Yesterday, on the eve of All Hallow's Eve, Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for Senate from Tennessee and the figure that will appear if you say, "Crazy-ass fundie" three times in a mirror, published a piece in the conveniently-named Tennessean newspaper. It's a tale of terror, one where there are hordes of terrifying figures staggering towards the United States and only Blackburn can stop them before they cross the border and eat your jobs.
Her opponent, former governor and Democrat Phil Bredesen, would enable the monsters, she asserts. Writes Blackburn, "[Bredesen] would be at the border to greet these illegal aliens with driving certificates, encourage them to work on his campaign, and then go cast a vote for him." They are an "invading force," this herd of immigrants, and they need to be met and dealt with as such, according to Blackburn, or they will just overwhelm us with their sheer numbers, which are around 5-7 thousand, with a couple of thousand children as part of it. But juvenile and infant zombies are still zombies. For Blackburn and almost the entire Republican apparatus, we gotta fuck 'em up and meet their force with force. For freedom, goddamnit.
This is the scary story that President Donald Trump and the GOP are telling us around the bonfire of our nation. We're now amping shit up from "they're gonna want to eat and live and want us to pay for that" to "they're evil terrorists and gangs who will murder the fuck out of us" to "they're filthy, diseased scum who are gonna give you leprosy and scabies and other scary-sounding things."
Seriously, on that last one, Michelle Malkin, who is apparently still a thing, wrote in the National Review (motto: "Xenophobic from all the way back when conservatives knew how to spell the word"), "It’s neither racist nor xenophobic nor hateful to discuss the impact of unfettered mass immigration and unvetted caravans of illegal border-crossers on our public health." Of course, the caravan isn't "unvetted" because they're going to ask for asylum and go through health screenings and perhaps even receive medical assistance (which, yeah, we'll pay for because that's what you do when you're a supposedly Christianish nation that is allegedly the greatest, superest, wealthiest, goldenest bunch of motherfuckers that ever congregated on a single piece of earth).
Meanwhile, Trump can't get enough of talking about how terrible the bedraggled refugees from Central America are. "You look at that caravan and you look largely, very, you know, big percentage of men, young, strong. A lot of bad people, a lot of bad people in there. People that are in gangs," he babbled barely coherently to Laura Ingraham on her Fox "news" program, The Ingrown Toenail.
Of course, there aren't a lot of bad people there. Surely, there are likely a few assholes in the group, as there are assholes in every group, even in your church or school or book club, but mostly they are young people and families. Here's one detail from today's Washington Post that doesn't scream "bad thugs." Twin brothers, both 17, "shared a single pair of pink sandals — found on the road — with their father" as they walked the miles and miles from Honduras. I'm gonna say they're not MS-13.
When you reach a certain age or you've read enough recent political history, one thing you'll know pretty fuckin' clearly. Republicans will try to make you shit yourself in fear so that you go to the voting booth or sit down to fill out your absentee ballot with underwear full of shit. And if you're not shitting enough, Republicans will go even bigger to scare that shit out of you.
They've been doing this and doing this for years. Quick sample: There's an ad from the 2010 midterms, from the Nevada Senate race, where Republican Sharon Angle was running against Democrat Harry Reid. Angle called Reid "the best friend an illegal alien ever had." That ad showed filthy Mexicans crossing the desert. In 1994, Republican California Governor Pete Wilson had one with immigrants riding horses through the border stop. This is a devolution of the Republican Party which, under Reagan, at least tried to be semi-rational about immigration.
So now we've got Trump talking about eliminating birthright citizenship, which he has mentioned before the idiotic Axios interview clip that came out yesterday. He actually tweeted today, "So-called Birthright Citizenship, which costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens, will be ended one way or the other" (fucking moron misuse of capitalization is all him). Well, shit, undocumented workers pay taxes. By the IRS's own numbers, it's around $23.6 billion. Wonder how much they get from that infusion into the federal government.
Republicans would want you to be frightened by the possibility of waves of children of undocumented immigrants needing welfare and food stamps and, horror of horrors, public education. But you know why immigrant parents want their kids born in the United States? So they can be Americans. So they can try to succeed as Americans. Very few people actually come here just to spawn and pollute your nice country and steal your precious social services. No, they come here and they live and they work and they fall in love and they fuck and they have kids. Like people everywhere.
How about this, anyone who is thinking of voting Republican: Don't let them do this shit again. Don't let them trot out all these fucking bullshit ads that are meant to make you afraid of poor people looking for the same goddamn fake American dream that immigrants have always sought. Tell 'em to shove it up their racist asses. Tell 'em that boogyman doesn't work anymore.
Compare Trump's insane accusations to George H.W. Bush, who said in a 1980 Republican debate, "We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law." Ask yourself who benefits from your fear. If it's you, then fine. Cling to it, like on things such as health care. But it's not you in this case. The only people who benefit from you shitting yourself over immigration are the people who will maintain power through your fear. You get nothing from it.
And they won't even pay to wash your pants.
