Losing Their Minds

Liberal media and politicians seem to be doing all they can to demonstrate that Trump's contempt for them is amply warranted. Let's let Andrew Klavan describe the latest example of media mendacity:

At a sit-down with California officials worried about sanctuary laws, Trump was questioned by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims. The sheriff complained that the laws kept her from holding the vicious, brutal, murderous members of the MS-13 gang for deportation. "There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it," the sheriff said.

And the president, sympathizing and obviously referring to the gangsters, answered, "You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals."

CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Times and even C-SPAN rushed to tweet this comment in such a way as to make it sound as if Trump were referring to illegal immigrants in general. "Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders 'animals.'" Well, yes, except they left out the descriptor: "But only those immigrants who beat children to death with baseball bats and cut their enemies' hearts out and are animals."

This was such an obvious distortion of the President's words that even they realized that their comments made them look either dishonest or stupid so they rushed to change the narrative to something like the following: Well, okay, Trump wasn't talking about all immigrants but still it's simply awful to dehumanize these gang members who rape, murder, and terrorize - who commit acts of unspeakable savagery. Even though their behavior is bestial, it's simply deplorable that Trump would call them animals.

It's obvious to anyone with a scintilla of common sense that Mr. Trump was speaking metaphorically not literally, but metaphor is apparently too subtle for some to grasp.

According to the Daily Caller (See here for additional examples):

CNBC’s John Harwood claimed, “however repugnant their actions, MS-13 gang members are human beings,” and Vox’s Dylan Matthews argued, “What if MS-13 members are still human and it’s bad to call them animals.”

Well, of course they're still human. It's obvious to anyone not consumed by a visceral hatred of the President that he was employing a metaphor. It's obvious to anyone not blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome that he meant that the vicious and inhumane behavior that characterizes MS-13, their view of both life and other human beings, is accurately and fairly described as that of predatory, conscienceless, amoral beasts.

For the left to make an issue of this seems symptomatic of a loss of all perspective, a loss of their collective mind.

Even so,

BBC reporter Anthony Zurcher insisted, “Referring to any humans as ‘animals’ edges toward the language of genocide.”

This is nonsense. In fact, refusing to condemn savage behavior in the strongest possible terms is to edge toward moral paralysis.

CNN personality Ana Navarro ...said the president was dehumanizing these poor MS-13 members, which put him in the same category as Nazis and slave owners.

The President did no such thing. Those MS-13 members have dehumanized themselves. Trump is simply pointing out that these are people who've chosen to diminish and set aside their own humanity.

In a textbook illustration of hypocrisy, Navarro wanted her viewers to know how reprehensible it was for Trump to allegedly dehumanize someone by calling them an animal and yet in a tweet a couple of years ago she herself used the same language to disparage Mr. Trump:

Regular CNN commentator Ana Navarro joined the crowd attacking President Donald Trump for referring to MS-13 gang members as “animals,” apparently forgetting that she had used the same terminology to attack Trump during the 2016 campaign. Just after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Navarro tweeted her disgust with then candidate Trump.

“Should Donald Trump drop out of the race? Yes,” she tweeted Oct. 10, 2016. “He should drop out of the human race. He is an animal. Apologies to animals.”

Here's another example of a journalist condemning Mr. Trump for doing pretty much the same thing she did not too long ago:

Jennifer Rubin, the self-described “conservative blogger” at the Washington Post, called President Trump’s comments “disgusting,” but in August of 2017, Rubin also compared the president to an “animal” in an opinion piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

“Only 24 hours after he read a serious speech off a teleprompter committing to send more young men and women to fight in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump reverted to form, delivering a rambling, rage-filled, 77-minute harangue that was alternately defensive, angry, accusatory and just plain weird. Like a trapped animal, he lashed out in every direction, trying unsuccessfully to draw blood.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also criticized the President for not recognizing that each of those MS-13 killers, as she put it, holds within himself the "spark of divinity."

These are odd words from a Roman Catholic who is nevertheless staunch in her support of the right to use abortion as birth control. Don't those babies also have the spark of divinity in them? Which is worse, calling someone who has done everything he could to snuff out that spark of divinity within himself an animal or actually snuffing out the spark of divinity in a baby by treating it as just a blob of tissue?

All humans are created in the image of God, but that doesn't mean that they can't become so degraded and cruel as to transmogrify themselves into moral monsters. It's a symptom of how perverse the left has become in their hatred of Trump that they're now reduced to coming to the defense of the humanity of extremely evil men, denying the obvious inhumanity of their behavior, and castigating Trump for clearly articulating it.

Why does MS-13 warrant President Trump's opprobrium? Breitbart offers a list of eleven of their more heinous crimes. It's worth reading and mulling over whether "animals" is really an inappropriate description of these people.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on the criticism of President Trump and his "animals" remark:

An amusing aspect of all this is to consider that had Navarro, Pelosi and the rest ever discovered that MS-13 was a branch of the alt-right they themselves would be happy to declare them savages and animals.

Their indignation is not really that Mr. Trump has called the nation's attention to the depravity of this gang by labeling them what they in fact are. Their indignation is with Mr. Trump himself who has had the temerity to not only win an election they thought they had sewn up but also to keep all the promises he made during the campaign, undoing much of Mr. Obama's legacy in the process.

That's what's causing them to act as if they're losing their minds.