Andrea Mitchell and other reporters have speculated lately about why, in their view, the White House has seemed surprised by long-festering problems like this flow of refugees, or others like the Veterans Administration's failures and the collapse of Iraq. Rep. Cuellar commented:
If he's saying he's too busy to go down to the border but you have time to drink a beer, play pool, the appearance means that he's not paying attention to this humanitarian crisis.
To be fair, this humanitarian crisis is not new. Nobody has been paying meaningful attention to it for decades. It's getting attention now only because the flood of refugees has topped the figurative levees and threatens to inundate higher-priced real estate. Almost everyone talking about it is fundamentally cynical, focusing only on symptoms, nothing approaching a cure for the underlying pathology
The most obvious example of a cynical band-aid is the President's modest proposal of $3.7 billion in emergency spending, roughly half for caring for and processing refugees, and half for more military and para-military border protection. The inherent logic in the increasing militarization of the border is increased killing of refugees: how far will Americans be willing to go with that?
In any case, more spending of this sort will not solve the problem, though it might relieve the crisis. The chance of the spending bill getting through Congress (it passed the Senate 93-3) is presently near nil. One measure of the President's cynicism is his unwillingness to photo op the refugee camps, which might actually pressure Congress to act -- and that might not be useful to Democrats who need an inactive Congress to run against in the fall.
To be fair (again), the prospect of Republican control of Congress is itself a potential crisis that could emerge from long-festering failures. But that's another story, even though it wouldn't likely improve the refugee crisis story.
There is nothing but cynicism on all sides of the refugee story
Another measure of the cynicism of the emergency spending proposal is what it proposes to do to "solve" the problem: make nicer refugee camps and get more officials to speed up deportation of these people back to the hellish places they came from. That's what the White House has already said is likely to happen. Well, that's a solution of sorts for the U.S. But it's not a permanent solution, and hardly one decent people can be proud of. In every meaningful sense of the word, these children (and most of the adults) are real refugees from the ravages of American power.
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