Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, demonstrating once again that the party base has been electing monsters.
Instead of viewing [Syrian] refugees as people fleeing the violence that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, Brooks saw a host of incoming welfare queens intent on taking advantage of Americans’ generosity.
“We’re paying them about $15,000 a year in free health care, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation,” Brooks said. “That answers very quickly why so many of them want to come to the United States of America.”
“We’re paying them to come here,” the Alabama congressman concluded. “It’s a paid vacation!”
And that would presumably be why we are seeing pictures of dead migrant children on the beach: their parents were not in fact fleeing the horrific violence perpetrated by ISIS, sometimes called the new Hitler by Mo Brooks' various colleagues, but just wanted to hit the buffet and if one of their children died doing it oh well.
We could again point out that Brooks's logic, like nearly all anti-refugee "logic" being peddled in the current moment, mirrors America's past rationale for turning away Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, but we don't need to. Even without it, his comments pin him as a monster. He is fully aware of the violence perpetrated by ISIS; he is fully willing to deny safe haven to those fleeing it, claiming them instead to be would-be leeches risking their lives only so that they may sponge off Mo Brooks. And they're also probably all terrorists, of course.
“I think you can also make a pretty good argument that there is a large segment of the Muslim population that is not engaged in terrorism but who is morally in support of what these terrorists are doing,” he continued. “It’s been this way for 1,300 years.”
You could. As I could make the case that Mo Brooks is in league with the Christians who murder abortion doctors and who bombed the Atlanta Olympics. Mo Brooks would—I hope—be outraged at the charge, but it would fit no better or worse than his own. You need not cast your net very far to find flag-waving Christians who think the answer to the world's problems is an ongoing series of strategic murders, after all, and Mo Brooks has probably shaken hands with a few of them.
But the theory that those fleeing a regime that regularly punishes public deviation from their edicts with death are fleeing because they just wanted a paid vacation is one of those things that anyone who was not a monster would never think of, and would certainly never say, and one of those things that really ought to be disqualifying. And Anne Frank was not in hiding but simply enjoying her rent-free mooching off the gullible family downstairs? And slaves finding their way to the northern states on the Underground Railroad were not seeking freedom, but a way to see wider America that might or might not end up with them being hanged if the wrong people found out?
You can make a pretty good argument that there is a large segment of Mo Brooks's voters who are morally in support of propping up sociopathic monsters. You certainly don't see them denouncing it, after all.