Political nitpicking worth nothing
I’ll give you the one-two-three of it and then I’ll tell you it adds to zero, which is the sum of most of our politics.
First, President Joe Biden got into an unfortunate exchange with that shouting buffoon from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, during his State of the Union address. She demanded he say the name, Laken Riley, of the young nursing student in Georgia who was killed last month allegedly at the hand of … hmmm, how shall I say … an undocumented infiltrator. Is that all right?
Biden mispronounced the name of the victim as Lincoln Riley, who is a football coach.
When Greene shouted that the young woman was killed by “an illegal,” Biden said, “yes, an illegal.”
Rule of thumb: Any time one says “yes” after Greene has said something, one has stepped in it.
Second, liberals, progressives and immigrant advocacy groups expressed their deep disappointment that Biden had devalued immigrant life that way by referring to the accused as “an illegal.”
Several years ago, liberals and immigrant groups, in their language-policing role, began explaining— decreeing, really—that “an illegal” was an inhumanely diminishing phrase in that no person was inherently illegal and should never be devalued as such.
It’s “undocumented immigrant,” they said, not “an illegal,” and probably not—I suspect—“undocumented infiltrator.”
Third, Biden initially defended himself by saying, well, the accused individual was illegally in the country. He has culturally conservative instincts sometimes, having to do with age and religion, I suspect.
But then, on a second try, he told an interviewer that he regretted using the term and should have said “undocumented.” Then Donald Trump lied, to repeat myself, and said Biden had apologized to a murderer. He hadn’t. Biden had merely regretted using a word in an excited exchange. He had not told any murder-charged Venezuelan he was sorry for anything he’d done to him.
So, there it is. One, two and three come to nothing other than the extreme nonsense of Biden getting the old tsk-tsk for saying in a volatile contemporary American political exchange something spontaneous, mere conversational shorthand, that others have declared should not be said.
Through it all, there’s a politicized lost life and an important issue, more significant than Biden slipping up and saying an accurate word that we are told no one is to say anymore.
The first part of that important issue is that a Venezuelan found to be in the country illegally was allowed to stay here to pursue his case for staying. That’s the Biden administration’s doing.
The second part of the important issue is that Democrats and Republicans worked out a compromise bill to address such things and Republicans then abandoned it because Trump didn’t want the immigrant problem eased, much less solved, while he was needing to milk it to fuel his megalomaniacal march to return to the presidency he defiled when he had it.
That “illegal” is not the right way to refer to an undocumented immigrant in public dialogue is a fair argument. It probably ought to be heeded to the extent that we try to avoid it and look for more thoughtful, fair-minded identifiers, which I suppose “infiltrator” isn’t. I regret it, I guess, though I do not in so doing apologize to any undocumented immigrant under arrest on a murder charge.
But if a guy slips up one time in a tense moment and says it back to a buffoonish heckler, he should be cut some slack. And if he later says in a quieter exchange that he regrets saying it, then no one should listen seriously to Donald Trump when he bellows that regretting a lone slip of a word in retrospect is the same as apologizing to an accused killer.
What we ought to be doing is shutting up all that claptrap and passing that compromise border security bill.