“I shouldn’t have used illegal,” Joe Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart. “It’s undocumented.”
The mea culpa pertained to the president describing a Venezuelan in the United States illegally who murdered a nursing student jogging in Athens, Georgia.
Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who represents a Georgia district, prompted Biden to address the murder during the State of the Union address.
One gleans from this not merely that Democrats remain unserious about solving the illegal immigration problem but that they do not regard illegal immigration as a problem.
“Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden told the joint session of Congress, “to her parents, I say my heart goes out to you.”
His brain went out to somewhere else.
Lincoln Riley, of course, coaches the University of Southern California Trojans football team. ESPN’s Pat McAfee confessed that he emerged from an event to discover the coach’s death (a fate for a USC coach even worse than losing to UCLA) trending online. “Lincoln Riley’s dead?” he asked. “Wait a second, who said that? The president? Lincoln Riley’s dead?” (READ MORE from Daniel Flynn: Grumpy Old Man Mumbles State of the Union)
The slain student’s mom reacted, “Biden does not even KNOW my child’s name — it’s pathetic!”
Activists and journalists, and activist-journalists, fixated on neither the murder nor the fact that the president did not know the victim’s name but that he called an illegal alien “illegal.”
Hmmm.
“We remind President Biden that no human being is illegal — and dangerous rhetoric inevitably leads to more violence against our community,” responded Faisal Al-Juburi of the Texas immigrant-support group RAICES.
The media followed suit in condemning imaginary violence allegedly brought on by the correct use of a word rather than the actual violence brought on by treating illegal behavior as legal behavior.
The New Republic reacted to Biden’s off-script remark by insisting, “He really, really shouldn’t have.” CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Democrats in interviews about the use of the word. As CNN put “illegal” in scare quotes on the chyron, Senator Laphonza Butler of California conceded to Bash that she considered it “unfortunate” that Biden “fell into the trap of the language.” A frazzled Nancy Pelosi, who understands the optics (and the humanity) of all this better than her less experienced colleagues, told Bash: “He should have said ‘undocumented,’ but that’s not a big thing.”
Many in Congress did not require Fourth Estate prompting to rush to defend the murderer —rather than condemn the murder — from a label they regard as unduly harsh.
“Let me be clear: No human being is illegal,” Rep. Ilhan Omar responded.
“As a proud immigrant,” Rep. Chuy Garcia tweeted. “I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the word ‘illegal.’ He should have said undocumented.”
“There was a lot of good in President Biden’s speech tonight, but his rhetoric about immigrants was incendiary and wrong,” Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas similarly tweeted. He added, “The rhetoric President Biden used tonight was dangerously close to language from Donald Trump that puts a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere.” (READ MORE: History Remembers Mitch McConnell Differently Than 2024 Does)
An illegal alien, already pinched for criminal offenses but somehow not deported, bashed-in a 22-year-old jogger’s skull. Their impulses compel them to largely stay mute in response to the horrific crime but react to outrage when a president of their own party acknowledges the perpetrator’s illegal status. To them, failing to deploy a euphemism, rather than erasing a young woman, amounts to the offense worth making a fuss about.
It all seemed not merely obtuse but upside-down.
One gleans from this not merely that Democrats remain unserious about solving the illegal immigration problem but that they do not regard illegal immigration as a problem. Biden, by apologizing for saying what he should have said more than a week earlier, illustrates the degree to which the party remains enwalled by ideological precepts regarding the border.
Bill Clinton elicited jeers from Republicans by saying to a voter, “I feel your pain.” A new generation of Democrats, far more ideological and less human than the 42nd president, exacerbates rather than feels others’ pain. That once-mocked empathy appears wholly absent from large swaths of the Democratic Party. Republicans surely long for that compassionate Democratic Party over this sadistic one.
He felt our pain. They inflict it.