Video of the day -- the wrong bus
"The fear on their faces!" This clown is a Congressman. Found via Politics Plus.
Edit: I'm misinformed -- Kwasman is a candidate for Congress and currently a member of the Arizona legislature. The point stands, and I suspect his chances of becoming a Congressman have dropped a little.
3 Comments:
This isn't surprising. Most of these baggers are woefully uninformed and not exactly critical thinkers. The fact that Faux Nooz has had the wide appeal that it enjoys is a testament to the triumph of stupidity over reason with these people.
How can this guy live on the border and not easily distinguish between a recent arrival and an established immigrant? I live in Houston, not on the border, but a destination for immigrants and a way station for people moving north and east. I can tell at a glance how long someone has been here. There is no way I could ever mistake a bus of YMCA campers for a bus of refugees. And there's no reason Mr Arizona border should either. Has he never looked at the people in his district? has he never spoken to them?
Furthermore, there's all kind of talk that these kids are being put up in luxury motels. I can tell you that here in Houston they are being put up five to a room in a recently closed hot-sheets motel that was essentially a brothel and stacked three deep in an abandoned elementary school in a depopulating inner ring suburb.
And it's just 50 thou kids. Houston by itself could take that hit. Drop in the bucket. Even smaller drop in the bucket in Southern California. Cali is even more populous near the border and fewer kids have taken the western route. Most take the shorter eastern route to Texas, and Texas could easily absorb the total number.
These kids have gotta learned hustle on their way through Mexico. We have a local company that builds business where hustle kids live. The Census said Gulfgate was dead. Local developers understood Gulfgate was a cash hustle gold mine and lured a lot of business there. Maybe these kids if they mix into the western Heights and inner Northwest will be able to save the once mighty Northwest Mall of my childhood.
Shaw: A lot of them are a few ants short of a picnic, that's for sure. Not only under-informed but over-susceptible to being panicked and agitated when someone pushes the right buttons.
Bacopa: The mind has a strong tendency to see what it expects to see rather than what's actually there, something stage magicians (and political manipulators) learn to exploit. Kwasman and his fellow baggers were all keyed up and primed to see buses for of refugee kids, so that's what they saw, regardless of what was actually in front of them.
I've read that when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland, some of his troops, who had been brainwashed to almost literally demonize the Catholic Irish, claimed they actually saw barbed tails on the bodies of the Irish they had killed. Obviously that wasn't real, but that's what they saw.
One thing I've noticed about right-wing discourse on migration is that there's very little in the way of hard numbers. They use evocative expressions like "many" and "a lot of" and "flooding over the border", but can almost never quote specific numbers, or occasionally use wildly exaggerated numbers (40 million illegals in the US, 75 million ready to "flood over the border" if reform passes, etc.) which they can't source and which have no connection with reality.
The last time I did see a discussion with some hard numbers, border crossings this year are still down from historic levels, even when the much-hyped wave of refugee minors is included.
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