I remember being a young couple in our 20s, with wee little babies. We would have done anything — we would have willingly died — to save those kids, but we didn’t have to. Jordan and Andre Anchondo did.
Jordan, 24 and Andre, 23, were among 20 victims killed in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Walmart and shopping center in El Paso, leaving their infant son without parents as they died protecting him, their family told The Post. Jordan’s death was confirmed Saturday. Family members confirmed Andre’s death to The Post late Sunday night, after waiting more than 24 hours to find out what happened to him.
Tito and other family members said they believe Andre died trying to shield his wife and son from the gunfire.
Jordan’s sister, Leta Jamrowski, told the Associated Press that based on the baby’s injuries, Jordan died shielding their baby.
“He pretty much lived because she gave her life,” Jamrowski, 19, told the AP.
Jordan was holding him in her arms when she died, Jamrowski said. She fell on him as she collapsed onto the floor, breaking some of his bones but keeping him alive, her sister said.
They left behind two other kids who are asking where their parents are now. This is a horror story beyond my imagining, but it’s happening for real. People are killing other people over an imaginary threat. The reason Jordan and Andre died defending their child is racism, plain and simple.
John F. Bash, U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, said the case is being treated as domestic terrorism. A manifesto that authorities believe Crusius posted on the Internet forum 8chan includes attacks against Latino immigrants and rants about a “Hispanic invasion.”
“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles wrote in a statement. “I’m outraged and you should be too. This entire nation should be outraged. In this day and age, with all the serious issues we face, we are still confronted with people who will kill another for the sole reason of the color of their skin.”
Why is this crisis coming to a head now? The answer is plain and simple: Donald Trump. People have been warning of the danger of our racist president before this weekend’s massacres.
A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.
In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”
So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?
We are in an intolerable situation. The president is a white nationalist bigot, and the senate is controlled by another greedy bigot. The Democrats are in denial and are avoiding doing anything about the putrid, rotting elephant in the room — impeachment proceedings are vital at this point.
Since taking over the House, the Democrats have not sat idly, passing several bills that have signified where they stand as a party. However, the semantic Twister the House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is playing right now in order to avoid simply launching an impeachment inquiry when the number of House members in favor of one is now in triple digits is an insult to African American voters in particular, the Democrats’ most faithful and consistent constituency.
People will say it’s futile as long as Moscow Mitch cracks the whip in the senate, but I don’t care. The fight has to be made, and every delay undermines the fading moral authority of the opposition party. If you’re not going to fight against racism and murder, what were you elected for?
Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans will never allow a conviction, I know. However, the other main Democratic arguments against impeachment are bunk: the effort against Richard Nixon united the country, they currently enjoy sufficient public support, and they can do all the business that the people require in Congress while putting Trump on trial for the crimes that they crow on Twitter all day that he committed. Again, what was the point of bringing Robert Mueller to testify before the American people if you weren’t going to do a single thing with his report other than tell us to go vote our conscience once we read it? What if we live in a state where Republicans take that vote away? What if Trump does something else even more disastrous before the election that makes all of this moot? And don’t tell me that it isn’t possible, because, please.
It seems to me that telling the electorate to have the conscience our representatives lack is the “thoughts and prayers” of the Democratic party.
I don’t know how you can live there.
One wonders quite why the democratic leadership reckons that a robust and enthusiastic investigation into Trump’s crimes in Congress isn’t going to spur the electorate on against him, but publishing the Mueller Report will? Even if he isn’t impeached, surely the proceedings will help to expose his rottenness?
Also, while we’re on the subject of impeachment proceedings, your constitution’s provision for them is very stupid indeed. Why is it the Senate – which can be, and currently is, stacked with partisans of the President – that gets to pronounce impeachment? Why not a jury of regular citizens under oath, like all other criminal courts? Or at least some other politically neutral legal body?
I suspect there will be a point beyond which even the Republicans renounce Trump and all his works. Not because they have principles or morals or anything like that, but because, like the proverbial rats on a sinking ship, they don’t want to go down with him, and will try to preserve what is left of their brand from the opprobrium Trump brings it. Given that the party ran candidates like the obviously-a-paedophile arsehole Roy Moore, though, I have trouble wondering what the tipping point is going to be. Damage to corporate prospects I guess. That seems to be the only thing they care about.
KARMA is getting involved by breaking McTurtle’s shoulder by making him stumble off a stage at a speaking engagement, after getting chanted off the stage with “Moscow Mitch” drowning out his loudspeakers.
I know this won’t help, I simply can;t stop my schadenfreude response to that BREAKING NEWS
excuse me
For the Dem leadership, the point of it is to avoid the responsibility of dealing with the problem while also begging the electorate to vote for them because clearly they’re the only ones who can stand up to the Republicans. Which I must say is quite an inspiring strategy and I bet will really pay off. Pay off for who I don’t know, but it’ll pay off for someone.
This is not a parody; Trigger Warning Trigger Warning
https:/ /www.ballisticmag.com/2019/08/02/ auto-ordnance-trump-tommy-gun/
remove extra spaces
fusilier
James 2:24
Playing Devil’s Advocate here, so don’t hit: What’s the point of impeaching Trump when the Republican-controlled Senate will not vote to remove him? Campaign points for 2020? The people you’ve got to convince either already worship Trump or are too apathetic to vote in the first place. A philosophical victory? Unless it removes a philosophical president, that’s pretty worthless. A black mark on Trump’s historical record? Again, it doesn’t deal with the problem at hand, Trump.
cartomancer @ 2
For the same reason why our founders didn’t give the right to vote to non-land-owners, non-whites, and women, created the Electoral College, and made the constitution so fricking difficult to amend: Despite all their revolutionary, democratic bluster, our nation’s founders were, at heart, wealthy wanna-be aristocrats who didn’t want to the common rabble to have much of a say.
fusilier @ 5
Well, they chose the right weapon. Trump has all the attributes of a 1920s mob boss.
fusilier@5 one of the ironies about the Trump Thompson is that Auto Ordance is currently part of Kahr Arms. Kahr is owned by Justin Moon, son of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon. A lot of Trump’s Christian gun fan supporters buy guns from a guy whose dad claimed to be the Messiah, making him a heretic as far as pretty much all Christian denominations are concerned.
For virtually all of us, virtually all of this affects us via the media. That means that we can compartmentalize, we can look on deaths in Texas or Ohio or even practically next door in Gilroy, the way we looked on deaths in Rwanda or Burma. It’s getting harder to ignore reality, though, and not just because my local paper tells me that two local, young waitresses were badly injured at the Garlic Festival. (Neither has health insurance, incidentally.) I suppose that this is a paradoxically good sign that things might just be reaching some kind of a tipping point, if it’s not too late.
I live a short walk from a beautiful ocean, a short bike ride to a fairly active downtown, a modest drive from a lovely walk in the woods, a slightly longer drive from somewhat more dramatic scenery. (What, me, worry?) Yet I’m just about crying quietly to myself this morning. It seems that right livelihood now involves some explicit involvement in trying to change society not just from the inside (I suppose you could say, by example) but by grappling with the monster its own self. (Again. I’ve failed before, but still.) That will be another way of living here.
Akira MacKenzie @6:
These elections are not about turning any Trump supporters, not even the Obama-Trump voters. It is about turning out more Democrats and D-leaners. An example of a large group of potential voters that can be influenced by impeachment hearings (if accompanied by more moves in this style) are young voters. They lean D, but have notoriously low turnout. They are more idealistic, and therefore tend to fall more easily into thinking both major parties are the same (ie not good enough at sticking with ideals) and therefore voting doesn’t matter. So show them one party does what it can to promote a view that matches said ideals. One party that is not willing to normalize Trump’s horribleness.
I’m usually pretty inure to the concept that Democrats and the GOP are the same, but Pelosi is doing her best to convince me she’s pretty OK with what Trump is doing.
@#10, numerobis:
Oh, but we were assured, when she once again became Speaker of the House, that she was the only one with the political savvy to make use of the office correctly, and that anybody who was even slightly to her left was a wild-eyed radical who would play into Trump’s hands.
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the goal of “centrist” Democrats is to enable Republican policy. It’s what the Clintons wanted (the union-busting NAFTA, repeal of Glass-Steagall, “global policeman” view of the military) and it’s what Obama wanted (drone bombing, free pass for Bush on Iraq and for Wall Street on the meltdown, expansion of ICE and construction of more detention centers) and it’s what Joe Biden certainly wants. The only reason to vote for a centrist is because, after consideration, you think that the policies the Republicans tried to pass a decade ago which were rejected as too extreme are now good ideas.
One of the people killed by the recent two shootings was a German. Same effect here, I suspect.