You Poor, Dumb Sucker.

I want to confess something to everyone now. I am terminally naive. When I meet someone, or work with someone I trust, I overshare. When I have gone into business or made an investment, I trust that a piece of paper with signatures is binding. Because of that simple-mindedness, I have missed the brass ring more than once. As a manager, I have been accused of being mean or unfair when I have always thought that I was probably too soft-hearted, and was called that by one co-worker.

In one case recently, an old friend and colleague, my boss at the time, knew the facts of a situation and refused to step forward. Like a politician, fear of jeopardizing one's livelihood can cut a lot of family ties.

My long suffering wife of nearly 42 years, knows this about me and is still here, resigned to my hopeless, ingenuous lack of business sense, I suppose.

So, I am the ultimate wide-eyed naif who has spent a life in journalism thinking the things I say or report actually might matter. I have labored under the delusion that if people simply see the actual facts of the matter, they might rub their collective chins and say, "Ah, I see where that was wrong."

Ah, you poor, dumb sucker.

What I see now is, that even if those facts of the matter are as intensely personal as one could imagine, shaking an unshakeable belief is well nigh impossible. A couple of recent stories proved to me that either through self-interest or simple stubbornness, changing a point of view can be as hard as pulling a sword from a stone.

Case in point, Bradley Bartell of Wisconsin. Now, Brad, a die hard Trump supporter and voter, has no doubt seen on the evening news, the questions being raised by at least some of the immigration raids and deportations, ostensibly of truly bad guys. But Brad saw first hand how rough it could be when his Peruvian-born wife, Camila, was arrested and sent to a detention camp in Louisiana for overstaying her student visa, even though married to a citizen and working toward legal residency.

Any regrets about his vote last November? Nope. In fact, he is contemplating having to move to Peru with her. So the prospect of either losing his wife or his country isn't enough to shake his belief in Donald Trump.

Or this from Newsweek...

Earlier this month, ICE detained Jensy Machado, a naturalized U.S. citizen, in northern Virginia.

"They just got out of the car with the guns in their hands and say, turn off the car, give me the keys, open the window, you know. Everything was really fast," he told Telemundo 44 and NBC 4 Washington.

Machado added: "I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals."

The one that convinced me of the futility of my Quixotic quest, was this couple in west Texas.

Their names haven't been shared, for understandable reasons. They are the parents of a 6-year-old girl who died from the measles outbreak in that part of the state. The logo at the bottom of the screenshot is for the Children's Health Defense, a group of quacks formerly led by our new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Thanks to his asinine example, they didn't have their child vaccinated and she died of complications from the disease. And astonishingly, they stand by that decision, saying the vaccine can be harmful. OK, not as harmful as death, but...

From the Huffington Post...

Despite their heartbreaking loss, the couple said that they believe it was their daughter’s time and “she was too good for this Earth,” according to the translator assisting the interview.

“He says that God does no wrong and he wanted this to wake people up,” their translator said, speaking for the father.

As a believer, I say, don't blame this one on the Almighty. You chose not to vaccinate your child, and still rationalize her unnecessary death. They still say they wouldn't have changed anything they did, or more correctly, didn't do.

Frankly, how do you deal with that in any rational universe?

And then there is our newly minted Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Here is the Wikipedia entry on his early life...

He is the second son and third child of Mario Rubio Reina and Oriales (née García) Rubio. His parents were Cubans who began living in the United States in 1956 during the regime of Fulgencio Batista, two and a half years before Fidel Castro ascended to power after the Cuban Revolution.   Neither of Rubio's parents were U.S. citizens at the time of Rubio's birth in 1971 in Miami. They applied for U.S. citizenship and were naturalized in 1975. Some relatives of Rubio's were admitted to the U.S. as refugees.

So, Marco is one of those "birthright citizens" his boss wants to eliminate. And his folks weren't even fleeing the Red Menace. Batista wasn't a commie, just a crook. In addition, according to the Guardian Newspaper...

The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that it would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans welcomed into the US under a Biden-era sponsorship process, according to a notice posted to the Federal Register and signed by the homeland security chief, Kristi Noem.

The new policy affects people who are already in the US and who came under the humanitarian parole program. It follows an earlier Trump administration decision to end what it called the “broad abuse” of the humanitarian parole, a long-standing legal tool presidents have used to allow people from countries where there is war or political instability to enter and temporarily live in the US.

I confess to wondering what Marco thinks of all this? Would his parents have been able to escape Cuba today? They are both gone, so he doesn't have to face them with some sort of sputtering answer for this familial betrayal.

To be fair, I personally doubt he agrees with it, but it is also fair to say, he has acquiesced out of personal ambition. So, don't expect an H.R. McMaster - style resignation on principle.

Now, look, should bad actors, criminals and other miscreants be locked up or at the least, sent home? Of course. But like Elon Musk's group of teenaged mutant ninja HR guys, ICE is using a cannon, not a rifle and rounding up all the melanin-challenged folks they can find. Let God sort 'em out.

But figure this one out, though it should be easy. South Africa has passed a new law. The law allows the South African government to expropriate land from private parties if it’s in the public interest and allows for expropriation without compensation, but only if negotiations for a reasonable settlement have failed. The government has defended the law as targeting unused land and says private property rights are protected. It says it does not allow land to be taken arbitrarily.

No land has been taken and it appears to be the kind of eminent domain law that we have here. But, white South Africans feel it is aimed at them and at the behest of a white South African he knows, President Trump has cut off relations with the South African government and offered refugee status to whites who want to emigrate.

Yep, send us your tired, your poor, your huddled white masses...

We have that kind of law right here in the US, in fact, and land doesn't have to be taken for a community purpose. When the Keystone Pipeline was built through Texas to transport Canadian oil, landowners were forced to take what was offered for the right of way, to benefit a private company. Here's a story I did about one of them:

But back to my original premise. If I were to interview Marco and ask directly about this 180 from his family history, would he have to admit his hypocrisy? I imagine, like our buddy Brad or the shameful mom and dad in Texas, he would find a way to rationalize the spinning noise from his parents graves.

So, shameless denial, or reversal of professed beliefs is the order of the day. Oh, it may cost you a wife or child, or your parents heavenly disapproval, but you can't admit you got it wrong, or express any regret at all. You have to go down with flags flying.

In fact, hypocrisy is the order of the day. Democrats don't believe in government shutdowns, except some do now. And Republicans used to see a shutdown as a useful tool, until it became unthinkable now. Republicans hate electric cars, well, except Teslas. Democrats love electric cars, well, except Teslas. Though to be fair, it's the owner they hate. Everyone makes electric cars now and no Chevys or Fords are being set alight.

I have a sneaking suspicion, by the way, that Teslas are actually self-immolating out of simple shame.

Incidentally, my Outlaw colleague Chris Newlin has a very amusing piece on the Tesla controversy, and quoted Trump as speculating whether all those EV's he hated would someday be made only in China. He should ask his co-President...

Tesla's Gigafactory Shanghai, its largest production hub outside the United States, is a major manufacturing plant in China, producing the Model 3 and Model Y, and serving as a key global export hub. 

So, my quest goes on. Like some sort of media Diogenes, I'm looking for an honest person, any person, who is open to new information and can adjust when it's presented. To be frank, I'm losing hope.