o_O

[blythechild]

I've been watching the nightly updates from Trumptopia on the news with escalating disbelief. Seriously, how is it even possible that a man of his years be so childish and completely unable to handle himself? Does he even have a staff? Does ANYONE down in that building know what the damn plan is

Comments

[chamekke]

Fellow Canadian here, freshly back from a local solidarity vigil with our local Muslim community. Like most of us, I've been thinking about almost nothing but Quebec City over the past two days.

On Sunday evening, a lone gunman entered a Quebec mosque during prayers and shot up the place. 6 worshipers were killed and 19 were injured. Our country is united in its disgust at this. But today I heard that Trump referenced the mosque shooting in defense of his illegal and unconstitutional travel ban from selected Muslim countries.

As you're probably aware, early reports stated that 2 men had been taken into custody, one of them had a Muslim name. It later transpired that the Muslim gentleman was a witness, one of the worshippers in the mosque, and had actually contacted 911 to summon the police. However, Trump, Spicer and co. immediately jumped to the convenient (but false) conclusion that the violence was committed by Islamic extremists. Of course, the man whom police have now identified as the sole gunman turns out to be a white supremacist lone wolf whose "likes" on Facebook include one Donald J. Trump.

What was really interesting is that CBC failed to report Trump's efforts to blame the shootings on Muslims in its "extended report" on Monday. The kindest interpretation I can put on this is that (1) they were trying to retroactively give the witness some semblance of privacy (somewhat pointlessly since his name was freely reported previously), or (2) CBC are officially in "mourning mode", choosing to emphasize the tragedy aspect of the shooting rather than its political context and impact. Which I think is a dubious strategy, given that in the meantime so many Republican right-wingers were doing their level best to make racist hay out of that very same tragedy.

As implied in Neil McDonald's excellent CBC opinion piece ("Simple truth is Canada's mass shooters are usually white and Canadian-born"), the term terrorism is too often reserved to describe heinous acts committed by people of colour - but when white people commit acts of terror (even or especially against people of colour), it is downplayed as mere crime. I'm grateful that Justin Trudeau deliberately used the word "terrorism" up front to characterize this hateful, xenophobic act of mass murder.

And yes, totally with you on your assessment of Trump. He is appalling, not least because he has a scary gift for promoting the delusion that [white] society is polluted by unwelcome "foreign" forces (races, religions, ideologies) and that the only way to make society "pure" again is to purge it of those forces. Very much Hitlerian, I'm afraid.

[chamekke]

Aaaand they're still at it, the bastards:

PMO [Prime Minister's Office] slams Fox News for incorrect tweet about Quebec City shooting suspect

(The "Moroccan shooting suspect" refers to the man who Quebec police have acknowledged was a witness, NOT a suspect.)

[amberdreams]

I'm gobsmacked, we totally missed Trump trying to blame Islamist extremists - I think the BBC reported it as a probable right wing terrorist almost immediately. All this misprepresentation and downright lying is really making me so mad.