The Great ICE Melt
or What I Thaw at the Revolution
And now for the non-surprise of the week:
You may remember my having mentioned in an earlier post that Uncle Ned Lamont and Ding Dong Tong decided to double down on the criminality of illegal immigrants by interfering with the activity of ICE agents. Those two boneheads made four classic mistakes, all of which were perfectly predictable given who they are:
Their plan was bad.
Their execution was worse.
They overestimated their juice.
They underestimated their opponent.
You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know Uncle Ned put a bazooka to his head when he said this:
Sometimes you think maybe Trump is spouting off in that first couple of months of his administration. You don’t have to respond to every provocation.
By every provocation, of course, Uncle Ned was referring to President Trump’s determination to enforce the federal immigration law that was in effect long before he was elected the first time and that Uncle Joe Biden chose to ignore. Uncle Ned’s foolish taunt was the rough equivalent of trying to take out a heavy artillery position with a pea shooter, then choking on the peas.
And so all of Uncle Ned and Ding Dong’s lunacy led to this: “US Justice Dept. sues CT over law banning masks, requiring ID for ICE”. Good grief:
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont and Attorney General William Tong on Friday over a new state law that prohibits federal agents from wearing masks and requires them to display identification when operating in the state … The federal government called the law “blatantly unconstitutional,” saying that the state has no authority to tell federal agents what they can and cannot do. The government argues that the law goes against the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that when state and federal laws clash, federal laws override those of the states … Tong said in a statement Monday that the new law was “fully lawful and necessary to protect public safety … We will vigorously defend the law.” [As always, Ding Dong was careful NOT to say which law they’ll defend.]
This fiasco bears on two fields of study, call them academic or scientific as you see fit — psychology and philosophy. First, I’m forever amazed at the perverse twist of human psychology that compels people who know they’re going to be knocked out to lead with their chins. Uncle Ned and Ding Dong had to know they were going to get cold-cocked. But they stuck their chins out anyway. And now Connecticut taxpayers get to pick up the tab for the litigation. Sweet.
Second, this debacle raises, yet again, the age-old philosophical question: Why are the people who sit on powder kegs the ones most likely to play with matches? Nobody knows. Maybe they take some masochistically warped delight in getting their asses blown off. Maybe some pyromaniacs also suffer from explosomania (also known as bombomania), which are subsets of Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). Or maybe some gluttons for punishment like Uncle Ned and Ding Dong are just imbeciles.
What I Wish I Didn’t See
The subhead of this post is a play on the title of Peggy Noonan’s 1990 book, What I Saw at the Revolution, her account of life in the White House during the Reagan years and what it was like to help give voice to a transformative conservative era in American politics. She also describes her transformation from a liberal Democrat to becoming a key voice in the conservative movement:
I was leaving the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University where I was an adjunct professor when I was dropped like a sack of wet cement by a bolt of lightning that hit me in the head. I awoke some hours later in Tisch Hospital and was immediately aware of being able to think much more clearly than I’d been able to think before I was struck. I was acutely aware of the value of empiricism, limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, social order, free-market economics, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, private enterprise, a strong national defense, history, and the Constitution — all the things I’d been taught to disdain as a Democrat. And I realized justice and freedom come from uniting around longstanding, shared moral traditions, not abstract, knee-jerk ideologies and vote-grubbing pandering. I also learned not to play with matches around powder kegs.
Uncle Ned and Ding Dong will never have any such revelations. They’re making promises, giving raises, shielding criminals, and pandering for votes as quickly and recklessly as they can and as shamelessly as they have to. Along with Murf the Smurf Murphy and Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, Uncle Ned and Ding Dong are raising grandstanding to something like Grand Burlesque, like WWE with linguistic gymnastics in place of physical agility.
Ironically, if any of those lightweights had ever watched professional wrestling, they might have learned something from Ric Flair; although, I doubt it: “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.”
My father loved to say, “Don’t send a boy to do a man’s job.” And after the Justice Department announced its lawsuit, Uncle Ned and Ding Dong were seen fighting over clean undershorts in the Boys Department at Marshalls.
Ready, Fire, Aim
The only thing worse than going off half-cocked is going off half-cocked when you have no idea at whom or at what you’re shooting. If I wanted to be fair, I’d say Uncle Ned and Ding Dong are starry-eyed idealists who think moral relativism, defiance of the law, and deliberate ignorance of history are the keys to the Utopian Kingdom. But I don’t. And they’re not.
They’re conniving morons whose self-interest can only be sustained if we’re as starry-eyed and ignorant as they are, with a dose of pathological gullibility thrown in for good measure. And our starry eyes, our ignorance, and our gullibility will be tested — yet again — in November.
In the meantime, their attempts to flout the law won’t cut any ICE.