Complicity with evil

The fascists at work:

Vice President Pence and Defense Secretary James Mattis stood directly behind their boss Friday, one man on each side, as President Trump announced an order that will ban half the world’s Shiite Muslims from entering the country for months.

“I’m establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States,” Trump said from his podium at the Pentagon. “We don’t want ’em here.”

Malevolent imbecile. Immigrants are already vetted. Nobody’s flinging the doors open to Islamist terrorists.

Pence nodded along to the words. It was just over a year earlier when he had called Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States “offensive and unconstitutional.” That was before Trump picked him as his running mate and won the election.

Self-serving piece of shit.

Right then, Pence; wrong now. Self-serving piece of shit now.

Trump sat down after his speech, signed the executive order and handed it to Mattis — a retired general who six months earlier had said the mere suggestion of a ban on Muslims caused “great damage” to world order.

Now, Mattis was defense secretary. He took the order and grinned while Pence started clapping.

Like other Republicans, the two men’s condemnations of Trump’s words had evaporated as he drew closer to power — and as his original call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” morphed into a nearly 3,000-word orderthat does not mention Islam but temporarily bar visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Cowardly self-serving scum.

After winning contest after contest in the spring primaries and turning his sights on the general election, Trump blasted Democrat Hillary Clinton for border policies that would “let the Muslims flow in.”

A few months later, a taciturn retired general who had overseen all U.S. military operations in the Middle East felt compelled to speak out against Trump.

The call for a Muslim ban was causing American allies to think “we have lost faith in reason,” Mattis told Politico last July.

“They think we’ve completely lost it,” he said. “It’s sending shock waves through this international system.”

He and Pence were joined in displeasure by Republicans across the spectrum. By former vice president Richard B. Cheney, who said banning a religion “goes against everything we stand for,” and who echoes language by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and many others.

But that’s all over now.

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