There's horseshit and then there's damned horseshit. And one of the goddamnedest piles of horseshit is "Obama says things when black guys are killed, but why didn't he say anything when [Insert Name of White Person] was killed?" Usually, they rattle off black people Trayvon Martin - who was killed by a neighborhood watch captain who thought Martin was a criminal for looking black, Michael Brown - who was unarmed and shot to death by a cop, Eric Garner - who was unarmed and choked to death by a cop, and/or Freddie Gray - who killed by cops recklessly driving a police van with the intent of harming Gray, who was in the back. Tragically, you can expand that list endlessly.
Shit, torture apologist and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen triples down in his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "Mouth foam from a rabid schnauzer"), mentioning President Obama's speaking about Martin, Brown, and Gray. And then he says, "But after Kathryn Steinle was killed July 1, allegedly by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions, Obama said...nothing."
He's referring to the shooting in San Francisco of a young white woman by the aforementioned undocumented immigrant. The fuller story of the whole incident is about institutional and individual incompetency that makes you want to beat your head against a wall. The immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had no convictions for violent crimes, so instead of being handed over to an overwhelmed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, he was sent out after five years in jail, homeless, drug-addicted, and possibly mentally-ill. According to a public defender, "He didn’t receive any services. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket...He was homeless, penniless and living on the streets." Sanchez claims that he had popped some pills and found the gun, which he accidentally fired. That may or may not be the truth. It's hard to tell because Sanchez is a drug-addict who might be mentally-ill.
But Thiessen and, of course, the Fox "news" junk pundits have to shit out their theories, which mainly involve how "illegals" are murdering the fuck out of good Americans. Thiessen says, after quoting the head of the ICE, "121 times over the past four years [2010-2014], the administration has released an illegal immigrant with prior criminal convictions who went on to be charged with murder. That is one every 12 days." Now, the Rude Pundit is no statistician, but he knows how to use a calculator. According to the ICE, the Obama administration has deported over 900,000 undocumented individuals with criminal records. That's 640 every day.
Of course, numbers are a game. And the rules that govern who stays and who goes in the immigration game are subject to local, state, and federal whim. Do conservatives want to take away California and San Francisco's right to deal with immigration how they see fit? Yeah, federalism is merry and fine when you want states to enact insane abortion policies. But sympathetic immigration laws? Bring the motherfuckin' federal hammer down, right?
But, to conservatives' bigger point, that somehow Barack Obama's immigration policies are responsible for some kind of phantom surge in crimes by undocumented immigrants, Thiessen cites, "In 2013, the Obama administration released 36,007 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions — 1,000 of whom were subsequently convicted of other crimes after their release. Last year they released 30,558 such immigrants." Thiessen doesn't say if the criminal convictions were misdemeanor or felony, trespassing or rape, marijuana possession or murder.
But Thiessen did work for the administration before Obama's, George W. Bush's. And it took the Rude Pundit about two seconds of searching to find, for instance, a 2005 story about the arrest of 100 mostly undocumented immigrants who were part of a violent gang that spread over multiple states. The article says, "Federal immigration officials estimate that there are 80,000 to 100,000 criminal illegal immigrants in the United States." That shit's scary. In 2006, an undocumented worker murdered actress Adrienne Shelly in her New York City apartment. In 2007, two undocumented men were part of a trio who killed three teenagers in Newark, New Jersey. Tom Tancredo, who thinks Donald Trump should tone his fuckery down, made a presidential race issue over the crime.
In other words, conservatives, shut the fuck up about blaming President Obama. You know what would prevent anyone from shooting people dead? Fewer fucking guns. Why don't we put that on the table?
Finally, there's an enormous difference between the deaths of the black men and the murder of the white woman mentioned above. Kathryn Steinle was killed during a crime by a criminal. Brown, Garner, Gray and many other black men were killed by cops in situations where no one was threatened. When people in authority murder unarmed people, that would seem to be something that demands a reaction more than another day, another awful crime.
And, by the way, Obama didn't speak immediately after Trayvon Martin's death by George Zimmerman, someone whose actions were defended by many on the right. Martin was killed on February 26, 2012. Obama spoke on June 19, 2013, after the acquittal of Zimmerman. He faced a shitload of criticism on the left for not addressing it earlier. So maybe let that comparison go. Oh, who are we kidding here? You guys will hump that corpse like a rabid schnauzer on a Confederate flag pillow.
