Before Cantor there was Hume
by digby
Before David Brat’s upset victory last night, there was a sort of precursor in the form of hate talk hero Laura Ingraham destroying elder statesman Brit Hume for having the nerve to defend little immigrant children the day before. I wrote about it for Salon this morning.
You see Hume thinks that kids who make it across a thousand miles of treacherous terrain to come to a better life might actually have something to offer America. He even thinks these children are human beings. Ingraham was having none of it:
To get a flavor of the reaction to this rare demonstration of decency by a conservative commentator, one need look no further than chief immigrant basher, Laura Ingraham, whose xenophobic callousness toward the plight of the kids who are currently flooding the border from central America is well documented. She claims to love the Hume, but thinks he’s a bit addled for holding those views:
Of course there are wonderful children. I love children. I remember the children in the Iraqi orphanages that I had to leave behind … heart broke for them. But we have something going on here that is profound. In our sovereignty, our rule of law, our financial resources, our military bases.
By the way when he said they are happy to eat whatever they’re giving them the consul of Honduras is saying that the illegal immigrant children are complaining that the burritos and eggs they’re being given in their holding areas are making them sick. So they’re complaining about the food. I’ll bet there are American kids who would like free food before they go to bed at night.
They’re already complaining.
Yo quiero Taco Bell
You read that right. She played the Taco Bell tag line at the end of that rant. Her misanthropic disregard for the welfare of these little kids remains a bizarre counterpoint to the fact that she is the adoptive mother of three foreign born children, one of whom is from Guatemala. If one were a cynic, one might assume that this is a performance. The right wing talk audience is rabidly anti-immigrant, so it’s a good, perhaps necessary, career move. But if it’s a performance, she deserves an Oscar. She sure sounds like she means it.
Ingraham was down in Brat’s district campaigning for him just last week. She said that President Obama should have traded Eric Cantor for Bowe Bergdahl. Because he once had the nerve to say that kids who’ve spent their whole lives in the US (The DREAM kids) might be allowed to become citizens. That’s all it took for him to become her enemy.
Last night on Fox she and Ann Coulter battered old Brit Hume to his face. Here’s how Twitchy gleefully described it:
