The Democrat Crying Game

Democrats are great at pretending to be concerned about problems they created - as long as they can blame the people trying to correct them.

Democrats like Corey Booker and the insufferable Alex Padilla from California are posting sob stories about illegal immigrant children who are in the system for deportation – most of whom were steered across the border as “unaccompanied minors” by human traffickers.

And even though the same situation existed under Obama and Biden, under President Trump, they have decided it is a problem beyond all moral comprehension.

Where was their concern when these children were being forced across the border by human traffickers as “unaccompanied minors”? Every Democrat posting this meme are part and parcel of the problem because they closed their eyes as their party and president let this happen - more than let it happen, they encouraged it.

They are pathetic.

Don’t fall for their crying game because these are the people who created DACA out of fairy dust and believe Temporary Protected Status is really permanent. Joe Biden skipped the railroad and set up an entire airline to distribute aliens with no legal status all over the country in the hope he could Cloward-Piven them toward citizenship and votes for Democrats. These are the people who gave Tom Homan a medal for his immigration work but now want to send him to prison for doing the same job.

There is a peculiar inversion of responsibility that happens when a bad situation has been allowed to continue long enough: eventually, the person who tries to correct it gets blamed for creating the conflict.

And that makes very little sense – or should make little sense to anyone with two functioning brain cells to rub together.

Imagine that someone builds a fence ten feet onto his neighbor’s property. The neighbor notices but decides not to make an issue of it. Years pass and eventually when the property is sold, the new owner surveys the land, discovers the encroachment, and asks that the fence be moved.

Who created the conflict?

It is tempting to say the new owner did because everything was peaceful until he demanded that the fence be moved. Yet the absence of confrontation did not mean the absence of a problem. The problem existed from the moment the fence crossed the property line. Someone else simply chose to tolerate it.

There are really three different kinds of responsibility involved.

1. Causal responsibility: who created the condition?

2. Moral responsibility: who knew the condition existed, had some obligation or reasonable ability to correct it, and nevertheless allowed it to continue?

3. Remedial responsibility: who finally has to deal with it?

These are not the same things.

A police officer arresting a burglar did not cause the burglary. A manager firing an employee after repeated violations did not necessarily create the circumstances requiring termination. A judge ordering someone to comply with a contract does not create the breach merely by enforcing its terms.

The corrective action may create the confrontation, but the confrontation is not necessarily the underlying problem – and that distinction between cause and occasion matters. The person enforcing a boundary may provide the occasion for an unpleasant consequence without being the cause of the circumstances that made the consequence necessary.

There is another party who often escapes scrutiny entirely: the person who knew what was happening and allowed it to continue.

Ignoring a problem does not eliminate it, quite the opposite – often it makes it worse because tolerance gradually becomes expectation. What began as an exception becomes customary and because nobody is enforcing the law, what was once understood to be wrong becomes something people believe they are entitled to continue doing.

Eventually, enforcement of the original standard begins to look like aggression – and as we have seen across the country when immigration law is being enforced, it is how responsibility gets turned upside down.

None of this means the person correcting the problem can do whatever he wants. Corrective action can be excessive, vindictive, selective, incompetent, or unlawful. A legitimate objective does not justify illegitimate means and errors should be corrected and unlawful actions prosected – but irrational “resistance” where people feel free to impede or even attack law enforcement officers should be handled the same way.

But even then, that is a separate question from who created the original condition.

Perhaps the better way to judge these situations is to ask the four questions of people like Senators Booker and Padilla – and the thousands of bleeding-heart activists who post on social medial but were AWOL when the situation was being created by their people:

• Who created the condition?

• Who knew about it and permitted it to continue?

• Who had a responsibility to act?

• When someone finally did act, was the response consistent with custom and law?

The answers produce a very different picture of responsibility.

The person who finally enforces the boundary did not necessarily create the conflict -sometimes the conflict began when the boundary was first crossed and the greatest contribution to the eventual crisis came from the people who knew it was being crossed and decided that pretending not to notice was easier (or more politically expedient) than doing something about it.