By David Norlin
Tim Huelskamp finally arrived in Salina Nov. 23rd, after town-hauling it all over West-Central smaller towns. Speculation was, he didn’t want to face more critical questions likely in more populous areas.
Turns out, he didn’t have to worry. Such stage shows masquerade as ‘listening’ tours, but primarily feature the representative front and center. They are held during most people’s working day, with resulting attendance consisting primarily of retirees, other Republican office-holders, business folks with potential benefit from federal sausage-making, and standard-bearers of the rep’s fan club.
Room for dissenting views is largely overshadowed, if the rep is even moderately skilled in the art of question deflection, non-sequitur creation, and appeals to his base’s basest emotions. Tim is.
Despite his “Front Lines of Freedom” newsletter claim that, “Saline County residents were especially concerned about the threat of ISIS,” I saw little of that, but plenty of contradictions in his barriers to Syrians fleeing for their lives.
His drumbeat that we are the land of freedom seems not to apply to Syrians–unless they are Christian.
From all evidence, he hasn’t consulted Jesus’ actual stance on such exclusions. Nor did he specify a litmus test. Syrians wearing crosses? Syrians taking loyalty oaths to Jesus?
More strands of his threadbare analysis frayed when confronted by a KWU student, afraid she might not be reunited with her Indian husband. Who will we let in?
This Republican stock-in-trade fear is much harder to maintain when confronted with a real person in a wedding picture—or lying drowned on a beach.
To paraphrase John Oliver, only one wave of refugees did huge damage to the existing population. It began in 1492.
I could only hear, as a descendant of immigrants in Tim’s Town Haul, Pogo drowning Tim out. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
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