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There’s a very old joke about the stupid racist who goes to a rally against illegal immigrants from Mexico and yells “Go back to Africa!” or the stupid KKKer who goes to a black church and yells “Go back to Mexico!” And now we have this tidbit from Arizona: a politician who got all excited about positioning himself to show the world (and the voters) that he opposes migrant children settling in his community — only to find out later the kids on the bus who he said were immigrant kids were actually Arizona children going to a a YMCA camp.
No, this is not a joke, although the politician could most assuredly now be seen as the human embodiment of that term. NOT FROM THE ONION but from The Arizona Republic:
Republican congressional candidate and state legislator Adam Kwasman had just raced up to Phoenix Tuesday morning from the protest in Oracle over the expected arrival of dozens of migrant children at a shelter.
He had tweeted from the scene, “Bus coming in. This is not compassion. This is the abrogation of the rule of law.” He included a photo of the back of a yellow school bus.”
You can almost sense how breathless he was.
Kwasman later told me he saw the migrant children. “I was actually able to see some of the children in the buses. The fear on their faces…. This is not compassion,” he said.
And the website has raw video footage showing him saying just that.
But there was a problem with Kwasman’s story: There was no fear on their faces. Those weren’t the migrant children in the school bus. Those were children from the Marana school district. They were heading to the YMCA’s Triangle Y Camp, not far from the Rite of Passage shelter for the migrants, at the base of Mt. Lemmon.
12 News reporter Will Pitts, who is at the protest scene, says he saw the children laughing and taking pictures of the media.
I had to break it to Kwasman that those weren’t migrant children. Kwasman later deleted the tweet. He did back flips trying to take back the story he told me.
As another great Republican thinker once said at a debate: “Oops.”
It turns out that the bus Kwasman and others expected to come in wasn’t expected to be in that day at all, the newspaper reports.
Just step back and take this in:
1. This guy got wind of a bus load of migrant children en route to this city.
2. How did he know there were MIGRANT CHILDREN on THAT BUS?
He didn’t talk to the kids.
He didn’t talk to the bus driver of that bus.
He had no confirmation from immigration officials.
Someone tipped him or his people off about a bus of MIGRANT-LOOKING children on THAT BUS.
3. Time to send out a Tweet! Let the world know you’re on top of this invasion.
4. Time to race down so you can say you saw them and are making sure you’re on the scene. You’re diligent. You care. Nothing get You’re the embodiment of Bill O’Reilly’s slogan: “I’m looking out for YEW!”
To be fair, this is a monster issue now in the U.S. fed by a)the strain on resources b)the federal government seeming to be unsure how to handle it and the Obama administration looking hapless as it struggles for a coherent policy and message on this crisis, c)Congressional Republicans digging in their heels in yet one more indication that their number one goal is to do anything or nothing to make the administration look bad (which isn’t always necessary since the administration can do that all by itself) d)the genuine concern on the part of many Americans about how to absorb, pay for, and process these traumatized kids e)the fanning of anti-immigrant feelings by some shameless conservative radio and cable talkers and Internet wrties who see this as a great ratings and/or readership gainer.
And Kwasman knows that people in Arizona, in particular, must deal first hand with the issue of illegal immigration — and that it’s a hot button issue in his state, an issue that isn’t an abstract one, but part of the state’s reality.
Still, his wasn’t a total bust for Kwasman.
At least neither he nor anyone in his car yelled out “Go back to Africa!”
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.