El Greco, “A Lady in a Fur Wrap” (1577-80), oil on canvas, 62 x 59 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (image via Web Gallery of Art)
In a story titled “Donald Trump, Wavering on Immigration, Finds Anger in All Corners,” Maggie Haberman and Michael D. Shear of the New York Times write:
Mr. Trump faced anger, confusion and disgust from across the political spectrum on Thursday after indicating that he was open to letting some undocumented immigrants remain in the country legally provided that they paid “back taxes.”
The comments, made at a town-hall-style event broadcast the night before on Fox News, were strikingly similar to the views of former Gov. Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, fellow Republicans whom Mr. Trump vanquished in the primaries with slashing attacks that they were soft on immigration.
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well—William Shakespeare, Othello, Scene V, Act II
Yes, you’re lovely, with your smile so warm
And your cheeks so soft
There is nothing for me but to love you
And the way you look tonight—Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern, “The Way You Look Tonight”
Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same — hardihood. Give them raw truth.
—John Jay Chapman
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
—Raymond Chandler
It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times are going.
—Groucho Marx
I praise loudly, I blame softly.
—Catherine II of Russia
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Slow buds the pink dawn like a rose
From out night’s gray and cloudy sheath;
Softly and still it grows and grows,
Petal by petal, leaf by leaf.—Susan Coolidge
Trembling in her soft and chilly nest.
—John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”
What soft, cherubic creatures
These gentlewomen are!
One would as soon assault a plush–
Or violate a star.—Emily Dickinson, “What Soft- Cherubic Creatures”
The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell — in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
—Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
—William James
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
—Susan Sontag
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
—James Thurber
The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
—C.S. Lewis
“Sleep soft, beloved!” we sometimes say
Who have no tune to charm away
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep…—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Sleep”
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.—William Butler Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
—H. L. Mencken
If they pay their “back taxes”???
Trumps caveat might be justifiably amended to include that the US Government also pay back benefits owed to these aliens.
What Mr. Trump conveniently excludes is the fact that many undocumented aliens do indeed pay taxes as well as Social Security, but because of their undocumented status, never reap the incumbent benefits.
The truth is that the notion that illegal aliens do not pay taxes is just that…a notion, little more.