That's a remix of an old line on Vince Lombardi and his black players in the less-enlightened 1960s. He treated all his players equally...like dogs, as the old saw goes.
That line came to mind in this piece Drudge had front and center on the push-back from governors on having Syrian refugees sent their way. So far, most of the governors objecting are Republicans, but Jerry Brown and New Hampshire's Maggie Hassan were in the mix; Hassan has been on record objecting prior to this, but Brown was an interesting add to the skeptical governor crowd.
The administration seems to be set to send refugees where they want, since states generally don't get vetoes on who does and doesn't come into a particular state. Given the administration's chilly relationship with a number of state governments on the issue of illegal immigrants, there isn't a heck of a lot of trust on these legal ones.
The governors were complaining about deliberate opaqueness of the administration on who was going where, but such lack of transparency might be prudent, since protesters could be propositioned if unfriendly state governments had a heads-up on things.
This passage prompted the Lombardi quote-
Sen. Dick Durbin said that refugees aren’t the primary source of concern. He pointed to the millions of foreign visitors who enter America each year.
“Background checks need to be redoubled in terms of refugees but if we’re talking about threats to the United States, let’s put this in perspective,” he said. “Let us not just single out the refugees as the potential source of danger in the United States.”
You have a number of immigration hawks who are willing to do just that, but not in the way Durbin would like; they went to treat immigrants in general the same ... as a source of dangerous attack dogs. The fear is more focused on Muslim immigrants than others, but even generic immigrants are often suspect by their critics, doubly so given the relative lack of attention to the issue by the current administration.
There is a potential source of danger here, more-so than with Jose and Maria from Guadalajara. While other immigrant groups have their unsavory subsets (Mexican drug cartels, Russian mobsters, Nigerian scamsters, et. al.) those unsavory subsets do less damage to random civilians than modern jihadis. Syria is the current epicenter of said jihadis as the HQ of the self-styled Islamic State.
Thus, one would need to be more prudent with refugees from there than we would be with, say, refugees from drug-war violence in Central America. Cartels generally don't look to slaughter civilians for the heck of it (although if the civilians are getting in their way, all bets are off) but slaughtering infidel civilians for fun and the glory of Allah is right up a Daesh fan's ally.
A Facebook friend noted that it wouldn't be wrong to combine compassion with common sense; that seems to be the trick here. While the vast majority of refugees from Syria are just getting out of a war zone and want a peaceful life, a few have other ideas.
Finding that blend of compassion and common sense is tough. Folks on the left major in compassion and want to avoid being judgmental, while folks on the right major in security and want to avoid the outliers among the refugees shooting up their favorite restaurant or having fun with plastique at the ballpark. Middle ground seems very hard to come by and even harder to sell in a primary race.
More on this to follow; I have a second post in process on this front, but this seems to be a good breaking point.
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