Caen Spree

It's Friday, why not a little dot dot dot

[Title explained.] Let’s see, what happened this week:

Conservatives are trying to kill Ilhan Omar. That’s just what Occam’s razor tells me. We’ve already seen how enraged they are at her, and how they’re driven to portray her reasonable skepticism toward U.S.-Israel and -Middle East policy as anti-Semitism.

It’s not exactly like their hate-on for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though in both cases their targets’ gender and attractiveness adds a creepy edge. It clearly drives them extra nuts that Ilhan is black and Muslim. And I think they’re especially bothered by the fact that she not only wears a Muslim headscarf but also has a hint of a Somali dialect — she clearly isn’t trying to whiten up her act for the crackers whose asses we’re all supposed to kiss.

Anyway you’ve seen the insane New York Post cover, and maybe heard how it uses a bullshit misreading of her “some people did something” comments as a casus bellow. It’s interesting that after an embarrassed pause of many years wingnuts are back to old-school Nineelevening (and the Post headline — “Here’s Your Something” — is barely more than the noun, verb, and 9/11 on which Rudolph Giuliani famously coasted for years).

But the main thing about it is the obvious invitation to retaliate. This was clear as glass at RedState: “The death threats coming at Omar could be viewed as ‘some people’ who are ‘doing something,’’’ they snarl — don’t cry if ya get killed, bitch, it’s your own fault for making us mad.

They’ve already been making threats; you can imagine what’s next. When Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw got after Ihlan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told him to get his head on straight and go fight rightwing terrorism — which is really the top terrorism trend in the U.S. now — the wingnuts all gathered to say hey, Dan killed a bunch of ragheads in Afghanistan, he’s done his part!

These people won’t be happy with anything but blood, and they’re not even trying to make it look like anything else. Speaking of which:

Trump wants immigrants to kill some white people. This story is totally nuts:

White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Trump administration officials have proposed transporting detained immigrants to sanctuary cities at least twice in the past six months — once in November, as a migrant caravan approached the U.S. southern border, and again in February, amid a standoff with Democrats over funding for Trump’s border wall.

People have been suggesting this since Trump got his goons to pen up a bunch of immigrants under a bridge in El Paso, but it’s now obvious that he wants some violence to Reichstag his way out of his polling slump. Angel moms ain’t moving the needle, so he wants to rile the rubes by creating a critical mass of Bad Hombres in places where they won’t be immediately arrested, in hopes of getting another Kate Steinle on the news. And if the real immigrants don’t work, they can always hire a ringer!

Assange goes down. Don’t we all deserve a little good news? I know, I know, he’s a whistleblower notwithstanding all his service to Trump, and “the left” is supposed to support him. Happily I am not a lawyer and cannot offer the guy any useful legal assistance, so I bring instead the gift of laughter. I’m getting a huge kick out of all the online Trump-Q-Ron Paul mystics who are baffled that Dear Leader is acting like a Hillary tyrant (e.g. “Trump can either pardon Julian Assange or he can forget about getting reelected” — stop, yer triggering my funny bone), but the greatest joke is that Assange bet the ranch, or rather the cupboard, on Donald Trump, and has been watching for two years as everyone else who trusted Trump got thrown to the wolves. I wonder if, just before the end, he still thought he was going to be the one exception?