In the furor over Melania's jacket and the naked political opportunism of a White House desperate to stop stepping on its own dick with a track shoe, we lost sight of the fact that Melania was supposed to visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station too.
Instead, we got some nice "optics" from a place called Upbring (part of Lutheran Social Services Inc) - a "non-profit" facility aimed at care for child abuse survivors (now there's an interesting little Freudian twist).
Anyway:
I'm not beating up on the Lutherans, btw, although I'll say again that I purely hate the idea of handing any tax dollars to any religious organization for any reason, but that's another rant.
The point is that Melania didn't visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station, where we've cloistered some goodly number of kids in a makeshift prison camp. That part of the mission was scrubbed. Because - well, it kinda got to rainin'...
They already had their nice pictures of a place they told us held some immigrant kids. So they either had to bar cameras at the next stop because comparing the two joints would prob'ly make the second one look pretty fuckin' awful, or they could make up some shit to pretend they just couldn't get there, or whatever.
And about those pictures - I didn't see every single one of them, but I didn't see any kids either.
I guess I'm also wondering what might happen to the private donations that Upbring actively solicits, now that they've gotten million of dollars worth of free publicity.
It reminds me of the practice of the English sovereign granting special favors to a particular dressmaker or whiskey distiller. Merit-Based Free-Market Capitalism my dyin' ass.
