CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom
Lies, lies, and more lies about caravan of Central American refugees. America has a process in place for handling those fleeing from authoritarian, war-torn, crime-wrecked, and disaster-devastated countries. Many such individuals from Central America—including a lot of desperate, desolate, and powerless women and children—are now seeking to avail themselves of this process by showing up at specified U.S.-Mexico border spots to officially apply for asylum. For some reason, this terrifies Republicans.
Or at least they're pretending to be terrified. Most folks in the "migrant caravan" coming up from Central America are following the rules we set, which should ostensibly make it more difficult for folks to pull the "we don't hate Hispanics, we just don't want them in the country illegally" shtick.
But President Trump and his acolytes have sidestepped this by simply lying, repeatedly, about our southern neighbors seeking refuge in the U.S. To hear Trump and company tell it, the caravan is basically all MS-13 gang members, brown men seeking to rape white women, and the occasional member of ISIS who came all the way over from the Middle East to get in on this caravan thing.
"It doesn't matter if it's 100 percent accurate," a Trump official told The Daily Beast. "This is the play."
In one particularly disgusting spectacle, a Fox News segment on the caravan featured an anchor hiding in bushes until he could ambush a boat containing a (non-caravan) migrant family trying to secretly cross into the U.S. "We seem to have thwarted this attempt," the anchor boasts before interviewing a woman about why she was doing this. She says she can't find work in Honduras and criminals keep stealing her money so she was heading to the U.S. to find a job. Perhaps realizing that preventing this doesn't exactly make him the hero, the anchor hastily adds that "they're not all women and children" coming here peacefully.
Others have resorted to using old images of violence and attributing them to migrant attacks.
A photo of bloodied law enforcement officers from 2012 was used to make false claims about the migrant caravan. Here's Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, helping spread it: https://t.co/03omMOnwPS pic.twitter.com/2bqji6TwwH — Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) October 23, 2018
No proof, no problem. Trump admitted Tuesday that he has "no proof" the migrant caravan had been infiltrated by ISIS, a claims he's been making repeatedly over the past week along with claims that these evil hordes were being funded by U.S. Democrats.
The ISIS lie initially came from Judicial Watch, which twisted Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales' statement that his administration had deported around 100 ISIS members since he took office in 2016 into a claim that these terrorists were marching north into America as part of the migrant caravan.
Department of if-only: For libertarians, there are at least two frustrating threads in all this panic and hoopla. First, there are the folks who act like immigration laws and national boundaries are immutable precepts handed down from God, and that anyone who transgresses against them is morally wrong and depraved, instead of just rejecting the arbitrary policy and geography decisions that have heretofore destined them to misery.
We could just let them in legally. There, problem solved! https://t.co/kjEHtvXELc — (((The Alex Nowrasteh))) (@AlexNowrasteh) October 24, 2018
Second, there's the Trump administration insistence that Democrats are responsible for migrants heading here because Democrats support "open borders." We have yet to have a single Democratic president, U.S. senator or representative, or party higher-up come out in favor of anything close to an open borders policy, and many of the immigration policies people on the left now object to under Trump are continuations of Obama-era policies.
FOLLOW UP
But what about the killing itself? If nothing else, President Trump objects to how bad a job the Saudis did at planning and then hiding their hand in Jamal Khashoggi's brutal murder.
Full Trump quote on Saudi killing of Khashoggi: "They had a very bad original concept. It was carried out poorly and the cover-up was one of the worst cover-ups in the history of cover-ups. Very simple. Bad deal, should have never been thought of. Somebody really messed up." — Jordan Fabian (@Jordanfabian) October 23, 2018
FREE MARKETS
Houston reaches a compromise on sex robots.
"The ban prohibits the use of a sex robot at a business, but does not prevent the sales of the robots." …………………… https://t.co/1TqYXSsE5r — Shoshana Weissmann, Regulatory Reform Muse (@senatorshoshana) October 23, 2018
QUICK HITS
Secret Service are investigating a suspicious package, thought to be an explosive, left outside Bill and Hillary Clinton's home.
Amazon has reportedly been shopping its facial-recognition software to federal immigration agents.
Here's what Trump's trade war is doing to American companies.
Dungeons & Dragons art is "finally getting the respect it deserves."
Sex-segregated support for Democrats versus Republicans is widening:
Gooood morning! There are 13 days until the midterms, and as of now this election has the largest gender gap since 1958. @alexi and @StefWKight have the details for you —> America, 2018: Gender gaps, gender wars https://t.co/KjSk0XIxSH pic.twitter.com/h9W7rsjmP5 — Haley Britzky (@halbritz) October 24, 2018
Comentarios