“Why elect Democrats if they act this lily-livered when doing the right thing carries any political risk?”
by digby
There are a lot of horrors in the world every day — and especially today. Watching the footage of the carnage of the Malaysian air crash is just awful. The scenes from Gaza are sickening, particularly the hundreds of kids who’ve been injured or killed. I’m angry and sad and feel impotent in the face of it all.
But you don’t have to go around the world to see such displays of disgusting cruelty. Right here in the United States we are witnessing a reprehensible example of callous disregard for the lives of children by our own political leaders of both parties when it comes to the refugee crisis on our border. I’m with Emily Bazelon on this:
Where should the 57,000 children who are already here go? The answer is: Every state should be raising its hand and offering to take some of them. This is not a border-state problem. It is not up to Texas and Arizona to carry this load just because they’re the first places the children land. States in the Northeast and the Midwest can take some of these kids too. Yet some states are looking only for excuses to say no. Their leaders—including in my own state of Connecticut—are behaving shamefully. This NIMBY response is the worst kind of hypocrisy, especially coming from supposedly liberal blue states. Got a star on the flag? That means you have to pitch in right now.
Instead of showing some heart, my governor, Dannel Malloy, is looking heartless and feckless. He claims otherwise: “Obviously, our hearts go out to the children in this situation,” his communications director said. But that is an empty piety if I’ve ever heard one. Asked by the Obama administration to temporarily house 2,000 immigrant children at a nearly vacant training school in the town of Southbury, Malloy said no. “We don’t currently have the ability to meet this request,” the same spokesman claimed.
Malloy’s administration says Southbury is too small and decrepit. Never mind that the federal government would pay for getting the facility ready for the children and for upkeep. If Southbury, built in the 1930s for developmentally disabled people, is really unusable, then Malloy should find another place for these kids. The only reason why he so far has not is politics: He is in a battle for re-election with Republican candidate Tom Foley. “The bottom line is that too many swing voters fear immigrants, and Malloy doesn’t want the ‘optics’ of hundreds of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking children being bused into Connecticut,” the New Haven Register editorialized last week. This is just ugly. Since Malloy also faces a third-party challenger from the left, maybe he should rethink his political calculus anyway. But the bottom line is this: Why elect Democrats if they act this lily-livered when doing the right thing carries any political risk?
On the Cowardly Governors list with Malloy: Terry Branstad of Iowa, a Republican. Branstad too expressed “empathy” for the immigrant kids and then said no to taking any children, even as a facility for at-risk youth was readying a 48-bed unit. “We’ve always felt we’ve been good partners with the state. We met with officials and decided it was not in any of our best interests to do it,” Steve Gilbert of Sequel Youth and Family Services told the Des Moines Register of deciding not to take the kids. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, scrapped a proposed site in his state without coming up with another alternative.
Yes, “it’s not in their best interest” because they’re fucking jackasses. And here I thought politicians were a bunch of despicable cowards for failing to accept the Guantanamo prisoners and insisting they be kept in a prison camp indefinitely. Apparently, the same goes for little children.
Good God, this is sick. It’s not a million children ferchristsakes, it’s 60,000. We spend vast sums of money on total bullshit every day in this country chasing down phantom drug dealers, paying off corrupt politicians and keeping our 1% fat and happy. If we can’t deal with this crisis in a humane and decent fashion then it’s pretty clear we are no longer a decent country. These are children.
Oh, and I don’t want to hear one phony pious word out of any of these jerks about what good Christians they are and how they follow the teachings of the Bible. To quote Max von Sydow in Hannah and her Sisters, “if Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he would never stop throwing up.”
Shame on these horrible politicians and the horrible xenophobes to whom they are catering.
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