Boundless media fury at Trump, the morning after

Telephonic interviews on the major network news shows this morning, taking up his suggestion to close America to Muslims, were uniformly and bitterly hostile.

A CNN interviewer called Trump "un-American" and denounced him for “tearing at the fabric of what America is.”

All of his competitors for the GOP nomination and all the GOP leadership have denounced his suggestion.

Meanwhile, his polls are steady and his supporters applaud.

Opponents characterize his idea as unconstitutional, un-American, Nazi, fascist, communist, and difficult or impossible to finance or carry out without creating a police state – which is pretty much what conservatives have always said about gun control and Social Security and nowadays say about Medicare for all and tuition-free education at public colleges and universities.

Liberals are saying all of that about the Mexican border fence, any thought of deporting most of the illegals now in the US, and of course Trump’s suggestion.

CNN and MSNBC gave air time to Muslim immigrants to righteously denounce in halting English Trump’s plan as un-American.

And the entire classe politique is saying about Trump’s idea pretty much what Hillary and the White House said about a You Tube video in connection with the Benghazi attacks and the Muslim demonstrations in Cairo that fateful 9/11.

They are blaming American responses to the horrors of Muslim violence and hatred for the Occident and America for that very violence and hate, much as liberals declaimed that Abu Ghraib would teach savagery to Muslim fighters, waterboarding would cause them to abuse prisoners, and both would cause a rise in terrorist recruiting.

Too, they and the Muslim spokesmen to whom the major media gave air time have been denouncing Trump for encouraging "Islamophobia" and perhaps provoking a backlash of violence against Muslims – as though decades of almost daily news of Muslim violence and hate did not put Trump’s remarks quite in the shade in that regard, and as though we ought to accept a ban on free discussion among Americans of the Islamic problem and what we should do about it.

The American classe politique knows what it wants and what it doesn’t want, and right now it is trying to do to Trump what their opposite numbers in France have done to the FN.

Why favor Trump's idea?

It signals to the world our profound annoyance with violence originating in Islam or Muslim identity and our rejection of their widespread and violent hatred of us, of our values, and of pretty much everybody who isn't a Muslim.

And it limits the size of the population of Muslims actually in America at any one time, from among whom future Muslim terrorists can emerge.

Recall that all of the terrorists of the original 9/11, most of them Saudis and all of them (of course) Muslims, were here on valid visas, some as students.

I am not aware there is any other religion in the world so deeply and terrifyingly committed to hatred of the Occident in general and America in particular, and to violence against us, at this time.

But if one emerges I would certainly be willing to consider banning believers in that religion from immigration and travel here, too.

As for claims that such measures inspire Muslim hatred of us and increase the likelihood of Muslim violence, my thought is that such measures would have considerably less such impact than, say, the joyful gay porn in the Netflix production of Sense8, or the everyday American obscenity of a single gay pride parade.

And I suspect most Americans would merely laugh at the idea (I would join them) of censoring sex on Netflix because Muslims disapprove of it and it makes them hate us.

And the outrage of the American classe politique at any suggestion of banning gay pride parades for any such reason is easy to imagine.

Recall that the hero of the left, FDR, actually interned all the Japanese who could be rounded up in the continental US, citizens included.

Doing that to all US Muslims would be far too much.

But doing that to Muslims with ties to terrorism or the underlying Islamofundamentalist ideology?

Remember "preventive detention"?

Or perhaps preventive expulsion from the US would be better, even of naturalized US citizens if not also of the native born.