Wait a second. If armadillos spread leprosy then we need to close down the border. Hell, we need to let Mexico annex Texas and then close down the border. Who cares about unattended children? It’s the armadillos that are the real threat. And Ted Cruz.
This is the level of logic and basic human compassion we have to deal with on a daily basis, whether we’re talking about kids at the border or unemployment insurance. On the left, letting Mexico have Texas back is a fringe position that is not espoused by any members of Congress and few, if any, elected Democrats nationwide. But Republicans who want to pass laws to prevent the housing of unaccompanied migrant children because they fear disease? Finding them is like shooting fish in a barrel.
And, yet:
There have been a handful of reports that children have swine flu, tuberculosis, measles, and chickenpox. But while Central American kids are at higher risk for tuberculosis, mainly an upper respiratory disease, it is not only treatable and curable, but the Department of Health and Human Services screens and quarantines the children who test positive for TB. In fact, the first step once kids are intercepted by border agents is to perform health screenings on each individual.
The general population is likely safe from swine flu because the vaccine for it is part of the trivalent influenza vaccine that’s administrated annually. Measles and chickenpox vaccines are available and already required, although the recent uptick in measles outbreaks can be partially blamed on parents who forgo their kids’ MMR (measles, mump, rubella) vaccine based on the belief that vaccines cause autism. Reports of Ebola virus (a West African disease), as Gringrey suggested, seem to be downright doubtful since people with the virus develop dramatic symptoms within days, and are probably too busy hemorrhaging blood to make the treacherous journey into the United States. And Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease is a benign infection that can be picked up anywhere like the playground and in daycare centers, not just by three-year-olds granddaughters who somehow have direct access to unaccompanied children.
According to the World Bank, many of these unaccompanied children have already been vaccinated. The vaccination rate in the United States hovers at 92 percent, but comparatively, 99 percent of Mexican children are vaccinated as are 93 percent of kids coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
But none of this matters because the right-wing has completely taken over the Republican Party and paranoid hateful insanity is now just what’s for dinner.
They’re worried about disease when their brains have already been infected.
“They’re worried about disease when their brains have already been infected.”
Uhm… What brains, BooMan?
You mean those walnut-sized masses that are like what serve as reptile’s brains?
They have no heart, either.
I suspect that their blood is pumped by their spleen.
I am sitting here simply shaking my head and, admittedly laughing like a lunatic, at the irony that kids from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have HIGHER vaccination rates for measles than kids right here in the good old U-S of A.
I have been inundated on social media the last few days with all these stories from conservatives about disease infested kids streaming across the border and how these camps are just going to be havens for all sorts of strange and exotic germs that are going to infest us all. And it turns out that we are in bigger danger of falling ill from exposure to measles from the kids in many of our own communities than we are from these refugees.
Man, oh man. We are living in the bizarro world, for sure.
Look, conservatives don’t and never gave a fuck about starving and diseased children who are nominally their countrymen in their own backyards.
Why in the world would you expect them to show consideration for people even further removed from their tribe? It’s like going ‘well, sure, even though Know Nothings hate Catholics, maybe they’ll like this Jew-converted-to-Muslim with Irish and Negro parents!’ It just defies all logic that you would expect otherwise from a conservative or tribalist, but I repeat myself.
“Michael Savage” has been running with the immigrants are diseased schtick for a long time. That the GOP has to borrow a talking point from “Savage,” and with children no less, is a sure sign that they’re running out of material. (As if their reprise of the scary “unisex restrooms” that they used to help defeat the ERA wasn’t another indication. Difference is that public “unisex restrooms” didn’t exactly exist back then, and today “gender neutral restrooms” do, and well, they may be gross but not scary.
Not only are these Rethugs concerned about the spread of various diseases, but our “illustrious” senator from Illinois, Mark Kirk, is worried these little ones may be felons. Geez!
http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140711/NEWS/140719860
He’s gotta know he’s on his way out, that’s the only explanation otherwise why be so crazy.
Well of course these kids are diseased. They’re rabid little brown animals coming from nasty dirty places. They must not be allowed to infect our beautiful white country.
This kind of idiocy has been spouted during every immigration wave, back to the Barbarian invasions of Rome and no doubt before; it’s a standard anti-immigrant talking point.
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-lesson-of-open-door.html?utm_source=feedburner&u
tm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FlpjFg+%28Smartypants%29
This describes the mentality of the GOP. Do not forget that there is a real healthy dose of “I got mine, FU** you” in their actions as well.
On the left, letting Mexico have Texas back is a fringe position
Yeah, I favor letting Texas become an independent country, then embargoing it the way we do North Korea.
I always find it amusing when fellow liberals say self-aggrandizing bullshit like this, even in jest, and then champion themselves defenders of the little guy immediately thereafter.
I don’t think amusing means what you think it means.
Also: fuck Texas.