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Cheap Seats 2017Tears - 02/01 By Rich Trzupek
Everyone is familiar with the closing lines of Emma Lazarus’ famous poem The New Colossus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
However, few remember how Lazarus updated the poem years later by adding the lines: “And if a few religious zealots determined to blow crap up manage to slip in at the same time, oh well.”
America has a long, proud history of accepting refugees. That’s a great thing. However, we know that really, really bad people who intend to do us harm can and have slipped into this country under the guise of being refugees.
Nobody, not me, not you, not the “outraged” Democrats in Congress, can say that we have done a good enough job of vetting refugees from nations that are known homes of large numbers of radical Islamic terrorists. Maybe we have. Maybe it’s inevitable that a few will leak through as some did during President Obama’s watch.
The Commander In Chief, whomever he or she is, is ultimately responsible for national security. It is not unreasonable, therefore, for our new President to take a closer look at how we are vetting refugees from certain nations, nor is it unreasonable to suspend immigration from those nations for a few months while he does so.
Good people may disagree with the preceding paragraph and that’s fine. Disagreement over policy and practice is one thing. Senator Chuck Schumer’s ridiculous tears are something else again. Worse the mainstream media’s continuing collusion with people like Schumer, who are either liars or idiots, is more pathetic than ever.
There is no “Muslim ban”. There is no “religious test”. If you get your news from places like CNN or ABC or The New York Times, you surely think I’m full of it. I’m not. They are.
They don’t tell you that the list of countries subject to the temporary halt in immigration and to extreme vetting did not originate with the Donald, it was a list created by President Obama.
They don’t point out that President Obama himself instituted a six month ban on accepting refugees from Iraq in 2011, presumably without Senator Schumer reaching for a handkerchief.
They wouldn’t quote someone like liberal journalist Asra Nomani of the Muslim Reform Movement who understands and supports the temporary travel ban from these seven countries.
Instead we get hysteria and protests, most of which are designed to play into the whole “Trump is Hitler” nonsense. And for that we on the conservative side of things must take some responsibility. All of the “Obama is a secret Muslim”, birther nonsense and the like helped to make extreme hyperbole the new normal in political discussion.
It’s no secret that I was no fan of President Obama, but that was about what he did, not where he was born or what his faith was. Wherever you line up in the political spectrum, when you employ hysterical hyperbole instead of sober analysis, you make yourself less heard, not more. People tend to walk away when you scream at them, in other words.
But, boy of boy, don’t some of us just LOVE to scream anyway.
E-mail: rich@examinerpublications.com
www.threedonia.com
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