Do Trump Republicans care about children? A brief investigation
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Dan Froomkin has a good roundup at the ridiculous number of media outlets who took fake Republican outrage about Pam Karlan’s 100% innocuous pun using the name of the president’s son seriously (as well as praising the ones who didn’t take the bait.) Most egregiously, 20% of the ABC segment about the hearings was devoted to this transparent-even-by-Republican-standards bullshit. Republicans have no reason to stop doing it when it keeps working:
The conservative movement’s ability to get any piece of bad faith nonsense taken seriously and put on the mainstream news agenda is a superpower for a movement that has no interest in advancing policies that benefit most people. https://t.co/IS26naApHp— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 4, 2019
In other news, here’s a news story involving the treatment of children that is much less likely to get attention on the evening news:
Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant, was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.
A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.
None of that happened. Worried that Carlos might infect other migrants in the teeming McAllen facility, officials moved him to a cell for quarantine at a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco.
By the next morning, he was dead.
In a press release that day, Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner at the time, John Sanders, called Carlos’ death a “tragic loss.” The agency said that an agent had found Carlos “unresponsive” after checking in on him. Sanders said the Border Patrol was “committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody.”
But the record shows that the Border Patrol fell far short of that standard with Carlos. ProPublica has obtained video that documents the 16-year-old’s last hours, and it shows that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous.
I’m beginning to think that the Barron Trump outrage was in bad faith!