Sunday, January 22, 2012

Out to lunch for the weekend

Remarkably incoherent even for the Courier, today's editorial had my head spinning trying to parse the unnamed editor's carnival-ride argument, in which he attempts to paint the President as a socialist for -- get this -- deporting illegals.
   He starts out with standard right-wing magical thinking, identifying "to close or control the border" as an "easy answer." He then advocates a "contrarian approach" that he never gets around to describing.
   Then he goes right off the rails, claiming without citation, "according to the Associated Press, President Barack Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Yup, he's saying that over two terms Bush the Younger followed a "socialistic" approach, and then Obama took it further.
   He explains with this whipsaw head-spinner: "Socialists like to control the workforce and the freedom to roam, so aggressive immigration policies come naturally."
   So it appears that the editor accidentally flipped the channel away from Fox News for a second and has discovered that the Obama administration has been deporting far more illegals than the Bushites, for all their yammering about the Brown Peril, ever got around to. The only way he can explain this to himself is to confuse socialism with authoritarianism.
   But then the crafty socialists switched strategies again, and it must be to win back those illegal voters, who were presumably thinking of supporting Newt. Ultimately the editor seems to like the change, but blames the Prez for playing politics with the issue.
   Here in the reality-based world, what happened is that the Obama administration came into office and immediately began working on practical policy to address the widespread fear the Republicans whipped up over nothing -- in other words, responding to a popular complaint with practical action. It focused on apprehending and deporting criminal aliens, reporting record numbers and putting the Bushites to shame. Regular non-criminal illegals were not a target in the federal plan, that was Arpaio, Babeu and their ilk. There's no new policy, only a restatement of what's already working and a PR connection with the Utah Compact, which has been gaining traction here as well. This is the part that the editor suddenly likes, because some Republicans have given him permission to like it.
   The editorial demonstrates in excruciating detail how a dedicated right-wing mind has to contort itself to approve of any action by a perceived adversary -- cramming square pegs into round holes, scrambling the timeline and finding any possible way to see it as objectionable.

And no, I can guarantee that the AP never said "Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Some wacko pundit sold as part of the AP suite may have said something like that, but ascribing it to a news source is completely wrong and a vile distortion.