You can’t buy credibility with lunatics, even with human sacrifices

You can’t buy credibility with lunatics, even with human sacrifices

by digby

Recall that the administration once insisted that record deportations would buy him credibility with the right so they could do some kind of Grand Bargain on immigration:

Whenever Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and other immigrant-rights advocates asked President Obama how a Democratic administration could preside over the greatest number of deportations in any two-year period in the nation’s history, Obama’s answer was always the same.

Deporting almost 800,000 illegal immigrants might antagonize some Democrats and Latino voters, Obama’s skeptical supporters said the president told them, but stepped-up enforcement was the only way to buy credibility with Republicans and generate bipartisan support for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.

How’d that work out?

They’ll insist that Obama is soft on immigration, no matter what. Not even this will change their minds:

This chart is being touted as some sort of achievement, by the way, even though they know that people who are not criminals are being deported right along with the alleged criminals.

This has been an appalling policy and one I predict will rank up there as a very bad mark on President Obama’s legacy. There was no good reason to do this: the recession had brought illegal immigration to a standstill as it was — something that common sense would tell you was bound to happen. This was a political decision and it hurt people.

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