How Low Can They Go?
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American values are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1, he replied, and I said, why don t I just keep the same thing going?
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we ve never seen before. I don t think the people of the United States would stand for it.
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there s something exceedingly creepy and blatantly opportunistic about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris s home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, on this little island.
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don t want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The argument that migrants coming across the border have a more severe impact on border states is obviously valid. You can t have a nearly unchecked flood of people coming in an average of 8,500 a day, according to Axios.
It is also a valid criticism that Democrats both in the White House and Congress are going out of their way to avoid what they see as a third rail with progressives. The border is just the tip of the spear. Democrats are too afraid of angering the base to bear down and overhaul the system, including tackling the backlog of court cases and fixing how those cases are adjudicated.
President Biden ignores the border, giving it to Kamala Harris to get under control. We all know that s not happening. Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham who once tried to work on solutions have now just degenerated into using the border issue to bash Democrats as flaccid.
But the contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
via dnyuz.com
Ms. Dowd in only half wrong. Sending illegal migrants to the Vineyard and DC is exploiting exhausted and incidentally brave refugees from communist countries who have managed to get to the US. These are political refugees and that bears remembering, a fact Ms. Dowd does not mention. Of course, this is probably the reason why the Biden administration seems willing to get rid of these particular refugees. OTOH this political stunt is the first time I remember the Dems paying any attention at all to the obvious problem at our border. So it seems to be working, even if it it cynical and boorish.