Contributors

Monday, August 15, 2016

Trump's Bold New Antiterrorism Plan Is a Questionnaire!

Donald Trump's immigration and anti-terrorism plans are dumb and getting dumber. 

His first plan involved simply banning all Muslim immigrants because they might be terrorists. How would he know they were Muslim? He'd ask them. Because terrorists would never think of lying!

His latest plan will be announced today:
In the speech, Mr. Trump will call for greater scrutiny in screening immigrants, particularly from countries he has described as “exporters” of terrorism. The plan would be to have people answer a questionnaire that could press them on their commitment to “our basic principles of tolerance and pluralism,” on issues ranging from gay rights to women’s rights, Mr. Miller said. If that is not effective, visas could be banned from certain areas of the world.
Yes! Defeating terrorists with paperwork! They will never be able to lie on a questionnaire!

The irony is that Trump's own supporters and the vast majority of conservative Republicans don't believe in "our basic principles of tolerance and pluralism!" Trump's new plan would prevent most Republicans from entering the country.

Trump supporters appararently want to ban all Muslims and think all Mexicans are rapists, based on how much they cheered when Trump spewed that bile. He won the Republican nomination based on those two intolerant and non-pluralistic sentiments.

Trump pays lip service to gay rights (he had to in order to get that campaign cash from Peter Thiel), but the vast majority of conservative Republicans don't believe in equal rights for gay and transgendered people. Witness all the whining about making cakes for gay weddings and all the preposterous bathroom bills flooding Republican statehouses. And of course they are dead-set against a woman's right to control her own body, many of them opposing even birth control.

When people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, proclaim their wholehearted support for Trump, you can be sure they don't believe Trump means any of this drivel he spouts about "tolerance and pluralism."

Trump refuses to acknowledge that we're already vetting immigrants from countries that are "exporters" of terrorism with far more stringent procedures than his ridiculous questionnaire. They're subjected to background checks that take months and years to complete. They're interviewed by people who are trained to spot terrorists. These interviewers ask follow-up questions when they sense evasion or mendacity. Something that a questionnaire simply can't do.

Yes, occasionally bad people get in -- or just as likely, they're born here, like the San Bernadino and Orlando shooters. That's the dilemma of a free and open society, and the risk you take when you're the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But Americans are supposed to tough. Should we cower and hide and let millions of innocent people be slaughtered by the likes of ISIS? The more we help oppressed people the more support we'll have in the future, which we need to beat terrorists and tyrants like ISIS, Assad and Putin, who has worsened the civil war in Syria, using it to destabilize Europe with millions of refugees.

Yet Trump talks about cutting deals with Putin to "defeat ISIS," which really means letting Assad stay in power. But it was Assad's crackdown on Arab Spring demonstrators demanding democracy and freedom that sparked the Syrian civil war, which is how ISIS gained so much territory in the first place. Last week Trump "sarcastically" called Obama the founder of ISIS, but the most effective recruiting tools for the terrorist organization have been the wars started by Bashar al-Assad and George W. Bush (Trump himself blamed Bush for 9/11 and ISIS when running against Jeb!(!)).


A questionnaire to fight terrorism? Sheesh! Who's running the Trump campaign? This latest plan sounds like something a lackey in H.R. thought up during lunch hour.

3 comments:

VoteLibertarian said...

Perhaps the saddest commentary on the state of American politics is that one candidate for whom it is completely impossible to vote will win the election because the alternative is a full-on trainwreck. And there is significant percentage of the country who believes that is OK. Hillary could not run any commercials, not hold any rallys, not give any speeches, and she will still win. And there is a large percentage of the country that thinks that is OK.

Mark Ward said...

Why is it not OK? What's wrong with Hillary?

VoteLibertarian said...

By inference you are saying that if Hillary were a Republican you would not be tearing her apart for her multitude of failures.