It’s always nice to take a break from the freak show that is current U.S. politics, but something always pulls you back in. Today, for those who missed their daily dose of NPR propaganda, the nine o’clock news brief led off with the immigration monstrosity about to pass the Senate. After praising the courage of the Senate, the announcer intoned: “But House Republicans seem more interested in cracking down on undocumented aliens than in helping them gain citizenship.”
Savor the Orwellian perfection of that sentence. The assertive doublespeak of “undocumented” aliens, still unable to consistently use the honest designation of illegal immigrant. Even more, the horror(!) that elected lawmakers might just be interested in punishing illegality, instead of abetting it. But that, of course, is the wrong side of the moral war NPR is waging. And those evil Republicans, cold-heartedly uninterested in “helping” the undocumented become citizens. Which is worse: if NPR really believes the tripe it spews out, or if it is just cynically driving its partisan message? Either way, politics flies ever further from reality, as about to be proved in the august forum of the U.S. Senate.