"Can Anything Stop the Confirmation of Jeff Sessions?" - Slate

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/jeff_sessions_racism_sadly_doesn_t_matter.html

This is worth reading - I am copying the end of it, below

"I wrote during the campaign about the dangers of Donald Trump’s slick efforts to decouple his language from his positions, and the ways in which he persistently argued that his words in no way reflected or mirrored his convictions or beliefs. He has done an equally deft job in arguing that his actions too—ranging from his failure to release his taxes, his behavior toward women, his refusal to abide by the norms of good business—are not indicative of his character. Trump’s absolute mastery of the argument that neither one’s words nor deeds are good predictors of one’s convictions has now spread to the people with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Like him, they are distanced from everything they have either said or done with claims that nobody has the right to pass judgment; that we have no idea what’s in a person’s heart; that the real villains here are the ones who assume a person saying and doing racist things is racist. I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the entire American justice system were premised on the now-commonplace assumption that you can know nothing about anyone despite his words and behavior. This goes far beyond gaslighting. This is the suggestion that there is no wrongdoing that is ever provable (unless your name is Hillary Clinton).


The final irony of this new era in which we find ourselves—in which the only true measure of a man’s character is what his friends say about him on Fox News—is that more and more, when called upon to explain Donald Trump’s dangerous and divisive choices in his first weeks as president-elect, we are ordered by his late-to-the-party boosters to simply “stop worrying” and “trust him.”

No seriously. We should stand down and just let him unite us. Never mind the divisive words, nor the deeds guaranteed to foment precisely the kind of hate and mistrust we now endure daily. They don’t matter. They are just words. Just deeds. We owe it to our country to give him a chance. Trust him. Trust Bannon. Trust Sessions. What could go wrong?"

[Ford_Prefect]

1. I have very different sentiments about what we should do with Trump et al, and they are not polite.