“You're doing a helluva job, Brownie”
Who can forget this tone deaf Bushism at the height of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? I never thought it could ever be outdone, but the Donald and his colleagues have taken the art of inappropriate statements to a new high in the current refugee crisis.
The American president this past week attempted to defend his zero-tolerance policy at the border by warning of the danger of these illegals “infesting the country” by the millions. He warned they were a danger to American children, despite the fact many of them were mere children themselves. With his comments, the President was equating families, often with small children, with the murderous thugs of gangs like MS13.
Then his friends at Fox and Friends offered their defences of the conditions in which the children, separated from their guardians by the policy, were kept. Host Steve Doocy denied they were kept in cages as government photographs actually showed. These were just rooms with 'walls built with chain link fences.” And Doocy noted, they are supplied with thermal blankets to keep them warm on the cold warehouse floors.
Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, an African-American mother of six, declared than some of her African-American friends described the detention facilities as being nicer than the “projects” in which they had grown up.
Then appearing on the same program with Campos-Duffy, commentator Laura Ingraham suggested the facilities were “essentially summer camps.” This comment was particularly egregious given the fact that Ingraham is the adoptive mother of three children, including one young girl from Guatemala.
I am most certain it is not the sort of “summer camp” Ingraham would want her little girl to attend.
It has been hard over the past weeks not to have heard at least once the tapes of these young children crying as they are separated from their guardians. Unfortunately, it seems Trump and friends have been totally tone deaf to this tragedy.
Frank Likely is a retired Anglican minister living in Springhill