we opened one of the boxes, there were the glasses, which had apparently fallen out of his shirt pocket while he was packing up our wedding haul.

And on and on and on. Lose it, and no matter how hard you look, sometimes you just can’t find what you lost.

But sometimes you can.

Which brings us to this:

Philae, Europe’s comet space lander that went missing nearly two years ago after its batteries ran down, has finally been found wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P.

The discovery was made by the European Space Agency’s craft Rosetta, which came within 2.7km of the surface of the comet and used a high-resolution camera to capture the main body of the lander along with two out of three of its legs on Friday.

Philae went missing after completing a soft-landing on icy dirt-ball 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014.

On landing, the probe’s harpoons did not fire to keep it anchored to the surface and it bounced a number of times, before settling in the shadow of a cliff where its solar panels could not pick up enough energy to keep it going.

…“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” [Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager] said. “It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.”

It seems to be a close relative of my bluetooth:

philae

Happy Labor Day weekend

The New Neo Posted on by

Are you planning to have fun this weekend? I am. Of course, my idea of fun is pretty sedate: going out with friends for a meal, going to a dance performance, going out for a walk and enjoying the fine weather—“fine” till Monday, that is.

Labor Day is a sort of bittersweet holiday. When I was young I dreaded it because it meant back to school, although it was always nice to get those new pencils and pens and erasers and bookbag and clothing. But on the other hand it was the gateway to autumn, one of my favorite seasons then and now.

Georgetown University tries to expiate its guilt over slavery

The New Neo Posted on by

Georgetown is a Jesuit school trying to atone for an episode in its past:

In an effort to acknowledge its ties to slavery, Georgetown University will offer the descendants of nearly 300 slaves preferential treatment in its admissions process.

In 1838, the school sold 272 slaves who were working on plantations in southern Maryland to pay down its debts.

Now, the school said it will give the descendants of those slaves “the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community” when they apply. That means that the applicants will “receive an extra look” and that their relationship to the university will be considered.

Interesting.

It’s not as though these descendants aren’t required to meet certain standards; they are. It’s just that the standards are slightly lower, and equivalent to those required for what used to be called “legacies.”

And Georgetown is free to do whatever it wants concerning admissions. I suppose this would not be considered any more discriminatory than already-existing preferences for “diversity” (racial, geographic, economic, what-have-you) or the already-existing preference for the descendants of those who have attended the school and/or given it money.

However, I have reservations about this one (not that Georgetown cares). The first is that it is a rather arbitrary thing. The slaves themselves were wronged by being sold into conditions that were almost certainly worse than those they were already enduring (they had been in Maryland and ended up in Louisiana). Their immediate descendants of the next couple of generations likewise probably suffered. But, eight generations later (that’s what I calculate an 18-year-old living today would probably be)? Can we really assume that that person today is still feeling some effects of that 1838 sale, and should be given preferential treatment because of it?

Also by my calculations (which are both rough and quick, so I certainly might have made errors), if you imagine two descendants for each of those eight generations, there would now be 139,263 descendants in all. How on earth could those people be found? Apparently, “research conducted by Georgetown and other organizations, including The New York Times, has identified many living descendants of the slaves.” But I bet it’s only a very small fraction of the actual descendants. Another interesting question is whether any of these descendants are white, and what’s to be done about them. Do they get special treatment, too? After all, when people track their DNA, it’s not at all unusual for people who are to all intents and purposes white to find they have some black ancestry, which could be assumed to have occurred for many of them back in the days of slavery. Do those descendants get special treatment, too?

As I said, Georgetown is free to do this. My guess is that it has more to do with the Georgetown administrators’ own feelings of guilt for something that happened about 175 years ago, an act perpetrated by people they have nothing to do with except for ties to the same institution. How far back does one take guilt, I wonder? And does this really change anything, except Georgetown’s PR?

[NOTE: If you want to learn the backstory of the pressure that was brought to bear on Georgetown regarding its slave-selling history, please see this. It’s been going on for a long time. Daniel Berrigan was instrumental in the preface to it many decades ago, as part of his general leftist (and in his case, Catholic and Jesuit) focus on American and Western guilt.]

Convincing reluctant Trump supporters to vote for him

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time I’ve conceptualized Trump voters as falling into two camps: the enthusiastic and the reluctant. No doubt there are some who fall in between, too, but I think that mainly there are those two categories.

The first group are people who supported Trump in the primaries, either as first or second choice. They believe he would be a good president, or at least that he was the best or one of the best of the lot of GOP candidates who originally threw their hats into the ring.

The second group are people who support Trump now only because he’s running against a person they consider worse, Hillary Clinton (if I end up voting for Trump, it will be for that reason).

Members of the first group sometimes appeal to members of the second group, urging them to make sure they vote for Trump. The arguments vary widely (we’ve seen many in the comments section of this blog). Sometimes the argument is that Trump will be a good president and will do a number of good things for the country. Sometimes it’s that Trump will do one or two good things, usually involving SCOTUS justice choices and/or immigration policy. And sometimes it’s that even though we don’t know what Trump might do, we know that Hillary would be awful and there’s at least a chance that Trump would be better.

That latter type of reasoning has probably become the most common argument we see these days, at least as reflected in blog comments and blog posts, in newspaper and magazine columns and TV commentary, plus social media. As Trump’s poll numbers rise and fall and then rise and fall and rise, and state polls become increasingly common, it occurs to me that the latter argument rests almost entirely on the race being at least somewhat close.

For example, let’s say you live in California. If Clinton is ahead by 12% in the polls there (I chose that number because it was the figure in a recent poll, but the point is that no one really disputes that she’s way ahead there), why would a reluctant Trump supporter be motivated to compromise what he/she sees as both his/her principles and integrity by voting for a man he/she detests, if that man is seen as having absolutely no chance of winning in that state? In other words, why prostitute yourself without a payoff?

It behooves Trump to stay close in swing states, because a whole lot of his supporters everywhere are in the category of “reluctant supporters.” Often very reluctant supporters. They will only hold their noses and vote for him in that voting both if they see a good chance of defeating her. Because elections are decided by winning state electoral votes rather than winning the national popular vote, voting decisions will be made by most voters who know much of anything about elections (and I would guess that the category “reluctant Trump voter” is probably made up of people who are aware of the way the Electoral College works) by taking into account this system.

That’s another way in which polls matter. There are margins of error in polls, to be sure, and there are just plain errors, too. But overall, polls that show Trump far behind in a state—particularly a state that usually and reliably goes for the other party; in other words, for Trump supporters that would be blue states—are going to discourage the Trump vote. And polls that show him close will almost certainly encourage it.

Tolstoy post du jour: the voice

The New Neo Posted on by

More Tolstoy! Just can’t get enough of that Tolstoy!!

Seriously, though, I came across something extraordinary yesterday. It’s a recording of Tolstoy himself reading an English translation of a book of quotations from other writers (The Thoughts of Wise Men, published as A Calendar of Wisdom in English), that he assembled late in life:

The audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself.

Here’s what he’s saying; you can follow along:

That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

I find hearing the actual voice of a long-ago historic figure to be a powerful and moving experience. There are a lot of these old audios on YouTube, one of the many reasons I love that site and am addicted to it.

Hillary Clinton, fast and loose with security

The New Neo Posted on by

It certainly seems that way:

Earlier today, the FBI released its investigative notes on the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, including its notes on their interview of Hillary in June. It makes for an interesting read, and a couple of eye-popping moments. For instance, agents showed Hillary the e-mails containing information that investigators had verified had been classified at the time of transmission, including Top Secret/SAP ”” programs so sensitive that even their names were classified. According to pages 26-7 of the first part of the 302, Hillary told them that she believed that the information wasn’t classified, and was not a problem even if the data had gotten into the hands of foreign governments.

More here:

The media is picking up on another interesting tidbit: Clinton claimed she could not remember any kind of training regarding how to handle classified information. The FBI also noted that the former secretary of state may have had as many as 13 devices…

At one point in the interview, an FBI agent noted that Clinton didn’t know the “C” meant classified…

Clinton aides said she often replaced her Blackberry and whereabouts of the old device would “frequently become unknown”…

Here are the files, if you want to read them yourself. I haven’t yet done so; don’t know if I will. The summaries are depressing and outrageous enough.

“We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Soviets were known for their revisionary history, a situation Orwell fictionalized in Nineteen Eighty-Four and immortalized in the quote with which I’ve titled this post.

But it goes on in post-Soviet Russia today, as this ruling indicates:

Russia’s Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin for reposting a text which states that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. The Supreme Court’s ruling came on September 1, 2016, the 77th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, 17 days before the anniversary of the Soviet invasion from the east…

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this is that the Perm ”˜historian’, the courts, the prosecutor are doubtless well aware of the historical facts. Luzgin has more than likely been prosecuted for revealing inconvenient facts, and the Russian prosecutor, courts, as well as a historian have all proven complicit in this cynical travesty.

…In parallel with its military aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin has been trying to reinstate the Soviet narrative about the Second World War in which details of the first almost 2 years during which the Soviet Union was Hitler’s ally are blurred, and the collaboration justified.

Please read the whole thing.

[NOTE: I’ve written before about historical revisionism, here.]

Eliminating the mosquito: is it nice to fool Mother Nature?

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently we have the ability to completely eliminate that very common pest, the mosquito, through genetic engineering:

Powerful new gene-editing technologies could allow scientists to program mosquito populations to gradually shrink and die off. Some efforts have gained enough momentum that the possibility of mosquito-species eradication seems tantalizingly real.

“I think it is our moral duty to eliminate this mosquito,” entomologist Zach Adelman says about Aedes aegypti, a species carried afar over centuries by ships from sub-Saharan Africa. It derived from a forest dweller and adapted to thrive among humans, to whom the mosquito spreads at least four viruses that cause major diseases.

Prof. Adelman, a virologist and associate professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, is working to program Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to develop as males.

Eventually, the mosquitoes would run out of mates, crashing the species’ population in places it invaded and “cleaning up a global mess,” he says. Female mosquitoes are the only ones that bite people and transmit viruses.

Anyone who’s ever been bitten by one of the little critters—and that’s just about everyone—would probably be tempted to shout “Hip hip hooray!”

But should we?

Everybody probably also recalls the old time travel science fiction dictum of not disturbing the past because you don’t know how it will affect the future. In similar fashion, to purposely eliminate an enormously widespread species—even one so very noxious—could invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences. Some scientists say we don’t know enough about the mosquito and its place in the ecology, and that it does do some good (for example, plant pollination and as food sources for other creatures).

Here’s one approach being considered to eradicate or shrink the population:

Imperial College London researchers are refining a system under development for the past several years to drive a self-destructive genetic trait into the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, the major carrier of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. The trait could eventually shrink the malaria carrier’s population. Malaria kills an estimated 438,000 people a year.

Aedes aegypti is high on the hit list of more scientists now that Zika has spread from Brazil to Miami, spawning an epidemic that has left hundreds of babies with devastating birth defects…

Many entomologists say eradicating Aedes aegypti would have a minimal impact on the environment. Such mosquitoes thrive around humans, breeding in water that collects in tires, pipes and plastic containers. Humans are their only source of food.

Zika-carrying mosquitoes aren’t very appealing to other animals as a food source, entomologists say.

I must say it’s appealing. But there’s also something in me that says “caution.”

[NOTE: I’ve written about malaria and DDT here.]

Trump’s latest speech on immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

Byron York discusses it here. The major points, as he sees them:

First, Trump announced that he will aggressively move to deport criminal illegal immigrants – that is, immigrants who have committed crimes beyond the act of entering the country illegally…

…[Secondly,] Trump’s statement that those here illegally would have “one route and only one route” to legal status seems clear. Everybody seeking legalization would have to leave and then return.

But then, a few short paragraphs later, Trump said that “in several years,” when tough enforcement measures are fully in place – not contemplated, not in the planning stage, but actually up and running – then “we will be in a position to consider the appropriate disposition of those who remain.”

Trump was addressing the illegal immigrants who would choose to stay in this country – that is, non-criminals and those who chose not to return to their home countries and get in line to return to the United States. If those people stayed here, Trump said, then their situation would be debated after all the enforcement measures are in effect. At that time, there would be “different options” available for them.

If this is substantially different from Marco Rubio’s position (or that of most of the other GOP candidates) I’ve yet to figure out exactly how, although I suppose that we can nitpick about this or that wording or emphasis. Yes, Trump says please go home (just as Romney did, for which Trump excoriated him), but the request has no teeth—not a single one—because there are no penalties for staying. And then for the stayers there’s a possible path to—something or other, to be specified later. Much much later.

York adds:

But that still leaves the question: Why did Trump and his top lieutenants make things so confusing in recent days? After the speech, CNN’s Maeve Reston tweeted, “Given Trump’s tone, I still don’t understand point of allowing softening/hardening debate to rage over past 2 weeks. What was the point?”

Indeed. After all the talk, that is one question about the Trump immigration drama that remains entirely unanswered.

Actually, I think it’s rather easy to answer. I have noticed ever since the Trump campaign began that Trump specializes in the all-things-to-all-people ambiguous/contradictory multiple-statement approach. He wants his actual policy to be unclear, or at least fluid and hard to pin down, and that has two purposes: (1) he becomes a moving target and maintains plausible (or semi-plausible) deniability about nearly everything; and (2) he can appeal to hardliners and softliners and everything in-between, acting as “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” In Trump’s eyes that’s definitely a feature, not a bug.