Jesus Hates You

Why does commie Big Gummint always have to play Good Samaritan?

From DCist:

Ruth and Ronald heard rumors when they arrived at the Texas-Mexico border that people in D.C. were offering free help to migrants like them. The couple from Venezuela, who declined to give their full names so as to not jeopardize their asylum application, were relieved to learn the rumors were true.

When they arrived at Union Station on Friday, the pair and their four kids say they were greeted by local volunteers and nonprofit staff, who offered food and other support. A volunteer purchased their flight to Florida, where they plan on meeting Ruth’s cousins — then she offered up her home to the family for the night, sheltering and breaking bread with them as they waited for their flight on Saturday evening.

Their experience in D.C. was night and day with Texas. “It was tougher because in the border there are military, so they treat you like military,” Ronald tells DCist/WAMU at a church downtown that’s become a base of operations for volunteers helping the migrants.

You may have heard that Texas and Arizona have in recent months taken thousands of immigrants who had entered their states via the southern border and bussed them to DC. This is an ongoing political troll by the conservatives who run those places, as is apparent from this lede for the rightwing Washington Times from April 13:

Texas sends first bus of illegal immigrants to D.C., delivers border crisis to Biden’s doorstep

Texas shipped its first busload of migrants to Washington on Wednesday as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to make President Biden and the nation’s capital feel some of the pain of the border crisis.

…The Republican governor said his moves are intended to expose Mr. Biden, who has fostered the most chaotic southern border situation the country has faced in decades.

(WashTimes frequently complains of liberal “media bias,” which adds piquancy to coverage like this.)

I should mention that Texas has a lot of unoccupied land — they have just 105.2 people per square mile. That’s including the state’s five cities that are larger than DC. Also, DC’s population density is more than ten times that of the state. And Texas is awash in oil and gas money and could probably put all those immigrants up in McMansions without feeling the pinch.

But hatred of “illegals” is part of the creed that keeps Republicans in office.  (I should also mention that, as Jill Filipovic recently noted, “in 2021, Biden resettled fewer refugees than Donald Trump in any year of Trump’s xenophobic presidency” — during which term, funnily enough, I don’t remember the shitheels crying about border-jumpers. In fact Biden “has kept some of Trump’s harshest immigration rules in place.” So they’re really complaining that Biden hasn’t increased the cruelty enough.)

DC might have just greeted those thousands of immigrants with cops who would have brusquely sent them on their way, the way California cops once turned away Okies in the days of the Dust Bowl; I expect the thought occurred to Mayor Bowser, who is facing reelection in a city full of lanyard drips (some of whom might be as nervous about the newcomers as the shitkickers) and has been calling the influx a “federal issue” that the feds must solve —an arguable point, but her game of chicken with them means present inaction, and the DCist article describes a chaotic spillover as unassisted immigrants are turned away from overfull homeless shelters and forced to take what comes.

It’s a prime example of a key conservative strategy at work — aggressively fucking up government, then going “see, government can’t do anything right.”  The rightwing Washington Examiner describes Bowser’s dilemma thus: “Washington politicians” — crafty of WashEx, conflating city officials with the “Washington politicians” their readers are accustomed to identify as kill-worthy Congressmembers — “are now echoing the same complaints that border state governors, mayors, and county commissioners have made the past year: that they cannot handle the influx of people being released into their communities daily.”

Of course the big difference is the immigrants went into Texas because that’s where they could get to, while its governor sent them on to DC as a cruel stunt with no regard for the immigrants or the people who live in their destination. (Sort of like the “People’s Convoy” — which also harassed DC citizens as a putative protest against “Washington politicians” — only slightly less ham-handed and more vicious, as it uses frightened refugees as pawns rather than their own dumbest voters.)

The rest of rightwingdom have picked up this theme with durr-hurr who luvz immigrants now libtard stories, and Tucker Carlson has contributed a typically racist froth (“Muriel Bowser meant it so sincerely that she hired people in leotards to stage interpretive dance to celebrate illegal aliens… Illegal aliens are holy because diversity is our strength,” etc).

The Washington Post is trying to get Bowser to step up: “even with federal assistance, the D.C. government needs to play a role.” Meanwhile citizen volunteers like those who met “Ruth and Ronald” at Union Station are trying to plug the leaks. DCist cites the Sanctuary DMV among those who are trying to handle the job with dwindling funds. Sanctuary DMV has a GoFundMe running for this purpose but it’s going pretty slow. There are FEMA funds coming, but apparently not enough, and who knows if our sclerotic Congress will get it together to help big enough and fast enough.

Well, I just kicked in. I have to say, though, it’s one of the more piquant ironies of our time that the party most identified with churchgoers is the one least likely to do anything requiring brotherly love and an ounce of effort for anyone else, whereas the party that’s supposed to be all godless and materialistic is perpetually called upon to play Good Samaritan.

I attribute part of this curious state of affairs to Reagan, of course — the worship of money, and the tempting theory that greed actually helps the poor eventually (so you don’t have to worry about it) — and part of it to the Clinton/DLC phase when Democrats decided Remember My Forgotten Man was a less important part of their branding that soulless technocracy. Whatever the appropriate blame-mix, I find one of the few reasons I still fear death is patriotic: I seem to be among the few Americans left who remember what this country was like when it knew itself, and when I and a few others depart this vale of tears the formula will be lost forever and the U.S. will enter its Heart of Glass phase. Enjoy the Clearing of the Benches, suckers!