GOP Your Pants

15 Responses to GOP Your Pants

1. Chris Peterson says:

   November 20, 2015 at 1:05 pm

   Belgian and French citizens, who can visit the US at will, terrorize Paris.

   GOP reaction: add Syrian bombing victims to the list of undesirables.

   Never was there a better time to ignore the elephant in the room.

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2. Greg Goodknight says:

   November 20, 2015 at 1:30 pm

   RL, that one is far enough below the belt to call shenanigans. In 2011, after Iraqi refugees already in the US were matched up to fingerprints found on IED’s, Obama paused the refugee program for 6 months while security procedures were improved.

   That was when we had boots on the ground in Iraq and hooks into the Iraqi government, with access to Iraqi records… contrast that with our current relationships with the various entities controlling pieces of Syria, including the Assad regime. There is no effective vetting possible.

   I don’t see any GOP fear of Syrian women with small children; I do see a bipartisan concern that too many of the refugees are single men of military age, not much education and few job skills.

   What is an acceptable error rate for the screening process? How many IS combatants per 100 we can handle? A 1% rate would be 100 IS among the 10,000 Fearless Leader has announced will be arriving soon. That’s 10 Paris attacks, more if they focus on radicalizing others to take up the slack. Sound good?

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   • rlcrabb says:

     November 20, 2015 at 2:09 pm

     We have these nations known as “allies” who have borne the brunt of the exodus from Syria. Since Obama and our Eurofriends dropped the ball when they had the chance to actually do something to stem the tide, it’s only right that we take some of the overflow. Maybe I could be more sympathetic if we were expected to absorb 100,000 or more, but I think we can probably vet and absorb 10K Syrians without too much risk. It’s always been fashionable to diss immigrants. I could post a hundred cartoons of blatant bigotry and racism throughout our history, and I’m more than happy to reverse the trend.

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3. Greg Goodknight says:

   November 20, 2015 at 2:52 pm

   House approves Syrian refugees bill

   ““I think a lot of us went in with open minds and really wanted to understand the administration’s position on this,” said New York Democrat Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. “It is offensive to me that we would stigmatize refugees…but if you read the bill what you find is that you have a pretty simple certification process sitting on top of an existing and extensive screening process that most of us believe works pretty well.”

   Maloney voted for the bill. ”
   w w w dot politico dot com/story/2015/11/syria-refugee-bill-vote-216053

   47 Dems joined nearly all the Repubs voting for the measure that was passed yesterday, 289-137. This isn’t about “dissing” immigrants, is bipartisan, and seems to have passed with a veto-proof majority in the House.

   News today includes the tidbit that two of the Paris terrorists with surviving fingertips were fingerprinted in Greece and received Syrian vetting.

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   • rl crabb says:

     November 20, 2015 at 4:13 pm

     While you’re counting fingers, you might note that the security guard who stopped the bomber from entering the stadium was a Muslim.

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     • Greg Goodknight says:

       November 21, 2015 at 1:16 am

       From what Stygian depths of your soul did the delusion this is about Moslems or Islam? I’ve good friends who are Moslem, one for 43 years, and if I found myself in Cairo or Lahore, I’d have a place to stay.

       This isn’t Islamophobia, RL, IS is not stupid and they’re on a roll. There are holes in the vetting process (because there is no trusted authority on the other end) and the House has a swag to make it better. Feinstein is also working to fix the visa issues to patch those up.

       Then there’s the raw economics…for the cost of accepting 1 refugee here, we can pay for their care and safekeeping close to Syria for 12. Which makes more sense?

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       • rl crabb says:

         November 21, 2015 at 8:39 am

         Of course it has nothing to do with Muslims. That’s why the presidential candidolts are falling all over each other trying to figure out ways to keep them out. Good for DiFi for closing loopholes. Maybe Gavin Newsome will let her keep her little gun to protect herself when he takes over in ’18.

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         • Greg Goodknight says:

           November 21, 2015 at 10:42 am

           This is about Jihadi wolves in refugee clothing, not Islamophobia.
4. rl crabb says:

   November 20, 2015 at 3:03 pm

   Right. I’ll be interested to see how many grandstanding governors change their tune with the new rules.

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5. Greg Goodknight says:

   November 20, 2015 at 3:25 pm

   There won’t be new rules until it gets passed by the Senate, and our grandstanding El Supremo has signaled he won’t be playing nice if it makes it onto his desk for his signature.

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6. Chris Peterson says:

   November 20, 2015 at 4:30 pm

   As Greg acknowledged, Obama already upgraded the vetting process by the intelligence agencies, which was already a stringent 2 year process. And the glaring fact remains; of the millions of refugees we have brought to our shores, not one has ever committed an act of terrorism on our soil.

   For the “home of the brave”, we can be pretty chicken shit sometimes. Fear is a group-think thing, and many of the members of Congress are simply hedging their bets against the odds, no matter how slim. Funny that they don’t see any problem with allowing citizens from dozens of other countries to walk right in, as they did before 9-11. Again; the Paris attackers were citizens of Belgium and France, and could have come here with nothing but a plane ticket, (yet some recall a needle in a haystack that never happened to bolster their fear).

   If she was still around, my Italian grandmother could tell you stories of the nasty treatment she received early in WW2 even after my Dad survived Pearl Harbor, as could my wife’s Native American grandmother, who was a prisoner at Fort Yuma. And there’s still Japanese Americans around who remember the paranoid incarcerations of their families. Seems some people will always have a fear du jour, and what sounds like a valid rationalization for it. Some politicians use it as a form of crowd control, while the best remind us that fear itself is the enemy.

   Then again, it might be a genetic thing, because my parents didn’t pass any of that fear onto me. I never was one who got scared when I heard someone else cry.

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7. Greg Goodknight says:

   November 21, 2015 at 10:55 am

   “And the glaring fact remains; of the millions of refugees we have brought to our shores, not one has ever committed an act of terrorism on our soil.”

   Forgot about the Boston Marathon bombing already? They’d applied for political asylum. Not to mention 9/11, but those terrorists were tourists or students learning how to fly.

   Before Paris, many French would probably have said the same thing.

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   • Chris Peterson says:

     November 21, 2015 at 12:08 pm

     Swing and a miss, Greg. The Boston bomber brothers were NOT refugees, and they were only 10 years old when they came here. Their Dad is the one who applied for asylum after having arrived here from Chechnya. And like the following article notes; damn those agents for not recognizing that two kids under ten would someday flip out.
     Not refugees; aslylees. That’s quite a distinction for people who are aware of the difference. But at least you got the 9-11 guys right. Good for you.

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bier/the-boston-bombers-were-n_b_8584016.html

     Again: terrorist acts on US soil by millions of refugees vetted? *ZERO*

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8. Greg Goodknight says:

   November 21, 2015 at 2:25 pm

   A hit, if you take the Oxford dictionary as a authority on the English Language:

   Definition of asylum in English: noun
   1 (also political asylum) The protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee:
   http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/asylum

   The operative word being “refugee”, and past vetting performance has little value in vetting the current crop from IS territory.

   The Boston Bombers mom was supportive of her kid’s radicalization, so the ‘toon above isn’t that far off their mark. The Chechen radicals are amateur compared to the pros in IS, and the issue here is refugees from IS strongholds in the aftermath of IS declarations they are among the refugees.

   My late father-in-law was a Serbian political refugee who carried his mother into Italy after WWII to escape Tito, and my wife’s mom was also a Serbian refugee. They met on the boat to the US. No problem, but then there weren’t terrorist groups in Serbia vowing to kill American civilians at home.

   I expect they’d have better luck walking across our southern border looking like Cochise, played on TV during my childhood and yours by the late Syrian-born actor Michael Ansara, but I liked him better as a Klingon.

   If it wasn’t for anti-GOP election year rhetoric, the new House bill would sail through the Senate, too, and the current President would sign it.

   Just to remind all, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Republican, never voting in a GOP primary or supporting GOP platforms. It’s just that people like Petrse

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   • Chris Peterson says:

     November 22, 2015 at 8:37 am

     If we lived long enough, I’m sure that eventually we would ALL be suspect, given that we are all tied to some foreign country by birth, as I’m sure Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Jobs, among many others, would attest to now. So, without any reservation, I see the opposition to accepting Syrian refugees today as nothing short of outright cowardice.
     As to your repetitively quoted political disclaimer:
     I, as an independent, do not vote in any party’s primaries, nor can I claim to support their platforms, but I most assuredly vote for progressive candidates and legislation whenever possible, which I have no doubt is in opposition to your votes for conservative “values”, whatever that means today, (vs last week, last month, or years past).
     And, far beyond his part in Broken Arrow, I always thought of Ansara as being the lucky duck who got to go home with Barbara Eden.

     Happy Thanksgiving, Greg.

     Reply