I’ve really enjoyed the right-wing freakout in the wake of Obama’s executive order on immigration. I’m not going to bother to link, because we all know the usual suspects. Boehner’s calling Obama a king, Ted Cruz is babbling about the usual nonsense, and the base is demanding things that are impossible. Over on Twitter, the usually quiet Pat Toomey is urging his followers to sign a petition that will go nowhere and accomplish nothing. Why? Who the fuck knows? Pat may be crazy, but he’s no dope: he knows as well as anyone else that the SCOTUS upheld Obama’s broad authority to decide who to deport two years ago, in Arizona v. United States.
But try to tell these saps that they’re deluded, and you know how it goes. They make up their own facts, start throwing around big words like “Constitutionalist” (as if using a six-syllable words confers intelligence on the speaker), and generally jumping up and down like Rumpel-fucking-foreskin.
So it gives me great pleasure to link to one of my longtime foes in Philadelphia, the otherwise-repellent right-wing demagogue Christine Flowers, who today is the voice of reason:
What I am is someone who knows why President Obama issued a set of executive orders addressing the single most controversial issue of our time: immigration. He didn’t do it because he’s an emperor, or because he wants to create millions of new, Latino Democrats. He also didn’t do it because he’s a humanitarian in the mold of Emma Lazarus or because he’s courageous…
We have waited and waited and continued to wait for Congress to do its job and create workable legislation that satisfies the concerns of both sides, and Congress has failed. Only Congress can create new visas, and only Congress can provide a permanent solution, and Congress has refused.
So Obama decided to take the action that – listen closely here – is his constitutional prerogative. The scope of his executive orders allowing noncriminals with family ties and longstanding residence in the U.S. to be protected from deportation for three years may be broader than some people would like (and narrower than others have urged) but it does not violate the separation of powers.
As you may imagine, Flowers -who is a freakin’ right-wing lunatic that has been know to speak at Tea Party rallies– is now being berated by her readers and branded a “biased phony” and a “failure” who traffics in propaganda and “pure lawyer talk”. Just skim through the comments. They are a joy to read.
Oh how I love the taste of impotent right-wing rage-tears. They taste like sunshine and happiness.
