Monday, November 23, 2015

Undesirables

These guys.
The House Republican leadership has pushed through a bill that would put an indefinite moratorium on allowing Syrian refugees into the country in response to the increased terrorist activity of the Islamic State (IS).  They're apparently afraid of women and children arriving here and blowing something up.
Let me see if I have this straight: France is letting in 30,000 more Syrian refugees after an attack on Paris, and the United States, which hasn't been hit once by IS, is the country freaking out?
I keep insisting that the United States, dominated by a corrupt, arch-conservative political party at a time when the social and political order is fast declining, resembles the U.S. of the 1850s, when similar sociopolitical convulsions placed the country in a state of crisis in the prelude to the Civil War.  Now I fear that these times do not echo America in 1851 but rather Germany in 1933.  The Republican effort to block refugees from entering the U.S. and also stirring up fears against Muslims eerily recalls Nazi anti-Semitism.  As if House Speaker Paul Ryan's efforts to put his own stamp on the job by cracking down on refugees from the Syrian Civil War and he Islamic State War - that;'s right ,Syrians are living through two wars at once, and with three sides between them - weren't bad enough, Donald Trump is proposing a database on all American Muslims and American mosques.
The Republican presidential candidates have mostly backed the House bill limiting refugees, which just passed, and Texas governor Greg Abbott - whose election can only be explained by the fact that the Texas Democratic Party is disintegrating faster than the nationwide Democratic Party - has ordered nonprofit organizations in the state not to accept refugees.  On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have stood up for refugees, and, to be fair, so has Hillary Clinton.  But her hawkish attitude toward the Middle East, which is sure to produce more refugees, should be enough reason to vote against her.  But principle doesn't count for much in politics these days unless you're a long-shot candidate.  
It's time we stopped favoring knee-jerk reactionaries and pseudo-progressives and started voting for people who will make the United States the world moral leader it's supposed to be.         

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