Trump vs. Trump (Updated with Trump’s announcement that there is NO EMERGENCY)
Patterico has this very amusing screen shot at his website, dating from 2014:
Trump is everything Washington is and has long been, only dumber. He is a parody of the democratic political disease of tribal hypocrisy, and what we might call the morality of convenience.
Oh, I know, all the best conservative pundits are out there hammering home the point that there is plenty of precedent for Trump’s emergency powers declaration. But they are part of the tribal hypocrisy machine: they were with Trump when he was attacking Obama’s unconstitutionality in 2014, and they are with Trump now, as he does exactly what he attacked Obama for doing. Is there precedent to support Trump’s action? Yes, and plenty indeed. Every demagogue in history who was trying to seize illegitimate power to do supra-constitutional things has pulled some version of this “national emergency” stunt. This is how it’s always done.
So go ahead, Mark Levin et al, keep licking boots for money and fame. Your nation will thank you for your soulless and slavish sell-out in the long run, I’m sure.
The term “banana republic” seems an increasingly fitting description for this growing populist demagogue despotism, inasmuch as it is clearly being undertaken as the government of baboons, by baboons, and for baboons. (I hope PETA doesn’t try to get my site taken down for that admittedly cruel and gratuitous insult to the intelligence and moral capacity of baboons. I actually love the little guys — really I do.)
UPDATE:
And here’s the best part, for all the bootlickers and cultists trying to squirm their way into believing Trump declared an emergency on legitimate grounds: Trump just told America, in a press conference arguing for his emergency declaration, that there is no emergency!
Likely to be used in future lawsuits: Trump on his national emergency declaration: “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster … I just want to get it done faster.” Via CNN pic.twitter.com/HcPrQdhRJ9
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 15, 2019
How about that: “I didn’t need to do this.” In other words, there was no emergency. Trump has already “done a lot of wall for the election, 2020,” but he “just want[s] to get it done faster.”
This is pure and unmitigated tyranny. A plain violation of the letter and spirit of even the unconstitutional law he is invoking, let alone of the Constitution itself — an emergency declaration being used merely to circumvent Congress, i.e., as a presidential power-grab of convenience.
Oh, come on, say the obfuscators and head-buriers, this “Trump is Hitler” crap is outrageous. True enough; Trump, as I have argued before, is not Hitler, he is Mussolini. His followers and facilitators, however, have a slightly more German lilt to them, in my view. I would say “They must be stopped,” but in truth it’s too late. They have already destroyed whatever hope (not much) was left for their country. And no, I am not speaking hyperbolically or hyper-emotionally. I am merely stating what is increasingly obvious.
The Trump cultists, like the man himself, are traitors to their country — albeit traitors naïf, if you will. In other words, they know not what they do, because they are too damn stupid.
