PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Chris Matthews to Jim Acosta: Trump Is Like Hitler And The Holocaust.
Matthews asked and answered his own question, “What did Hitler do? What did Hitler do in the Holocaust? He took people from Germany to other countries where there was no German law. There was not even a pretense of German law. They took them to Poland or Hungary or wherever, and they killed.”
Acosta helped Matthews double down, “And so when you see what’s happening right now with this El Salvadoran Gulag, I mean, this CECOT Gulag he’s basically taking a page out of that playbook, you think.”
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Acosta naturally agreed, “No, and there’s a component here that is deeply disturbing because it seems to be all about inflicting cruelty. It’s all about making an example out of this person and saying, ‘We’re going to be cruel to this guy, and so you better not come here or we’re going to be cruel to you too.’”
Of course, the people Trump is deporting are illegal immigrants. Even if one supports bringing Garcia back on the grounds he shouldn’t be sent to prison without due process, he is still an illegal immigrant who could just as easily be re-deported to another country like any other illegal immigrant. That’s not exactly mass murder on an industrial scale.
The 2006 version of Chris Matthews was much less of a fan of illegal immigration:
HOWARD FINEMAN, THEN OF NEWSWEEK: Everybody is focusing on the divisions in the Republican Party. I find the Democratic Party interesting on this too. In the old days, the unions, the labor unions …
MATTHEWS: Do we still have unions?
FINEMAN: We do have some. But the unions would have said wait a minute, all of our wage an hour workers who are doing pretty well here, are going to get killed with a wave of 11 million illegal immigrants. We‘ve got to stop it.
But the union leadership today has said no, no, because we have so many Hispanics in our unions, because we know the stories of personal struggle and family travail, we‘re not going to oppose this. As a matter of fact, we‘re going to get on board and shape it the way we want, so it‘s all those people against the cloth coats that you were talking about [GARBLED]
MATTHEWS: I think the country is going to get really ticked off at a government that won‘t do what they tell them to do. A country without borders is not a country. If you don‘t have a border—I‘ve never heard of a country in the world that doesn‘t have a border. That‘s what defines a country. If you don‘t enforce it, you‘re a joke.
(CROSSTALK)
FINEMAN: Well, this is bigger—as I travel around and talk to people, this is a bigger issue around the country than people here inside the beltway in the elite understand. That doesn‘t mean that that will will be reflected in legislation. Often it isn‘t. That‘s the story of Washington.
MATTHEWS: By the way, if you‘re a European trying to come to America and move here, or an African, West African, and you‘re waiting in line somewhere at a U.S. consulate nowhere, whether it‘s Albania or Nigeria, you‘re waiting in line dutifully. You show up every day, you fill out the papers and you wait and you wait and you wait.
Meanwhile, people are slam banging across the Mexican border every night with the searchlight on, and now we‘re saying put them ahead of you in line.
Oceania has never been at war with illegal immigration.