Okay, this is going to be a rant, and hardly anyone is going to come off unscathed, so if you’re feeling sensitive you might want to move on to another piece.
Now, I’ll be the first person to admit I don’t have a clue what to do about the whole immigration mess. As a fairly radical natural-rights libertarian, my first inclination is that anyone is entitled by virtue of the natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to go wherever they like; as someone who can do arithmetic, I can see that has necessary limits in a welfare state; and as someone who has been watching this argument since I was literally something like 6 years old — back in the days when “wetback” was descriptive — I’m very aware that if there were laws about being an attractive nuisance that applied to countries, the United States, Canada, and much of the EU would be risking prosecution for the current madness about immigrants.
So don’t bitch at me that I’m not providing a solution. All I can say is that I don’t know of one and no one on any side of the issue seems to have any more idea of a workable solution than I do.
That said, however, the current argument is crazy, and many of the people pushing the argument are either morons and fools, or malicious, and Hanlon’s razor notwithstanding, I’m increasingly convinced it’s malice.
Basically, we had a sudden — but completely spontaneous and uncoordinated, am I right? — outbreak of pictures of kids, usually crying kids, in detention. The outcry against Trump was immediate and outraged, with people comparing it to Auschwitz and using pictures of the train tracks into the death camps.
Mysteriously, it wasn’t one story that got picked up; it was a dozen stories, apparently independent, that were issued more or less the same day.
Not very long after, it because clear that the pictures that were being used had one little problem: they were from 2014, and at least one of them was a picture of a child in a cage erected at a demonstration against detaining families.
Now, it’s clear that the trauma of Trump winning the election has caused retrograde amnesia because these people don’t seem to remember that Trump wasn’t actually president in 2014, or if they do, they don’t remember who was. This seems somewhat related to the odd phenomenon that George W Bush was responsible for everything from 1995 through at least 2014. And they certainly don’t remember the stated policy of Democrat luminaries like Bill Clinton, Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. (In fact, HRC doesn’t seem to even remember her own policy statements, although that might be excused after her head injuries.)
What set me off today, though, was the reaction when Trump decided to alter the policy about separating families, and allow families to be detained together. One reaction — I’m not going to link it because screw him — was a liberal who, within literal minutes of Trump’s Executive Order, was decrying Trump as a lying SOB because, after five days of this circus, Trump reversed himself.
Of course, he wasn’t alone: when Congress tried to reverse the policy by law, the Democrats blocked that too. In fact, they said straight out that they’d rather keep the issue to use against Trump
Top Senate Dem preemptively comes out against all GOP proposals on family separation issue. “Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.”
Rejecting compromise solutions looks cynical amid humanitarian crisis. Is this about the kids, or Trump? https://t.co/y0oom8ayYH
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 19, 2018
So, you know, I’m sympathetic to the problems. I wish I knew a good answer.
But I’m tired of people who claim to be all moral and crap who make it clear that their morals are oriented, like a Boy Scout Compass in an MRI, toward one thing: they just hate Trump. Immigrant kids, well, we’re making omelets here kids, sorry.
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