Posted on 07/09/2014 3:27:51 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Yes, Rick Perry is awful for not shaking his hand, but the president needs a Pope Francis-like moment with the border kids to signal America is more than blowhards and racists.
Let’s get Rick Perry’s jackass-ery out of the way quickly: Refusing to shake hands in public with the president of the United States is just an idiot thing to do. Perry is trying to claim the faux moral high ground here by arguing that he held out for a more substantive meeting and got it, but come on. It’s not as if that meeting wouldn’t have happened if the governor had shown up on the runway. What exactly does Obama get out of a public handshake with a hard-right, not that bright, confusingly optometrized Texas Republican?
This might be a paragraph you can wave in my face on January 21, 2017, and God knows I’ve written a number of them, but: Rick Perry ain’t never gonna be president. We’ve been watching him on the national stage for a while now. Forget the third thing he forgot. The problem is that his instincts are wrong, his timing is bad, his hand is heavy. Accusing the White House of orchestrating a “coordinated effort” to help the movement of tens of thousands of children? That’s just Tea Party nonsense. He’s a guitarist who never knows what notes not to play. Now, guitarists like that have fans, sometimes millions of them. But they don’t ascend the plinth of greatness. He just has “governor but nothing more” written on his face.
Now let’s turn to the guy who did ascend the plinth, at least in terms of becoming president. What is he doing on this issue of the immigrant children? They were asking on Hardball Tuesday night whether this might be Obama’s Katrina. We’ve had a string of little crises that were all supposed to be Obama’s Katrina, and they’ve mostly been jokes. Slate’s Dave Weigel counted up nine of ’em. It’s been silly. But somehow, this one didn’t ring so false to me when Matthews et al were discussing it Tuesday night.
For one thing, there is the specific parallel of the flyover: Obama was going to Texas for a fundraiser but wasn’t planning on going to the border? I usually try to ask myself what I’d be saying if a Republican did X, and if a Republican did that, I’d be teeing off. It’s not defensible.
Second, Obama is at a really vulnerable point in his presidency, I think, not dissimilar to the point George W. Bush was at in August 2005, when Katrina hit. Then, Bush’s approval rating was generally in the mid-40s, as Obama’s is now. Hanging on, but vulnerable to one straw that could break the camel’s back. Obama is in that place now. And this is pretty far afield, but keep an eye on Aleppo in Syria. Aleppo has been a stronghold of the more legitimate opposition to Bashar al-Assad. It might be about to fall to Assad’s forces. This, two weeks after Obama announced a big aid package for the moderate rebels. Syria is Obama’s biggest foreign policy failure—he should have delivered that $500 million to those forces long ago, but he delayed. When Assad’s recapture of Aleppo is consummated, Obama is going to look played again.
That delaying is a pattern. I don’t understand it. I covered New York mayors. When a crisis hits, you go. If it’s 3 in the {expletive} morning and way out in some part of Staten Island you’ve never even heard of, you go. Obama should have been in Texas or California or Arizona last week.
But saying what? That’s the problem. If we lived in a better country, we’d take these kids in. It’s obscene that we don’t. Used by jackals, no life to go back to at all. Yes, I guess we can’t encourage 200,000 or 300,000 to come. But we could at least be housing them in circumstances better than 20 of them sharing one toilet. It’s disgusting and makes me ashamed, and it should you.
But Obama is the last person in America who can say that. He’d be pilloried. Maybe impeached (reason, what, five, to the right?). And that tells us what’s really tragic about this crisis. We have a political system that not only can’t solve this particular crisis, it is virtually guaranteed never to solve it. That’s almost all the Republicans’ fault. Anything that embarrasses Obama they’re going to play up, of course, but it’s also the raging xenophobia of their base.
Still, this is the kind of situation where the people who voted for Obama want him to do...something. They understand the political constraints. They know he can’t do a lot. But a Pope Francis-esque gesture of some kind: As the pope washed the feet of women, would it be too much for Obama to go to one of these horrid shelters and read these children a story? Kick a soccer ball with them? Would that really kill him in the polls? Most liberals aren’t unrealistic, contrary to what you normally read. But they want to see little manifestations of courage from the man they voted for. This is a prime moment for exactly that.
I think the White House in these circumstances underestimates the American people. The American people, thank God, aren’t right-wing bigots and blowhards. They’re actually pretty decent. You just have to find that yin of decency and locate the gestures and words that smother the yang of fear. It can be done. The media poke fun at “hope,” but what hope meant was that many Americans just wanted Obama to be able to do that—to say to the world, “We are this generous people, not that fearful people.” It didn’t, and still doesn’t, seem too much to ask.
Tomaskyity-ty (whatever) puts Party before country.
A man like that deserves no analysis because his opinion is bigoted.
We’ve been tolerating them for decades, our “bigotry” is new......again.
OK now, show of hands....
WHO DID NOT SEE THIS COMING????
I warned 8 months ago that Dems were planning to gin up the Hispanic Racism to drive turnout in November, just like they did in 2006, that gave Nancy Pelosi control of the house.
Now you are witnessing that plan in action.
Right-wing bigot, eh?
Yeah, obeying the federal laws of America, and protecting the security and health of its REAL citizens, is very bigoted.
Pig.
If you don’t like it go to Mexico. Oh that’s right you can’t live in Mexico without a visa. Like every other country on the planet.
Put them in Tomasky’s neighborhood and send the kids to his daughter’s school
He’ll typically be the first one out of the neighborhood. Leftist hypocrites
We’re the largest army the world has ever seen and we don’t realize it.
But I will say I've seen dung spatter in primate exhibits that made a better impression than this clown's essay.
Why should Americans need to defend themselves as they make immigration policy, yet the left has always called immigration restrictions “bigoted” regardless of the century.
Here is JFK’s 1960 democrat party platform on immigration.
“We shall adjust our immigration, nationality and refugee policies to eliminate discrimination and to enable members of scattered families abroad to be united with relatives already in our midst.
The national-origins quota system of limiting immigration contradicts the rounding principles of this nation. It is inconsistent with our belief in the rights of man. This system was instituted after World War I as a policy of deliberate discrimination by a Republican Administration and Congress.
The revision of immigration and nationality laws we seek will implement our belief that enlightened immigration, naturalization and refugee policies and humane administration of them are important aspects of our foreign policy.
These laws will bring greater skills to our land, reunite families, permit the United States to meet its fair share of world programs of rescue and rehabilitation, and take advantage of immigration as an important factor in the growth of the American economy.
In this World Refugee Year it is our hope to achieve admission of our fair share of refugees. We will institute policies to alleviate suffering among the homeless wherever we are able to extend our aid.
We must remove the distinctions between native-born and naturalized citizens to assure full protection of our laws to all. There is no place in the United States for “second-class citizenship.”
The protections provided by due process, right of appeal, and statutes of limitation, can be extended to non-citizens without hampering the security of our nation.
We commend the Democratic Congress for the initial steps that have recently been taken toward liberalizing changes in immigration law. However, this should not be a piecemeal project and we are confident that a Democratic President in cooperation with Democratic Congresses will again implant a humanitarian and liberal spirit in our nation’s immigration and citizenship policies.”
Liberals believe that Obama only has to gesture to
make it so...he IS the one after all.
“Blowhards and racists.” Good to see the proggies are heeding their own call for civility. BTT
Rantings from an America hating liberal.
My point of view is this...
The MSM KNOWS that his whole border thing with the underaged kids was ENGINEERED at the highest levels of government. What I think they thought was this:
“Hey America they’re KIDS! We gotta take care of the KIDS! It’s for the CHILDREN!”
Well guess what, much like the ‘Race Card’; the ‘It’s for the Children’ card has been played one too many times. Michelle playing with School Lunches, ‘Common core’ curriculum designed to cripple the kids mentally and destroy actual critical thinking of the kids in the public schools. etc.
It’s not that Americans have grown insensitive, it’s that we’ve become CYNICAL when it comes to the Obama administration.
Name one other country that accepts anybody who makes it across the border.
the president needs a Pope Francis-like moment with the border kids to signal America is more than blowhards and racists.
He shouldn’t talk about Harry Reid that way.
Another bukake journalist that wants his hedges trimmed, cheap....
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