[ I rate that meme as “mostly true.” There were no sanctuary cities and states arrayed against Obama. His I.C.E. operations were not as sweeping, but that’s because his predecessor hadn’t deliberately stopped enforcing immigration laws. Obama and Trump both employed Tom Homan to oversee I.C.E. operations, something the Axis media notes as seldom as possible.]
I have rarely made one of my replies to commenters a “Comment of the Day,” and I’m not about to today but one of my long retorts this morning made me realize how absolutely tangential and non-substantive the arguments being made by the Mad Left to support defunding or metaphorically castrating I.C.E are. I challenged an intrepid and respected commenter to justify the dishonest and misleading lyrics sung by a Bruce Spingsteen wannabe, genuinely hoping that he could enlighten me.
But the esteemed Democrat contrarian had nothing; just repurposed “Off the pigs!” and “Fry ’em like bacon!” -inspired stuff, as I suspected. When you begin an inquiry having already decided that one side is evil because, you know, they just are, it does not tend to generate an objective analysis. (The exchange is here.)
Notably absent from the courageous response was a feasible suggestion of a better policy to effectively and quickly remove millions and millions of illegal aliens from our land. Without that, the clear message is, “Ha Ha! We opened the borders, and now there’s nothing you can do about it with being compared to the Nazis hunting down the Frank family!”
I’ll be happy to see lively inquiries today on other topics, of course.
Ethics Alarms 
This Minnesota thing really is just the ‘sixties anti-war movement warmed over sixty years later, isn’t it? A cultural reversion to the mean for Baby Boomers. Depressing and disappointing. You’d have thought our generation could have done better. I thought we’d all grown up. Turns out, we just got older.
Many of your generation did grow up. Some of them didn’t and went into academia, politics and entertainment. Over the decades, they have cultivated a narrative of the ’60s as the be-all-and-end-all of cultural experience and moral rectitude. This has done incalculable damage to subsequent generations.
Let’s hear it for more long retorts.
I, on the other hand, was spared Springsteen’s Flash-in-the-pan/Pie-in-the-sky anthem. This week, I read “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, “Death on the Nile” by Agatha Christie, “The Good Earth” by Pearl Buck and am partway through “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde.
Mein Gott, AM. You’re doing at warp speed what I’ve been trying to do for decades: read the books on my high school summer reading list. I’m not a speed reader. I could have never survived grad school. I couldn’t have kept up.
Sylvia Plath? “The Bell Jar?” Can you explain why girls in college in the late ‘sixties were enamored of a poetess famous for having committed suicide? Always struck me as hilariously morbid.
” . . . were enamored of . . .”
Thank you for writing that correctly.
jvb
I think it was more because they were in search of their identities just as the protagonist in the book was, albeit sans the mental illness. I can’t speak for Plath’s poetry, but “The Bell Jar” struck me as a book of its time. There were things to admire; things to mock.
Best lot of the week, so far, has been “The Good Earth”. Of course, I also liked “The Grapes of Wrath”, so I must have an affinity for the poor attempting to overcome adversity. “Dorian Gray” isn’t bad. Wilde’s wit notwithstanding, I cannot get too much into stories that have English Manners at their core.
What’s wrong with these people?
Nurse banned from working in his home state of Florida after saying he wouldn’t anesthetize MAGA supporters | Daily Mail Online
Oh, that’s nothing. This nurse called for people to inject them with paralytics and poison them.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15506177/nurse-fired-virginia-hospital-ICE-video.html
This nurse just wished Caroline Leavitt to suffer a severe injury during the delivery of her child.
https://www.news4jax.com/news/florida/2026/01/29/viral-tiktok-video-costs-florida-nurse-her-license-heres-what-she-said/
Do note what I said previously about this being cult behavior that probably leads to mental illness. My stepson told me that he is the only person he knows of at his hospital who isn’t on psychiatric medications.
Is this Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “Fight! Fight! Fight” moment?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/man-charges-rep-ilhan-omar-town-hall/story?id=129618409
Apparently, she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar. Not sure why or if there is meaning behind apple cider vinegar . . .
jvb
The #BringBackOurGirls thing was one of the most idiotic statements I had ever seen.
(1) They aren’t ‘our’ girls. They were Nigerian.
(2) They were Christian girls kidnapped by Muslims. No president pushed for the advancement of Muslim countries (OK, Shia Muslim countries) harder than Obama did.
(3) The one person in the country with the power to actually rescue ‘our girls’ was Michelle’s husband, the President of the United States.
So, why is she telling ME to ‘Bring Back Our Girls’? I mean, did she expect me to outfit an expedition to Nigeria, kill a huge number of Muslims, and rescue these girls from the sex slavery they were most likely being subjected to? Would Michelle Obama have authorized me to acquire machine guns, grenades, mortars and other heavy weapons, perhaps from the Institute of Peace? If I did that, would she have backed me up when Democrats called for me to be arrested and charged with some kind of crime (like possessing the non-permitted NFA items from the Institute of Peace)?
No, she was begging terrorist to bring back “our” girls, because terrorists are always persuaded by virtue-signaling, rich politician’s wives making selfies with frowny-faces.