It is irrational to look at every challenge to our world, country and community as a partisan or ideological opportunity. When leaders start to do that, events not properly tended to on their merits spin out of control, crisis becomes a permanent condition and people can even die from a failure to do the right things for the right reasons.
In other words you get pretty much what we’ve got now in the Ukraine, on our Mexican border, in Gaza, Syria and Iran — even the local unemployment office where a shrinking workforce discovers daily the limited joy of part-time work.
At this point in the editorial many might expect us to unload a ton of criticism on President Barack Obama. But we have made a genuine effort, as we have with other politicians with whom we have fundamental disagreements, not to keep repeating ourselves.
We’ve not changed. We’ve just already said it a few times. More and more facts presented keep proving our point. If you are not convinced of the wrongheadedness at the heart of the direction we have taken by now, you will hold on to the cold comfort of your political faith all the way to the grave.
The scene can’t even provide interesting gamesmanship any more. No heroes here on any side.
As an example, let’s examine the immigration problem in which thousands of children from Central America, often unaccompanied, are allowed to pass through Mexico to the U.S. border where they fall into the arms of our border security, are declared refugees and are transported to communities away from the border. They will flit in and out of a judicial system that will likely never send them back home and perhaps give them voting rights here sooner rather than later.
This situation results from a perpetual acceptance of illegal immigration and the notion spread to other countries that if you can just get here, especially if you are a child, you get to stay here and get all the U.S. social services. Now the cost of these services, including attendance in public schools, might well buckle the nation and the states in which the new arrivals reside.
In the past, Republicans didn’t want to look mean to poor people, especially if the poor were a minority. It falls into the type to which Democrats have cast them. And groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce like the cheap labor represented by illegal immigrants. So, instead of doing the right thing and throwing employers hiring illegal immigrants in jail, the GOP let the old incentive for sneaking into the United States thrive. No one ever sealed the border.
Meanwhile, some Democrats hoped for waves of future voters that will eventually put Arizona and Texas in the Blue column on election night. And other liberals, who rank feelings above rational thought when constructing policy, believe that it is somehow social justice for American citizens to provide Medicaid to Guatemalan citizens. Never mind the consequences for everyone involved.
It is now a humanitarian crisis with sick, hungry children at its heart. Clean up and control of the border will require hard, unpopular and mainly bipartisan decisions. A similar formula is required by our other messes. Americans are going to have to come together as we haven’t in a very long time if we are to avoid greater disaster.
Meanwhile, election fundraisers keep soaking up our leaders’ time.