December 14, 2015--GOP Goose-Steppers

We need to calm down.

Those who are fearing that we are about to be bombed unrelentingly by ISIS need to get a grip. It's bad enough as it is and so the last thing we need is to get all hysterical and make things worse by overreacting.

Those drawn to Donald TRUMP, rallying to his bluster, believing his xenophobic proposals to suspend   the admission of Muslims to the country will keep us safe, need to take a deep breath and at least one step back.

And those of us on the progressive left also need to get control of ourselves--no matter what we think about him and his likely unconstitutional ideas, he is no Hitler.

Though that is what I'm hearing from liberal friends and reading in some hyped-up op-ed columns in the New York Times.

About the latter, on Saturday, Timothy Egan, in his piece, "Another Indecent Proposal," defamed TRUMP and his followers by labeling them crypto-nazis. With TRUMP assigned the Hitler role.

To make matters even more outrageous, the Egan piece, when it first appeared on the NY Times website, was more blatantly titled--"Goose-Steppers in the GOP."

Egan and some of my friends need to have a drink.

And while doing so, to give him his due, they need to quote TRUMP accurately. What he is saying may be bad enough on its own as not to require citation out of context.

For example, out-of-context Egan writes--

Trump's proposal--"a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering there United States"--is not just flotsam from the lunatic fringe. Well it is. But the fringe is huge.

Whereas in a campaign press release TRUMP actually said--

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on.

Or as he put it more colloquially--"Until we can figure out what the hell is going on."

What TRUMP said and what Egan said he said is quite different.

We may still deplore what TRUMP is saying and implying about Muslims, but we diminish the effectiveness of our deploring by intentionally not quoting him honestly.

And we can't just ignore his charge that our "country's representatives" at the moment can't "figure out what the hell is going on."

They can't.

Homeland Security people this past weekend acknowledged that they really blew it when they reviewed the application for a visa from the Pakistani women who joined her American-born husband in perpetrating the San Bernardino massacre. For years, openly on social media, she expressed interest in joining in violent terrorist activities against the West. And though her application was reviewed three times, no one picked that up. And the rest is tragic history.

It probably would have helped if we had, sorry, taken a TRUMP-pause to figure out what was going on with this and her.

Here's a little more from the Egan op-ed--

And sure, all the little Hitlers probably don't amount to a hill of beans. But what about the 35 percent of Republican voters on the New York Times/CBS News poll, who say they're all in with the man sieg heiled by aspiring brownshirts and men in white sheets?

For me, when someone so quickly starts making Hitler analogies, I know they're out of control and are not thinking with their heads but with their fears and emotions.

Hitler was Hitler. TRUMP is TRUMP. As I said, that's bad enough.