Today it's not just me fulminating about the Reverend Huckypoop's savage ignorance on immigration--I've shanghaied Pastor Dan as a guest fulminator

"The fact is the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds. It's about people that can come with a shoulder fired missile and can do serious damage and harm to us, and that's what we need to be worried about. And the unsecure borders that we have pose a real national security threat."
--"Mad Mike" Huckabee, ranting in Iowa, trying to show Republican single-issue psycho-voters that he isn't soft on immigration, no matter what those left-wing meanies say

"While privileged men work their games of power, it is the children of the poor and dispossessed who get stuck with the tab."
--Pastor Dan, in a Holy Innocents' Day post on Street Prophets

Poor Hucko was raving about 660 "illegal Pakistanis" crossing into the U.S., er, carrying shoulder-fired missiles, apparently. Of course what the Huckababy doesn't know about U.S. immigration can be summed up in a single word: everything. The missile-launching Pakistanis swimming across the Rio Grande exist nowhere except in the lurid psycho-instead-of-sexual fantasies of people like Minister Mike. (Don't you get the feeling sometimes that what wingnut loons need to knock the crap out of their brains is some decent, honest--i.e., non-Republican--sex?)

Of course the immigration issue is about people coming to pick lettuce and make beds and do all those other sub-minimum-wage jobs nobody else is willing to do. These people are so tightly woven into our economy that if they were suddenly deported en masse, in accord with the wishes of the loopiest anti-immigration loons, nobody would be more surprised than those loons to see hardly any sector of American life continue functioning intact.

At this point, since dishonesty and stupidity on this scale, especially unchallenged dishonesty and stupidity, make me kind of nuts, I'm going to turn the podium over to one of the sanest and most grounded people I know, Pastor Dan of the "Street Prophets" website, in this excerpt from a post he did for Holy Innocents' Day:

Just today, Mike Huckabee linked Benazir Bhutto's assassination to illegal immigration:

In his speech today, Huckabee said it should be of concern to Americans that 660 illegal Pakistanis crossed the American border last year.

One reporter asked if that was ethnic baiting?

"No, not at all. I'm just saying maybe that a lot of Americans who live in Pella, Iowa maybe look halfway around the world and say, how does that affect me?" said Huckabee.

"And the way it affects them is that we need to understand that violence and terror is significant when it happens in Pakistan, it's more significant when it happens in our own cities, and it happens if people can slip across our border and we have no control over it," he continued.

"The fact is the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds. It's about people that can come with a shoulder fired missile and can do serious damage and harm to us, and that's what we need to be worried about. And the unsecure borders that we have pose a real national security threat."

It's true that those 660 Pakistanis may have brought surface-to-air missiles with them. Given that most illegal immigrants overstay visas rather than swim the Rio Grande, it seems unlikely, but anything's possible.

Or they may have been like Joseph and Mary, frightened young parents fleeing a dangerous, chaotic situation to protect their lives and the life of their child. It may have even been that two of them were toting a new messiah with them.

Who knows? Anything's possible.

I want to be surprised that Huckabee, the Southern Baptist pastor, could miss such obvious symbolism. But I'm not, and for the very reason that underscores the importance of this lesson: while privileged men work their games of power, it is the children of the poor and dispossessed who get stuck with the tab.

If Mr. Huckabee were much of a Christian, he would have drawn the obvious line between anti-democratic violence in Pakistan and instability outside its borders. He could have articulated the faith claim that God has and does act decisively to establish peace and justice, and calls his disciples to do the same. He might even have said that stable, peaceful, democratic regimes around the globe are not only consistent with the Christian faith, but in the best interests of our own nation.

But apparently, that would have provoked a hostile response. He would have been deluged with accusations of being "soft" on illegal immigration and "not serious" on foreign policy. Both those charges seem to translate into being insufficiently bloodthirsty, or at the least not punitive enough to salve the hardened hearts of many Americans. Collateral damage be damned, we want to be safe at any cost, and if a few hundred brown children more or less get greased, well, it's their own fault for being born into such a f***ed-up part of the world. Which means, unfortunately, that Rachel will continue to weep for her children. Today - and every day - is Holy Innocents' day.

FINAL BIT OF FULMINATION: A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE

The last time I wrote about Itty-Bitty-Brained Mikie Huckababy, I was taken to task for having fun with his name and that of other famous far-right-wing sociopaths like Chimpy the Prez, the squatter in the White House who has spent seven years doing everything chimpanically possible to turn the U.S. into chimp poop.

Undoubtedly the complainer has finished reading the riot act to the lying scumbags of the Right-Wing Noise Machine like "OxyContin Rush" Limbaugh, who habitually traduce all manner of folk whose toes they aren't fit to lick.

I guess for me it comes down to a matter of respect. Lying, demagogic piles of filth like Chimpy the Prez and the Reverend Huckster have devoted their lives and diseased egos to trashing every shred of human sanity and decency.

Now we have the Reverend Huckypoop, of whom it could formerly be said that he had on occasion shown a glimmer of sanity on the immigration issue, showing that there are truly no depths of intellectual dishonesty and hate-mongering to which he won't sink if that's what he has to do to show that he's just as brain-damaged as any of the other Republican presidential hopefuls.


WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF NOMENCLATURE AND RESPECT

I hope it will be noted that I take care always to refer to ministers, even ones as debased as the Reverend Huckypoop, as the Reverend Huckypoop, rather than plain old Reverend Huckypoop. I was trained by a persnickety veteran copy editor to apprecdiate that "reverend" is a term of honor rather than a title. And so I extend the courtesy even to practitioners of the kind of junk Christianity peddled by Minister Huckster and his ilk, a bogus Christianity that would have shocked and appalled Jesus, who is ritually fetishized but has had his beliefs and teachings systematically expunged from the carnival.

My goodness, can you imagine how Jesus would have responded to the anti-immigrant hate-mongering being carried out even in his name? It would have left him with a lot of souls in need of saving.

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