Everyone knows what should be done about ISIS, but all I know is that those who seem surest are loo-loo. I am thinking mainly of Ted Cruz, for the moment. Before the attacks in Paris, he said his views on immigration were simple: legal, good; illegal, bad. Now, with respect to Syrians, he's added some nuance: Christian, good (should be legal); Muslim, bad (should be illegal). So when he's president there will be a religious test for immigration to the United States. Cruz has explained, "There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror."
Well, once, in Ireland. . . .
It seems that a terrorist has to be a little bit swarthy. Timothy McVeigh and the pockmarked little bigot who killed the African-Americans during church bible study don't qualify.
I'm not sure how Cruz is going to implement his policy. The mind's its own place, so how does a government determine who is a Christian? A baptismal certificate wouldn't prove current status. The practical difficulties seem insuperable, but then Donald Trump is still leading the Republican pack, and he's going to round up all the illegals and throw them over the wall that Mexico is going to build along the entire length of the border. Jeb Bush and John Kasich probably disqualified themselves when, at the last Republican presidential debate, both derided the unreality of Trump's "plan." But Cruz seems to have noticed that fantastical thinking is what Republican voters are looking for. On the debit side, it doesn't distinguish him from most of the competition. Jeb Bush seems to think that Trump is crazy but that Cruz is onto something with his religious test. Having one foot grazing terra firma must be what's holding his campaign back. You have to go all-in, Jeb!
Over my life I've gotten used to expecting some wise hand in the Republican party to urge restraint and reason in a trying time. When I was born, Eisenhower was president, and as recently as 2013 Dick Lugar was the ranking member of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. But those days are gone, gone. It's as if the whole party, its leaders and voters, were determined to prove the premise of Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The Paranoid Style."
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