"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," President Barack Obama's former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once infamously stated. He never bothered to spell out the unspoken corollary to that appalling statement: And if there is no serious crisis available, manufacture one.
The American left has followed that pattern for generations. The left destroyed the nuclear family by incentivizing women to give birth out of wedlock. When out-of-wedlock births exploded, they used that as an excuse to elevate federal spending, elevate taxes and disestablish marriage between a man and a woman as a moral standard. The left crafted a health care crisis by instituting price and wage controls that led to employer-sponsored insurance, and then undercut that insurance with excessive regulation and easy lawsuits. They used elevating costs as an excuse to push Obamacare and elevate taxes.
Now, the left, under Obama, has crafted the mother of all crises: an influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing America's southern border. Some of these minors carry disease. Virtually all carry wounds, either physical or psychological, from their criminal coyote guides. That crisis is not Obama's Hurricane Katrina, as some have speculated. Katrina was an act of God, and its botched handling the act of men. This entire situation is an act of Obama. And he couldn't be happier as he watches frustrated Americans take to the streets in Murrieta, California, to protest his lawlessness.
Obama created this situation, and he certainly knows how to exploit it. Obama wants to campaign based on the suffering of these children. He wants to push for higher taxes based on their unequal economic status. He wants their eventual votes for the left. He wants the federal government to punish American citizens tired of watching their government abandon them.
It's all part of the agenda.
Obama and the media maintain the absurd fiction that Obama was thunderstruck by this crisis. Obama himself has assured the public that he wants all of the new arrivals sent home forthwith and that they were foolish to believe they could stay.
Foolish?
Four years ago, the Obama Justice Department sued the state of Arizona for daring to enforce federal immigration law, and sanctuary cities across the country remained unscathed. Two years ago, Obama declared that all illegal immigrants between the ages of 16 and 30 who had not committed criminal felonies -- the so-called Dreamers -- would remain in the country. This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Arizona would have to hand out driver's licenses to the Dreamers, and the city of Los Angeles announced it would no longer cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in holding requested illegals for 48 hours after their jail terms expired.
Those desperate to come to America would be fools not to jump at the chance. And their dangerous decisions to send their own children across thousands of miles of desert in the company of likely drug cartel associates underscores their certainty: They're willing to risk the lives of their children, knowing that so long as the children get to the border, Obama will legitimize them, and then, by extension, their entire families.
This, of course, is precisely what Obama wanted them to think. Now he has his crisis. And he'll exploit it for everything it's worth, no matter how much blood is spilled in the deserts of Mexico or the streets of Murrieta.
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