Why Does the Republican Party Bother to Exist? Part II

A few months back I asked the question of the Republican Party – If you can’t make a story as black and white as the killing of Kate Steinle part of the debate over illegal immigration, why do you even bother to exist? Recent events have me asking the same question again: First off, revisiting the killing of Kate Steinle, National Review’s Mark Krikorian reports:

Sure enough, Senate Democrats voted to prevent debate on a bill to rein in sanctuary cities that shield illegal-alien criminals from deportation. The final tally was 54-45, short of the 60 votes needed just to proceed to debate on the bill. Manchin and Donnelly were the only Democrats to vote for it, Kirk the only Republican to vote against. (Graham didn’t vote.)

So when Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez, the most strident anti-borders voice in the House, called the murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco “a little thing,” he seems to have been speaking for his party. The only question now is whether Republicans will even try to make this a campaign issue. Cruz probably will, since he took to the Senate floor before the vote to urge its passage, but it will take more than that. Will party leaders go on the Sunday talk shows this weekend and denounce Democrats for protecting criminals? Will Jeb Bush hammer the issue on the campaign trail? Not likely.

The Radical Left has no problem raising poster children to sainthood status, no matter how outrageous the actual stories may be – see Trayvon Martib, Sandra Fluke, Michael Brown, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Or most recently, there is Ahmed Mohammed, but we’ll come back to him shortly. At the end of the day even though Conservative principles are superior, those of the radical Left have been winning because they do a better job of messaging, and part of that is storytelling. Individual stories help to humanize complex issues, and if the Republicans can’t use this to make the case you have to wonder why they bother to exist.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Reynolds Yonker reports over at the AP about a school district in Tennessee that will be closing because it can’t afford its new Obamacare premiums:

Classes in a small, financially struggling school district in northern Tennessee have been canceled until officials can find a way to generate more revenue.

Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong said the school board made the decision Thursday night after struggling with budget concerns for three years. He said the district doesn’t have enough money to pay for partially unfunded government mandates.

“Clay County’s inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what’s caused this to come to a head,” he said. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was really the Affordable Care Act for us and it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law. That was going to require new revenue and the commission felt like they couldn’t do that through a tax increase.”

“The choice was to either close schools and deal with this now or keep schools open and spend ourselves until we have nothing in our fund balance at all,” he said.

“This is a poor, rural county and we already have the seventh-highest property tax rate in the whole state of Tennessee,” he said. “Our property taxes, they’re high enough.”

This is just one of many, many stories of people who have been hurt by this piece of legislative date-rape that the Radical Left forced onto the American people. You don’t think when serious talks of repeal emerge the left won’t be prepared with some sob story of someone who would die without Obamacare? There are many different stories and angles showing the negative impact of the law – guess which one story is the one that will be repeated over and over?

Next up, Governor Mark Dayton decided to lecture his citizens at a talk for the NAACP on accepting more immigrants. Powerline’s John Hinderaker weighs in:

From the start of the event, Dayton bluntly stated his opinions on the racial tension in St. Cloud and across the state in regards to immigration.

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” Dayton said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. But, this is Minnesota and you have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here and this is Minnesota should find another state.”

Dayton said he was aware of some of the racial issues happening in the St. Cloud area and urged participants to take a stand against what he described as “unacceptable, un-Minnesotan, illegal and immoral” behavior.

“If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state. Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again. It’s not going to be that in St. Cloud, or Rochester or Worthington,” Dayton said.…

Dayton said many organizations are providing assistance to those who are arriving in Minnesota. But he said the key reason many immigrants choose to come to Minnesota is because of the jobs Minnesota provides.

Really? The data suggest otherwise:

Even though Minnesota has a good job market, that doesn’t seem to have translated into jobs for the Somali refugees. Minnesota’s state demographer’s office reports that only 41 percent of Somali men are working and 54 percent of Somali women are employed, meaning many may rely on the state’s handouts to survive, and are more susceptible to extremists’ pull.
Minnesota has one of the nation’s most lavish welfare systems. Dayton’s rant continued:

“Our economy cannot expand based on, white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens. We don’t have enough,” Dayton said.

Wow. Those “white, B+ Minnesota-born citizens” just can’t cut it anymore. Can anyone imagine a politician of any stripe making a remotely comparable remark about citizens of any other race? And Dayton is talking about his own constituents: over 80% of Minnesotans are white, and the proportion of voters is higher. Dayton won’t run for governor again, so, like lots of other Democrats, he is taking the gloves off.

Hinderaker raises serious questions about these remarks:

Two questions remain: first, what did Dayton mean by the “B+” reference? I think it derives from Garrison Keillor, the leftist who for years has found a home on public radio. All Minnesotans, as Keillor says, are “above average”–B+, in Dayton’s account.

Second, why didn’t Dayton’s racist rant get more publicity? Because not many people read the St. Cloud Times. A great many people, on the other hand, read the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Strib did report on Dayton’s St. Cloud adventure, but its account was carefully sanitized. No “love immigration or leave Minnesota” rhetoric, and above all, no reference to the “white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens” who can no longer sustain our economy. The Strib knows the first rule of journalism: the job of a reporter is to run interference for the Democratic Party.

This is exactly the sort of story that should be broadcast loud and clear. Leftists will sneer at us as they wave their finger and lecture us about helping other, but get damned quiet when you ask how many of these refugees they’re inviting into their own homes or at least suggesting that a refugee center be put in their own neighborhoods. It’s not difficult to  demonstrate the hypocrisy and contempt that most leftists have for this country and it’s values. Maybe it would be a good idea to go on the offensive and  point out to the people the politicians and propaganda outlets who despise them so?

And finally, back to Ahmed Mohammed, aka “The clock bomb boy”. When the story first broke it created a nice little uproar in social media. And then the story sort of unraveled. Not only was this clock not an invention, but his family has a history of being Islamic agitators. As Mark Steyn wrote:

South of the border, Ahmed the Clock Boy made his long-awaited visit to Washington to meet President Obama, following his pilgrimage to President Bashir of Sudan, the butcher of Darfur, a couple of days earlier. When Ahmed first got into trouble for bringing his “clock” to school, Obama Tweeted his approval (“Cool clock, Ahmed”) and invited him to bring it to the White House. Since then, the official line – precocious all-American teen’s enthusiasm and ingenuity stymied by ingrained Islamophobia – has taken a bit of a hit. Ahmed can’t make a clock. All he can do is rip the guts out of some crappy Radio Shack thing from the Seventies, and tape it into a simulacrum of a suitcase bomb, which is not a skill to be disdained, at least in some parts of the world.

However, it’s not really the talent all the hipster execs had in mind when, in the wake of the presidential Tweet, they invited Ahmed to visit the headquarters of Google, Facebook et al. The private sector apparently still has enough sense of self-preservation that the glamorous job offers and grants quietly faded away. And even the Oval Office had supposedly downgraded Ahmed’s audience with Obama to part of the crowd scene on White House “Astronomy Night”. But no: young Ahmed worked his way to the front of the line and was rewarded with a hug from the President.

The greatest clockmaker of our time explained that he’d been unable to bring his clock to Obama because he’s been “too busy traveling”, and it’s kinda bulky, being the size not of a clock but a bomb, and evidently President Bashir’s security in Khartoum being pickier about large ticking devices than the White House. But he’s certainly “busy traveling”: The quintessential Texas teenager and his family have accepted an offer to move to Qatar.

Nonetheless, like Niqab Girl, Clock Boy has taught us all a valuable lesson with his droll and spectacularly successful provocation. The US Department of Homeland Security’s slogan is “If You See Something, Say Something” – unless it’s something that might get you accused of Islamophobia, in which case keep it to yourself.

Which is where we came in, on the morning of Tuesday September 11th 2001 at the US Airways First Class check-in desk:

I got an instant chill when I looked at [Mohammed Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a politically correct slap…I thought, ‘My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.’

Clockmed has raised the bar on that one. My God, this is just a young Muslim male. So what if he’s ticking? Do I really want to be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six months?

I have a better question – how is it that nobody outside of the conservative blogosphere was jumping on this story? I know, what should a Republican leader be doing? Nothing formal was needed, but maybe a few snarky responses to the White House’s Twitter invite would have been nice – give them the ridicule they deserve. And maybe a few for the media outlets that rushed to judgment while we’re at it. The bottom line is these people enabled a massive hoax, and have not even gotten so much as a tweak on the nose for it. The fact that this story hasn’t become an embarrassment for the administration and its media enablers and instead gets the world’s smartest aspiring terrorist an audience with the president says a lot about both leadership for both the Democrats and Republicans.

In review, here are four recent stories showing Democrats enabling illegal alien murderers, hurting lower income Americans via their compassion, not even bothering to hide their contempt for this country anymore, and following a wonderful anti-American, multicultural hoax, facts be damned. And from Republican leaders we get… crickets. Back to the Krikorian article on sanctuary cities, I’ll steal his final line to wrap up this post:

And people wonder why Trump is so popular.

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