We have always been at war with South Korea

My friend Michael the Atlanta Lawyer focuses on something to which I hadn’t been paying sufficient attention, because it’s just impossible, as his first sentence notes:

It’s trite to say “why is the media not covering [INSERT TRUMP SCANDAL]” because he commits five impeachment-worthy sins per day but the detention of South Korean workers in Georgia is REALLY bad.

Brian Kemp and other politicians in Georgia have bent over backwards to attract foreign investment like the Hyundai plant outside of Savannah. The state has plowed a lot of money into port improvements in Savannah and other infrastructure to make factories viable. They have traveled to South Korea on numerous occasions to sell Hyundai and other big South Korean companies on doing business here. Kemp represents the kind of pro-business conservative whom I don’t like on a lot of issues (guns, race relations, infusion of Christianity into government business, etc.) but I can at least understand and respect because he is trying to bring jobs to the state. The whole reason why Atlanta exploded in population and economic activity whereas other Southern cities were left in the dust was because of a business community and political leadership that understood massive resistance to desegregation as toxic, along with an effective civil rights movement and Black elite and middle class that pushed those people where they needed to go. Even if I would prefer a Democratic governor for a lot of reasons, I can live with leadership that honors that tradition.

Now, Trump and Stephen Miller have fucked all of that up in ways that probably cannot be fixed. The arrest and deportation of South Korean nationals is a MASSIVE scandal in South Korea. ICE completely mistreated these people, calling them “Rocket Man” and “North Korean” while keeping them in squalid conditions. Now, it turns out that the arrests were likely motivated by the desire of ICE to hit Miller’s quota of 3,000 detentions of immigrants every day. The odds that anyone in South Korea (or any other Asian country) is going to want to build a factory in the U.S. have dropped considerably, as they are never going to undertake that kind of project when their skilled personnel – people who are absolutely essential because they actually know how to run the equipment and set up manufacturing processes – are subject to being humiliated. On top of that, a lot of the foreign investment was in the area of building electric cars and batteries, an endeavor that now seems less viable given the position that the Administration has taken on anything to do with fighting climate change.

In the end, Kemp and the other Republicans in Georgia have had to eat shit. Their efforts to attract foreign investment have been destroyed by a xenophobic Administration and they have to act like they are fine with it because there will be no questioning Dear Leader. They have to play along with Trump and Miller destroying the rationale for their tariff policy (attracting factories to the US) because their immigration policy is the prime directive. And on top of all of this, from a foreign policy perspective, we need South Korea on our side if we are going to treat China as a geopolitical rival and insulting the entire country is not helpful there, either.

I guess what I am saying is that Trump isn’t very good at his job.

I mean that’s true if you don’t assume that his job, or assignment if you will, is to destroy in every way possible the geopolitical status of the United States of America. And I can think of a logical principle, having something to do with a razor, that suggests that assumption may well be warranted, da?