I've Been Quiet

     I've been quiet.  What am I supposed to do or say when federal forces are operating as an army of occupation in a major metropolitan area?  When they are shooting people and spinning tales about the circumstances, narrative not corroborated by video recordings of the same events?

     These are bad times.  And they are not improved by a never-ending litany of distortions, sneaky language and outright lies from the federal government -- especially the Executive Branch.  They're arresting, abusing and killing protestors, despite a stated intent to round up illegal immigrants, supposedly concentrating on "the worst of the worst," a category that apparently includes five-year-old children.

     If the idea was to go after people in this country without due authorization, why wouldn't the effort start in a red state with a large population of such people, like Texas or Florida?  With a cooperative state government and a population that voted them in, wouldn't the process run much more smoothly?  And would it not a be a model program they could use to demonstrate their predicted benign effects to the entire county?  Instead, immigration enforcement has been deployed as a kind of punishment, in a state under the governorship of a former opposition party Vice-Presidential candidate, in a city that previously erupted into violence in the wake of a suspicious police killing.  It appears to be intended to create exactly the kind of chaos and harm that is making daily headlines.

     It's an authoritarian display, one that does the country no good and one that, despite press conferences increasingly askew from reality, appears to be backfiring on the President's party.  And yet it looks like their plan is to continue and intensify the beatings until things improve for them.

     I wouldn't bet on that happening.