I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: John Kelly is a more polished version of Donald Trump. Like his master, he has a tendency to shoot off his mouth and say horrible, xenophobic things. And that is why General/White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is malaka of the week.
Kelly firmly believes in pulling up the drawbridge and excluding immigrants. He also believes in demeaning and degrading those who want to emigrate to our country. Kelly expressed these views in the crudest possible terms yesterday:
“Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”
Here’s a reminder to Kelly of how his own people, the Irish, were viewed in their early days in America.
That was a cartoon by Thomas Nast depicting an Irishman as a sub-human, drunken papist who got his orders from the Catholic Church. Nast was a legendary 19th century satirist who worked for high-toned publications such as Harper’s Weekly and the New York Herald-Tribune. But Nast also trafficked in the bigoted stereotypes of his day.
I assume that Kelly would find Nast’s anti-Irish cartoons to be offensive. I wish that he’d understand the analogy, but I have my doubts. Like the president* he serves, he is incapable of empathy or understanding the other person’s point of view. And that is why John Kelly is malaka of the week.
How does John Kelly’s own family background stack up against his demands for immigrants?
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Here’s John Kelly’s maternal grandmother Teresa as a child in the 1900 census.
Her father, a day laborer named John DeMarco had been here for 18 years.
He had not become a citizen.
He could not read, write, or speak English.#resistancegenealogy pic.twitter.com/pmnHD4Yobq
— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018
The 1930 census shows those great-grandparents living with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, one of whom was Kelly’s mother.
John DeMarco had been here for 47 years and was not an American citizen (“AL”). Crescenza had been here for 37 years and spoke no English. pic.twitter.com/5Nyfsu48y0
— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018
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From https://mashable.com/2018/05/11/general-john-kelly-immigrants-family/#VGd8nMukDsqx