Not sure which is sadder -- that Rachel Maddow actually believes this, or that she knows it's not true and says it anyway.
A sure sign that Maddow is on thin ice is when she makes a dubious claim without attribution. She did this on her MSNBC show Monday night while trotting out a deceptive euphemism to hide what she was actually saying. (Video after the jump)
Maddow was comparing how two governors, Rick Perry of Texas and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, are responding to the massive current influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border.
Considering that Perry is one of those knuckle-dragging Republicans so loathed at MSNBC, it was a given that Maddow would ridicule his unfathomable decision to call up the National Guard in response to a crisis. Nearly as bad to Maddow is the possibility that Perry is again running for president, as shown by his recent visit to Iowa. Such overweening ambition is unacceptable unless exhibited by Democrats --
So Texas governor Rick Perry is trying to be as potentially presidential as possible right now. (Maddow accenting the "p" sounds, a la Porky Pig, for emphasis). Governor Perry went to Iowa this weekend, which is the kind of thing that makes no sense at all for a governor of Texas, unless that governor of Texas wants to be president. So Governor Perry went to Iowa and decided to proclaim that he was sending the Texas National Guard to the border. Nobody quite knows what the Texas National Guard will do on the border (more accurately, none of us here at MSNBC want to know). The flow of kids and young families turning up at the border is reportedly slowing down significantly already and when those kids and young families do show up, they by and large have just been looking for border patrol agents and then surrendering, turning themselves in. So nobody quite knows how armed troops are going to help that in situation. Are they gonna get in the middle of a hug or what?
Because one thing we can be absolutely sure of -- Latino gangs and drug dealers and jihadists would never take advantage of the chaos on our border and slip into America undetected. We know this with certainty because MSNBC's reigning brainiac has assured us it is only "kids" and "young families" converging on the border.
Maddow then touted what she considers the more enlightened response of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick --
In contrast, consider Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts who, honestly, probably has a better chance of actually being president someday than Rick Perry ever does (as shown by the unstoppable presidential campaigns of fellow Massachusetts liberals Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry). Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has taken rather the opposite approach to Rick Perry when it comes to dealing with the practicalities of this matter. Rick Perry is waving his magical National Guard wand and nobody (here at MSNBC) really knows why, but tens of thousands of those kids and young families are already here in this country in federal custody. And the federal government does have to figure out how and where to hold those folks while they are being processed before the vast majority of them will get sent home.
That's right -- "sent home" to their cozy domiciles .... and the death squads ... and grinding poverty ... and warring drug gangs ...
Needless to say, the children and young families won't be "sent home" from the GOP gulag that is Rick Perry's Texas -- rather, they'll be "deported," a word that the curiously tentative Maddow dares not utter when referring to a governor known hereabouts as "Cadillac Deval" Patrick.
The "vast majority" of these illegals will get deported, Maddow claims. Begs the question -- says who? Then again, perhaps the lack of attribution doesn't matter, because whomever or whatever was cited, no conservative would believe it and no liberal wants it to happen.
Maddow touts Patrick's willingness to deal with the "practicalities" of the problem. Patrick's way of doing this? Accepting more than 1,000 illegals to be "processed' in Massachusetts before most are allegedly deported, possibly within the coming decades. Uh, wouldn't it be more practical to eliminate the extended detour to New England?
"About two-thirds of the minors were ordered deported or allowed to leave the country voluntarily, and 361 were given legal status," according to the Journal. "In most other cases, the judge terminated the case, meaning the child wasn't ordered out of the U.S. but wasn't given explicit permission to stay, either."
"Separate data from the Department of Homeland Security show that in fiscal 2013, about 1,600 children were actually returned to their home countries -- less than half the number who were ordered removed -- suggesting that some are evading deportation orders," the WSJ reports. "The head of the immigration court system told a Senate hearing this week that 46 percent of juveniles failed to appear at their hearings between the start of the 2014 fiscal year Oct. 1 and the end of June."
What happens next to the illegal minors being brought to Massachusetts? They will be released to those claiming to be relatives, who won't have to prove this, nor prove their own legal status. After that, maybe they'll show up for their court hearing, maybe not, the odds roughly the same either way -- but many if not most will never be deported. Because Deval Patrick's mentor, Barack Obama, has made it abundantly clear that if you are a minor from another country and you are here illegally, you're already home.
