The Rude Pundit: The Immigrant "Invasion" Is Just WMDs All Over Again

The Rude Pundit
12/20/2024
The Immigrant "Invasion" Is Just WMDs All Over Again


There is no immigrant invasion at the southern border of the United States. That needs to be said at the outset any time you wanna talk about What's Wrong With Our Country. No matter how many times people say it, no matter how much it's covered, no matter even if elected Democrats agree, it's simply not true. The immigration system in this country is broken but that's because Republicans have refused to fund the courts needed to quickly process asylum claims and other cases.

The idea of an immigrant "invasion," as Donald Trump (who we really elected president for a second time - I know, it's fucked up, right?) puts it constantly, has one purpose, and that's to scare the public with a lie so that a cabal of power-mad assholes can remake the nation to suit their warped, contorted viewpoints. That should sound incredibly familiar for those of us with brains that actively remember shit more than a tweet-cycle old.

It's weapons of mass destruction all over again.

Oh, sweet children of America, you need to know that in the scary months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (that's the "9/11" you hear about every year, in case you weren't born yet or are fucking dumb), the administration of President George W. Bush decided that the nation of Iraq needed to be attacked and remade as a "democracy," free of its dictator Saddam Hussein. The fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks and the fact that the dictator of the country that did have a great deal to do with them, Saudi Arabia, was apparently off-limits was not something you were allowed to say openly lest you be labeled anti-American. Besides, we were assured, endlessly, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, big missiles, perhaps nukes, shit that could fuck up, say, Israel or even our allies in Europe or maybe even the USA itself. So we had to invade Iraq, take it over, and prevent the mad leader of the country from unleashing hell on the earth. In 2002, the president was given blanket authorization to use military force against Iraq by a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress. Again and again, we were told that we needed to bomb the fuck of the country to prevent a mushroom cloud over DC. Anyone who disputed that idea was treated as a traitor, even if you were a veteran. Ads were run declaring your support of terrorists if you dared say that WMDs (as the shorthand went) were a lie. The foreign policy and economic policy of the United States was remade around the goals of eliminating WMDs and turning Iraq into a shining example of freedom in that region of the world. If that sounds weird and hyperbolic, if anything, I'm understating how this shit went.

And, of course, it was all a lie. There weren't WMDs. The whole thing was bullshit, but two-thirds of Americans believed Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Two-thirds believed the WMD lie. All of them were wrong (I could say, "All of you were wrong" since I was right, but I don't wanna be smug about it), but Democrats and Republicans leaned into the lie because of the fear of opposing such a huge part of the population. Nearly three-quarters of the country supported the war, which eventually changed to over half coming around to saying it was mistake. But the damage was done to Iraq and to the US, even if the defeat of the GOP in 2008 was one of the outcomes of the entire fucktastrophe.

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https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-immigrant-invasion-is-just-wmds-all.html