Blamer-in-chief ignores the evil from within U.S.
This is what President Trump said the other day, in the middle of a terrible week when the world saw what kind of country we have become on immigration, when we all saw children being cruelly separated from their parents at the southern border until they weren't, because of what we were supposed to believe was a sudden attack of humanity.
“They don't talk about the death and destruction caused by people who shouldn't be here,” the President said. “People that will continuously get into trouble and do bad things.”
“They,” of course, are largely Democrats, whom this President wants you to believe aren't just waving all potential immigrants and asylum seekers across our borders the way school crossing guards would; they're practically encouraging them to run right from Texas to the nearest MS-13 recruitment center. It's their fault that we've separated more than 2,000 children from their families — not Trump, not Attorney General Jeff Sessions, not our Department of Homeland Security, which must make George W. Bush, who created it in the shadow of Sept. 11, awfully proud these days.
So “they” are the Democrats who want to let “them” into America; let in all the people that the Whos in Whoville are supposed to believe are not coming here in search of a better life, but are only coming to kill us and steal from us and take our jobs and do this in such record numbers that it will be impossible – wait for it – to make America great.
“People who shouldn't be here” are apparently now a greater threat to America than the terrorists who were the reason the Department of Homeland Security was formed in the first place. If we can just keep “them” out or at least locked up, then the rest of us don't even have to lock our doors at night.
But what about the criminals who are already here, because they were born here? What wall or immigration policy or secure border protects us from some of the worst criminals this country has produced? Not Mexico. Not Honduras or Guatemala. Us. Not them. On July 20, it will be six years ago that James Holmes walked into a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and shot 12 people dead and injured 70 others. Holmes, white American, was born in San Diego.
Stephen Paddock, white American, born in Clinton, Iowa, before he legally migrated to Nevada, shot and killed 59 people, including himself, last October, from a window at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Vegas, and wounded nearly 900. What immigrant, legal or illegal, ever came to this country and picked up guns and did something as horrific as that?
Dylann Roof, born in Columbia, S.C., shot and killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C., did this in an America where once we joked that if we were really safe, we were as safe as being in church.
Jared Loughner shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head and killed the granddaughter of a fine old baseball man named Dallas Green and five others one Saturday morning in Tucson. Loughner was born in Arizona.
Adam Lanza, who shot 26 people to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 20 of them children, was born in Kingston, N.H.
Nikolas Cruz, who shot and killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was born in Margate, Fla.
Even Omar Mateen, who shot 49 people dead at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando just two years ago, was born at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
And, of course, it is interesting to note that at this time when we are told constantly that it is the Democrats who are supposed to write new laws on immigration and make us all safe, that nobody wants to help any Democrat who wants to change the laws on guns, even with all these native-born Americans shooting up schools and churches and concerts and dance clubs and movie theaters.
No reasonable person would suggest that the entire system of immigration, in this country, at this time, doesn't need a sensible and dramatic and humane overhaul. But that overhaul cannot ever again include using children as bargaining chips as the “deterrent” that Sessions talked about before he was in full, sniveling retreat over a zero tolerance policy he acted as if he'd stolen from the Good Book.
It is not supposed to matter that as recently as four months ago the Cato Institute, using 2015 statistics from the state of Texas, found that illegal immigrants were 25% less likely to be convicted of a homicide, and that legal immigrants were 87% less likely.
It doesn't matter because this issue got this President elected, and he thinks it is going to get him elected again, and nothing else matters, certainly not children looking for their parents in McAllen, Tex.
But these children now understand something better than any politician: In the words of Walt Kelly's Pogo, they are the ones who have met the enemy. And it is us.