Donald Trump has made it OK to call illegal aliens 'illegal aliens' again

By Newsmachete

 

Republicans have been cowed into silence by the liberal media.  At first it was no longer acceptable to call illegal aliens illegal aliens.  Then they started to be called simply "undocumented" migrants – immigrants who simply lost their papers!  Then they all were lumped together, legal and illegal, as "migrants," so if you were against the illegal ones, you were against all of them.  And finally they became the ultimate virtuous class, called "Dreamers."  Are American kids ever called "dreamers" by the media?  I think not.
Anyway, Donald Trump has made it okay to say "illegal aliens" again, and the media is whining about it.

The Associated Press dropped ‘‘illegal immigrant’’ in 2013, soon after NBC News and ABC News. The New York Times announced it would encourage reporters and editors to ‘‘consider alternatives,’’ but ‘‘illegal immigrant’’ has shown up dozens of times in the paper in the two years since. The same goes for The Washington Post, CBS and The Wall Street Journal. 
‘We need to keep illegals out,’’ Donald Trump said at the Republican presidential debate earlier this month after being reminded of his earlier claims that Mexico is sending rapists and other criminals across the border. The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace picked up the term in a question, and Mike Huckabee volleyed it back, claiming that the solvency of Social Security and Medicare was under threat from ‘‘illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, all the people that are freeloading off the system now.’’ 
The more common phrase, ‘‘illegal immigrant,’’ also implies suspicion, but strip the noun from it and the entire identity of a person who crosses the border without permission, or outstays his or her visa, is reduced to that of a criminal: What rights could he or she be entitled to?

That's correct.  Criminal aliens are not citizens.  They have no rights.

And ‘‘illegals’’ implies a permanent caste, as if there is no possibility of becoming anything else — even if millions of immigrants in the course of American history have shown otherwise.

A minor point of distinction: those millions of previous immigrants came here legally.  And I would hope there is "no possibility of becoming anything else" for illegals, except perhaps "emigrants."
So we are supposedly disempowering illegal aliens by calling them illegals.  For years American citizens have been disempowered from calling them what they are for fear of being called racists.  Americans had their jobs taken away by illegals, their taxes went to pay for illegals education and health care, and they were killed on the roads and the streets...by illegals.  Not "undocumented migrants," not "Dreamers."  Our right to protest them was disempowered when we were forced to call them people who "lost their papers," and they were considered the supreme virtuous class.
And until Donald Trump came along, most Republicans were afraid to call them what they were.  But now we have reclaimed the phrase.  Donald Trump said the words, and he wasn't struck down in the polls, so we can say them, too.  Words have meaning, so this is an important victory, thanks to Donald Trump.
I still am very suspicious about Trump's sudden turn to constitutionalism, given his past, but once again he is doing this primary contest a great service, pulling Scott Walker and other candidates to the right on this issue.

Snarker-in-Chief

No one — least of all the American people — is exempt from our president’s snark.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.
President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.
Vladimir Putin is the dangerous autocrat of a nuclear-armed superstate. He has trampled on the rights of his own people while trying to bully the former Soviet republics back into a czarist Orthodox version of the Soviet Empire. So Putin is many disturbing things, but for Obama he is reduced to some archetypal high-schooler to be snarked at: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” Putin, in Obama’s putdown, has “got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.” Gratuitously reducing Putin’s aggression to the work of an adolescent rival show-off may be dangerous when combined with the past six years of Obama’s mostly seeming indifferent to that aggression. Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise.
Mitt Romney was not just wrong in his views, but, to Obama in his snark mode as psychoanalyst, apparently ill: “[Romney is] changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping we’ve got to name this condition he’s going through. I think it’s called . . . Romnesia. I’m not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.” Note the “I want to go over some of the symptoms.”
The reason Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary of 2008 was not just that the state’s Democratic voters preferred Hillary Clinton; he was sabotaged by an ignorant subset of the working-class population that lacked his own perspective, good taste, and calm analytical mind. Not appreciating Obama’s talents was analyzed as the equivalent of Neanderthalism: “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Note the “It’s not surprising . . .”
Obama would follow that pop psychology by analyzing the police as acting “stupidly” and stereotyping by race. In his unfortunate National Prayer Breakfast riff, he snarked at American Christians, advising them not to get on their “high horse,” given the moral equivalence between the millennium-old Crusades and the present epidemic of radical Islamic terrorism. Snarkers usually project, masking their own high-horse moralizing by alleging bastard forms of it in others.
Snarkers also don’t discriminate in their targets. Sometimes Obama’s snark has been directed at his own Democratic rivals. Hillary Clinton was not just someone Obama ran against and beat in the primaries, but comes off as a frumpy nice girl in his famous quip, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” Note the “enough.”
By all accounts Obama has had a loyal and competent staff; in any event, it ran two winning campaigns. But Obama snarked at them too: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Note the “I’ll tell you right now.” As far as Washington culture goes, Obama is the parent, it the child: “What Washington needs is adult supervision.”
Obama is supposedly friends with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the latter made a terrible mistake when he chided the golf-obsessive Obama as in fact a “hack” and a “sh***y” golfer. Obama quickly fired back that Jordan “was not well informed.” He then went after Jordan himself as the less than successful basketball-team owner: “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.” Snark is now exemplified by the president of the United States stooping to engage in a kindergarten tit-for-tat over relative golf skills with an ex-NBA player: “But there is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.” Note the “He might want” and “If I was playing twice a day . . .”
Sometimes presidential snark is just mean-spiritedness displayed through gratuitous smart-aleckiness. So when Obama once was asked about consulting past presidents, he replied of Ronald Reagan, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances” — a reference to decades-old rumors that Mrs. Reagan, octogenarian and widowed by the time Obama snarked at her, had supposedly consulted an astrologer. Note “a Nancy Reagan thing.”
When Obama talks of his bowling skills, it is by way of deprecating the handicapped: “No, no. I have been practicing. . . . I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something.” Note the “or something.”
The grandmother who worked overtime to raise him when his mother would not, and who saved to put him through a tony prep school, is psychoanalyzed away as little more than an ignorant racist stereotyper — a useful foil to contextualize and excuse the demonstrable abject racism of his own pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away.” Note the “typical.”
Snark can also be a sort of smart-ass caricature in which the statesman devolves into the silliness of popular culture: “I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.” Note “mind-meld.” To dismiss his opponents in his reelection campaign, Obama returned to popular-culture snark, “And you can pretty much put their campaign on . . . a tweet and have some characters to spare.”
When Mitt Romney criticized Obama for deep defense cuts and reducing the navy to its smallest fleet size since World War II, Obama offered snark instead of a counter-argument: “Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. . . . We also have things called aircraft carriers that planes land on and submarines that go under water.” Note the snark “that planes land on” and “that go under water.”
In the months before the Crimea and Ukraine crises, Romney presciently reminded Obama that Putin’s Russia in 2012 was America’s chief worry. Obama snarked back, “The 1980s — they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
When some Republicans at Obama’s recent State of the Union address clapped when he noted he had no more campaigns to run, Obama left his teleprompter to interject the schoolyard tit-for-tat, “I know. Because I won both.” Touché!
To Senator Jon Kyl, who once questioned the newly inaugurated Obama about the proper mix between tax hikes and budget cuts, Obama offered the gloat, “I won.” To his Republican House opponents of his agenda, Obama snarked, “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.”
Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers. As for those who wanted the Keystone Pipeline built to enhance North American energy independence, jobs, and prosperity, Obama reduced them to obsessed one-issue zealots: “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.” Note of the vast Keystone project the adjective “single” — perhaps as in a single Hoover Dam or a single Golden Gate Bridge.
Critics used to say they opposed Obama’s redistributionist programs, but conceded that he must be a pleasant guy. Supporters lamented Obama’s frequent inattention to detail but reminded everyone how charismatic the president was. Both diagnoses are probably mistaken. Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president.

Obama’s Crusades

How did that line end up in his speech?

By Michael Auslin

There may not be too much to add to the commentary of Jonah, Eliana, and others on President Obama’s condescending and offensive remarks on the Crusades and slavery at the National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, but there a few things I haven’t seen folks say.
After six years, it is so tiring to constantly be lectured to, talked down to, by Barack Obama that at some level, the content doesn’t really matter. It’s the principle of the thing. We elected a commander-in-chief, not a scold-in-chief, but the latter is what the progressive Left, embodied by Obama, sees as its primary role today. They just can’t see the rest of the country, outside the Upper East Side salons and Cambridge and San Francisco dining rooms, as adults. We’re all of us, all 300 million of us, the slightly dim children that need to be lectured to constantly. Sit up, don’t slouch, you’re forgetting your racist past, etc., etc.
Something I have asked myself: Does he really believe what he says, or is it all just for political effect, to send conservatives into a tizzy, eat up the airwaves, and keep us off-balance? He must have known how ridiculous, how unintelligent, and how offensive his comments were going to sound, correct? There’s a pause after he delivers the Crusades remark, you can see it below, and I just wonder, did he know that this was a stupid thing to say?
I hope so, I really do. Maybe he was just caught up in the moment, already committed to the lines — that’s politics — but there’s a pause just slightly longer than usual in his delivery. Maybe he was simply waiting for the profundity of his remarks to sink in, but I want to think that in his head, he was saying, “Gosh, this is really dumb.” But, never having been called on the carpet since, oh, probably Columbia, he is so used to saying whatever comes into his head without any criticism or knock-down, that he just did it.
But that can’t be true, and this is the thing that really depresses me. Even if you haven’t worked in government, the one thing that everyone in Washington, D.C., knows is that no president speaks alone. Every word, every line of every speech goes through multiple, sometimes dozens of hands. From the junior speechwriter, to the head speechwriter, to the assistant to the chief of staff, to the chief of staff, maybe to someone on the National Security Council or the State Department (since this speech talked about foreign issues), there are eyes and eyes and eyes reading the drafts.
No one said, “Wait, this is just stupid.” Or, “Isn’t this irrelevant to today’s threat?” Or, “Man, we’re going to offend about a billion people with this line.” Or at least, no one powerful enough said it. It’s not just the president, it’s that all those arrogant, bright young things around him, from the nameless wordsmith to 46-year-old chief of staff Denis McDonough, thought it was fine to scold us with centuries-old history by equating 21st-century Islamist barbarians with 11th-century medieval Christians. And when they let that speech go through, they showed the rest of us what, not just the president, but everyone working around him really thinks about Western civilization. And, after six years, I know that I should know this, but it depresses me still.
Which brings me to my last observation. We all know how weighty, demanding, crushing the role of president is. We know our presidents are just people, more or less like us. But, as an optimistic culture, we expect our presidents to grow in office, to become wiser, more patient, less arrogant, especially when they no longer have to worry about the next election.
Barack Obama’s speech last week showed that, after six years, he has not grown at all. Most likely, he can’t grow, and won’t in his last two years in office. He has a no more subtle or informed understanding of the world, of history, of the beauty and power of our imperfect Western civilization after leading its greatest country for more than half a decade.
Even worse, after all the travel, the rallies, the parades, he still has so little understanding of We, the People. He still thinks we need to be reminded of a bloody European past that happened 900 years ago, because that makes us, all of us small-l liberals, humble in the face of Islamist brutality. “There but for the grace of God go we,” he is saying, because he is still filled with every prejudice that Columbia and Harvard and the South Side of Chicago instilled in him. Some may say that’s because he’s not intellectually equipped to grow and transcend, but I can only think it’s because he doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to, because no one ever says, “Enough, this is dumb. And wrong.”
One of the more pretentious Washington phrases tossed around is “adult supervision.” It’s a way of demeaning and dismissing the arguments of those you disagree with, of saying that they’re simply acting or thinking emotionally. The ones we should listen to, of course, are the “adults,” the right-thinking ones. Not surprisingly, this phrase is usually used by progressives.
But if there ever was a time to say that the White House, and Barack Obama, lack adult supervision, well, this one is as good as his dozens of other ignorant, condescending insults to the American people. But it’s okay, Mr. President, the truth is, we have changed, even if you have not.
— Michael Auslin is a frequent contributor to National Review Online.

Islam’s Countless Slaves

If President Obama wants to draw a moral equivalence between religions, he should know some history.
 

By Ralph Peters 

 

Defending Islam in front of our religious leaders last week, our president not only invoked the Crusades but seized the opportunity to excoriate the United States for formerly justifying chattel slavery in Christian terms, his tone suggesting that chains are rattling still. Indeed, along with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
But let us, unlike our president, be honest. The Prophet Mohammed is reputed to have freed dozens of his slaves and to have encouraged his followers to release theirs. But the caliphs who followed the Prophet found that admonition inconvenient. In no time, Islamic jurisprudence produced detailed codes for seizing, keeping, and punishing non-Muslim slaves.
And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.
Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.
As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.
Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.
Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.
To be fair, the eunuchs who survived the procedure were valued as harem guards and for other positions of trust. A few became viziers. Nonetheless, one suspects that there was never an abundance of volunteers.
But . . . but this was all long ago, right? “Mais non!” as Secretary Kerry might exclaim. President Obama was absolutely correct when, in the heady, early days of his regime, he proclaimed that Islam had been important to American history since the republic’s founding. He referred, no doubt, to the Barbary pirates, the only Muslim connection from that period. Those North African raiders seized hundreds of American ships over decades, enslaving crews and passengers or, at their most merciful, holding them for ransom. Still, the president was correct that we owe them a debt. The depredations of the Barbary pirates confirmed the need for a peacetime U.S. Navy, the ships of which now dominate the waters the pirates once haunted.
But our first encounter with “violent extremism” in the Muslim world was merely a sideshow in the endless pageant of Islam’s enslavement of others, especially Africans. It’s one of the saddest travesties I know, that some American blacks, yearning for a refreshed identity, created the Black Muslim movement. No religion did greater harm to Africans than Islam. Endless slave caravans crossed the Sahara, while Arab slave ships plied the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, their fetid hulls full of “Zanj.” The Swahili coast of East Africa was a vast exporter of slaves from the interior, while Muslim Berbers, Arabs, and converted blacks looted the savannahs of the Sahel and the West African forests to their south. Even after the European slave trade began to expand, Muslims remained the brokers almost everywhere.
But that was then, right? Nope. Long after Europeans and Americans banned the trade and outlawed slavery, Arabs and other Muslims continued to take black slaves by the hundreds of thousands. In light of his Kenyan ancestry on his father’s side, our president should be more aware of who has tormented Africa since the seventh century, for nigh on 1,400 years (and counting).
Our treasured ally, Saudi Arabia, outlawed slavery only in 1962 — although a mere law didn’t kill the practice. Mauritania had to re-outlaw slavery just a decade ago. And human-rights advocates insist that slavery still exists in states such as Mali, Chad, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa where Islam is dominant.
These days, the new emirs of the Middle East have legalized slavery in the form of guest-worker programs — in which Nepalese or Filipinos are treated little better than the outright slaves of yesterday. Surely our president will want to take all this up with a conclave of Muslim clerics and scholars?
A conservative estimate of the number of human beings enslaved by the Muslim rulers of the greater Middle East and North Africa over those 14 centuries would approach, if not exceed, a hundred million (this is apart from the tens of millions butchered from southeastern Europe to Sindh and the Punjab). White, black, brown — try to imagine the victims — marched south from Polish villages and Hungarian cities, from settlements on the Dnieper and after battles lost on the Danube, hauled across the Indian Ocean in airless hulls or driven through the vastness of the Sahara . . . surely, our president has compassion for them, too, and not just for slaves brought to our shores by those despicable Christians? Surely, “Reverend” Al Sharpton can spare a benediction for the “many millions gone” to the slave markets of the Muslim world?
For all our disagreements on facts and their value, President Obama and I share one aesthetic taste: As a tourist in Muslim lands, I, too, have found the call to prayer beautiful at times. But I wonder how it sounded to those countless millions enslaved by our president’s cherished “religion of peace.”
— Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man, a prize-winning novelist, and, to the dismay of his left-leaning friends, Fox News Strategic Analyst.

Identification Chart, by Michael Ramirez