Trump's right. We have gotten soft.
by Tom Sullivan
Donald Trump's "bold statement" on banning Muslims from the country has freed us (at last). Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told Chris Hayes on All In last night that Trump has freed us from "politically correct enforcement" and opened up space for serious consideration of his immodest proposal. Meaning Muslim is the new N-word (or something) and can be used derisively in polite company by Real Men. The segment was jaw-dropping.
Transcript at Crooks and Liars.
A stunned Hayes offered past cases where Americans traveled the Road to Xenophobia before — sans Hope and Crosby — to their historical regret. King brushed them aside and went off on Sharia law and how Islam is incompatible with the Constitution:
HAYES: Let me ask you this. Why are you so confident that they got that wrong, that we now look with the sort of benefit of hindsight, we say well, clearly that's bigotry. Catholics weren't infiltrating America to bring it orders down from the Vatican.
How can you be so confident that you are correct about the religion of Islam that it is really different in this insidious way, and 50 years from now, people aren't going to look back on what you are saying and put it in that same category?
KING: Well, first, I would say that Catholics came in and competed with the Protestant work ethic. That was one thing. And they did assimilate into the broader society, and a lot of them, especially Irish Catholic, did their best to sound like they were English rather than Irish by dropping the O and the apostrophe would be one of the things. They changed their names to blend in more --
HAYES: Congressman, I can cite you chapter and verse of literature at the times saying these Italians, they speak only Italian. They don't speak our language. These folks coming from other places -- it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.
KING: But you're hearing the imams that are preaching in places like the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The imam there preached to the migrants go in to western Europe, build your enclaves there, breed their women, and do not associate or assimilate into the broader society.
You might call that a peaceful invasion, but that's the nicest thing can you call it. They're not assimilating, and they're not assimilating because Sharia law is incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. And that's an important principle that we need to have a debate about.
An imam? Seems I remember some guy named Khrushchev shaking his fist and pounding the table at the United Nations and promising the West "We will bury you." That guy was the leader of a military empire. He had at his disposal an army, a navy, an air force, and a fleet of nuclear-tipped, intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Whatever happened to that guy anyway?
Trump's right. If America's next existential threat is Muslims breeding with our women, we have gotten soft. And speaking of "soft"...
Conservatives like King have been obsessed with the birthrate gap between the West and Islam for at least a decade now. I wrote this in response to Mark Steyn's "It's the Demography, Stupid" in the Wall Street journal back in 2006:
... the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of "our lack of civilizational confidence." (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.
To plagiarize a quote from a review of one of nuclear-alarmist Jonathan Schell’s old books, "I shudder to think how I’ve failed. I shudder for Mark Steyn, for all the time he’s spent banging away at his typewriter instead of banging away elsewhere."
But thank heavens average Americans can still muster the cojones to verbally assault these implacable, Sharia-wielding breeders when they are peacefully praying in a park.
It's 6 a.m. and I already need a drink.