“If you can only be tall
because somebody is on
their knees, then you have
a serious problem.”
Toni Morrison, quoted in
MotherJones.com
“To the old, the old do not
look old.”
Novelist Howard Jacobson,
quoted in the Financial Times
“Books serve to show a
man that those original
thoughts of his aren’t very
new, after all.”
President Abraham Lincoln,
quoted in INews.co.uk
“Moderation is a fatal
thing. Nothing succeeds
like excess.”
Oscar Wilde, quoted in The
New York Review of Books
“A narcissist is
someone better looking
than you are.”
Gore Vidal,
quoted in Forbes.com
“To wear your heart on
your sleeve isn’t a very
good plan; you should
wear it inside, where it
functions best.”
Former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, quoted in
the Montreal Gazette
“Waldo should have
to find himself like the
rest of us do.”
Comedian Hannah Gadsby,
quoted in The New York TimesTalking points
Wit &
Wisdom
Re
ute
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NEWS 17
Poll watch
Q43% of Republicans now
think the nation’s problems
could be addressed more
effectively if presidents
“didn’t have to worry so
much about Congress or
the courts”—up from 14%
who thought so in 2016.
Overall, 66% of Americans
say it is too risky to expand
presidential power in order
to deal with the country’s
problems.
Pew Research Center
Q57% of Americans ap-
prove of letting Central
American refugees into the
country, up from 51% in
December.
GallupICE raids: Why not charge the employer?
ICE’s cruelhearted immi-
gration sweep last week in
rural Mississippi is a “win
for corporate exploitation,”
said Adrian Carrasquillo in
NewRepublic.com. About 600
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents raided six
chicken-processing plants and
arrested 680 suspected unau-
thorized workers—one of the
largest operations in ICE his-
tory. Agents bound the workers’ hands and took
them away on buses, “leaving children sobbing
and wives tearfully saying goodbye to husbands
through chain-link fences.” Some kids returned
from school to find that their dad and mom were
both in federal custody. Magdalena Gomez Gre-
gorio, 11, pleaded for her father’s release. “Gov-
ernment, please show some heart,” she said. “He’s
not a criminal.” But once again, “the cruelty is the
point.” Not charged was her father’s employer,
poultry giant Koch Foods, which actively recruits
undocumented immigrants and pays them pitiful
wages to cut, debone, and package chicken under
miserable, sometimes dangerous conditions.Liberals love to “hyperventilate about ‘the chil-
dren,’” said Eddie Scarry in WashingtonExaminer.
com. But by refusing to reform the asylum system
and blocking immigration enforcement, Demo-
crats created this mess. Migrants know they can
“waltz” across the border “so long as they claimasylum and come with chil-
dren.” While they wait in the
U.S. as courts process a back-
log of about 1 million cases,
“Democrats will breathe
fire on anyone who tries to
deport them.” In Missis-
sippi, ICE already released
271 workers from custody
pending hearings, prioritizing
“those who had children.”
Rather than vilifying agents
for enforcing the law, said John Daniel Davidson
in TheFederalist.com, why not address the root of
the problem? We should “expand the number of
work visas” to address massive labor shortages in
low-skill fields. If farms and meat producers used
only American workers, “we would all pay much
more for meat, fruit, and vegetables.”The raid on the chicken plant underlines President
Trump’s “profound hypocrisy” on immigration,
said Raul Reyes in CNN.com. His own company
“has a history of using illegal labor” at its golf
courses and construction sites. Nationwide, just a
handful of employers of illegal immigrants were
successfully prosecuted in the past year. Arresting
migrants is nothing but a distraction, said Paul
Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. The number of
people coming to or crossing the border is soar-
ing, and the “big, beautiful wall” hasn’t material-
ized. By any measure, Trump’s immigration policy
is “a complete and utter failure.”“For once, a major Hollywood film studio was
about to release a movie sympathetic to Trump
voters,” said Kyle Smith in NationalReview.com.
Then, “our film-critic-in-chief got it canceled.”
Universal Pictures’ The Hunt—originally sched-
uled to be released Sept. 27—is a withering satire
depicting a pack of “private jet–loving Davos
globalists” who kidnap and hunt a group of
red-state “deplorables.” The targets are chosen
because they express anti-choice positions or are
deemed racists. “War is war,” says one coastal
elite as she shoves “a stiletto heel through the eye
of a denim-clad hillbilly.” But President Trump
and the Fox News pundits who “egged each
other into a frenzy about the film” lack any sense
of irony, and failed to understand that the “posh
urban TED Talk–goers” are the bad guys; their
haughty cruelty makes audiences sympathize with
the hunted red staters. “The Right ought to make
it clear that we are not only not offended by the
premise of The Hunt, we’re delighted.”It wasn’t just the Right that put The Hunt on
the shelf, said Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel in
The Hollywood Reporter. In a “fraught politi-
cal climate” made even worse by several massshootings, Universal got queasy about the R-rated
film’s explicit violence, and some ads for the film
were pulled. The studio even reshot some scenes.
When and whether the film will be released is
now unknown. No one, liberal or conservative,
should be happy about that, said Caspar Salmon
in The Guardian. Universal officials canceled a
satirical film the president denounced as “racist.”
This is an “overt act of censorship.” Universal
should be “standing up for artists’ liberty of
expression.”This was “a perfect storm of disastrous tim-
ing,” not censorship, said Owen Gleiberman in
Variety.com. Releasing The Hunt in the wake of
the El Paso and Dayton shootings would have
been “sheer folly.” In this supercharged climate,
a movie about “Americans ritually shooting
other Americans” over politics would not feel
like “megaplex escapism.” But I suspect that the
movie will not stay on the shelf forever. Universal
spent a lot of money to make it and will wait
for a better moment to put it in theaters. Indeed,
a movie that was originally titled Red State vs.
Blue State might seem more “ideally timed for the
presidential civil war of 2020.”The Hunt: An incendiary film is shelved
Federal officers with arrested workers