God, if the entire holiday season is going to be taken up by an unending stream of crap spewed from the mouths of would-be Republican presidential candidates, I'm going to dig a bunker in the backyard and
just stay there.
Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) is calling out Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) comments about Japanese internment camps as "insulting," citing the experience of his own parents in the camps. [...]
Paul, in a speech arguing against President Obama's immigration executive actions on Friday in Kentucky, cited President Franklin Roosevelt's order to create the camps during World War II as an example of presidential overreach.
Specifically, Paul was comparing the illegality of tossing Americans of Japanese descent into prison camps to the supposedly equal illegality of delaying deportations while Congress attempts, eventually, to get their heads out of their behinds on the latter subject. This is a longstanding Paul family tradition—come up with the strangest possible rhetoric to defend your argument-of-the-moment, to the point where onlookers are never quite sure whether today is the day you've finally lost your gourd—but Rep. Takano is kindly requesting that Paul close his trap on that particular subject.
"Senator Paul’s comments likening President Obama’s executive action that provides immigration relief to millions of people in this nation to the internment of Japanese Americans is insulting—not only to the millions who will benefit from President Obama's executive action, but to the thousands of Japanese who were interned during World War II, including my own mother and father," Takano wrote.
He also, importantly, calls out the inherent bullshit of Paul's central argument, which is that Japanese internment camps were the result of presidential overreach gone amok. Unfortunately, Senator, 'twas every branch of government that turned that monstrosity into supposedly legal national policy.
Please read below the fold for more on this article.
"President Obama’s executive action prioritizes the protection of vulnerable, hardworking immigrants," Takano wrote. "Executive Order 9066 did the opposite and was not just a failure of the executive, but a failure of each branch of government, as Congress allowed the internment of thousands to take place, and the Supreme Court failed to uphold the constitutional rights of those interned."
So if you want to use it as an example of something, and I don't recommend it, you might instead use it as example of the entire American government working itself into a froth over powerless and innocent families that race-obsessed Americans had fantasized into an existential threat to the homeland.
All right, so Sen. Rand Paul says that not arresting people and putting them into deportation camps is exactly as bad as arresting people and putting them in internment camps, and Rep. Mark Takano says what all the rest of us are thinking, which is Oh My God Rand Paul Will You Please At Long Last Shut Up.
It probably won't stick, but at least someone was willing to take the time to say it.