Here is a story to distract you from thinking about what you
are paying President Trump for the Pence entourage to stay at the Trump golf
course in Doonberg, a town in Trump Ireland.
Long story, short: Jimmy Aldaoud, who came to the United
States as an infant in 1979, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
and put on an plane to Iraq. He had never been there; he was born in Greece. He
didn’t know the language. He needed medicine he wouldn’t know how to get. As a
deportee he couldn’t go to the U. S. Embassy for help. But being a culturally
American, he would be targeted by the people who were his kinsmen only in the
twisted minds of ICE. He had to be deported because he upsets the President of
the United States and his base.
Yes, he’s dead.
His death was totally legal, according to U.S. courts, which has found and
will be finding more and more of that thanks to the labor of Sen. Addison Mitchell
McConnell and his see-no-evil-on-Pennsylvania-Avenue caucus.
Here is another story. It’s not much of a distraction .
The second easiest story to write in Washington -- after
screw-ups at the Veterans Administration -- is the shoddy state of the housing
our government offers our military personnel and their families. You can do
either story anytime you face a dull first edition. The reason housing is so
bad for military families is that money for it keeps being diverted to more
important missions, like military bands, officers’ golf courses and, most
recently, a presidential wall. The walls is needed because people like Jimmy
Aldaoud make the President of the United States and his base nervous. The
amenities this month's Secretary of Defense is telling the Europeans to pay for include housing
for our troops.
We get tired of this crap day after day. That’s why POTUS
can divert us so easily by putting hurricanes in a Cone of Sharpie and aiming
them at Alabama. The temptation is to ignore them. That’s what they want us
to do. If any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind,
sometimes I just have to scream. Sorry.
Makes me scream, too. And you will hear a scream in Florida from Nebraska if any so-called pro-life groups stick their voter guides under my windshield wipers in the church parking lot. Because I don't think they care about this life issue.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure this is just an aberration and that the system overall is functioning smoothly by humanely shuttling people from where they don't belong to where they do belong. As Pogo would say, "Oog!"
ReplyDeleteOur politicians absolve themselves by claiming that they're simply enforcing the law, and if people die elsewhere, that is not our fault, we didn't make the mess back in their home countries.
ReplyDeleteThe maddening thing is that their argument, like Scrooge's is perfectly rational: Scrooge paid his taxes for the work houses, and the poor should go there. If they would rather die, then that reduces the excess numbers of the poor. Win-win, leave me alone, bleeding hearts.
U.S. history re immigration has always been schizoid. We have always tried to restrict Others--from Benjamin Franklin's freak out over the Germans in Pennsylvania, to the Yellow Peril laws, to "no Irish need apply," to emergency bans on Muslim travelers, to the calumny heaped on migrants from Mexico and points south.
We are equal opportunity xenophobics when anybody different shows up. Then, in a couple of generations, we're slobbering over their Horatio Alger stories of pluck and success, reciting Emmma Lazarus at them, and patting ourselves on the back for being the landathefree and the homathebrave.
It makes me laugh. But not in a good way.
Update: Mr. Aldaoud was buried in Southfield, Mich. What a sickening irony that he was deported, but allowed back in so he could be buried beside his parents here.
ReplyDeleteEven my know-nothing congressional rep.John Moolenaar co-sponsored a bill to try to give Iraquis an extended window so this sh*t would not happen.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/09/06/funeral-refugee-jimmy-aldaoud-who-died-after-being-deported-iraq-laid-rest-michigan/2219741001/