Fox News Sunday today helped promote Sen. Ted Cruz’ tour of a Texas facility housing the unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border. Predictably, Cruz used the occasion to grandstand about his own compassion in a ploy that Stephen Colbert just demolished Thursday night. Perhaps host Chris Wallace saw it. He obviously didn't buy Cruz' performance.
Cruz's compassion was heavy on getting rid of the children and attacking Obama with soundbites and light on improving their welfare. Cruz’ very first words in the interview revealed how his real interest is self interest:
CRUZ: What I want to do is solve the crisis. I agree with the president in one respect. We are seeing a humanitarian crisis. We are seeing tens of thousands of young children coming in illegally, being brutalized, being mistreated by global transnational drug cartels.
And the cause of this crisis is the promise of amnesty. If you look at the history of this issue, in 2011 there were roughly 6,000 children apprehended coming in illegally. Then in 2012, President Obama unilaterally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people who were here illegally, who entered as children. The direct foreseeable consequence of that was the number of unaccompanied children skyrocketed so that this year the Obama administration is estimating 90,000 kids will come next year, 145,000. That’s up from just 6,000 three years ago.
…The legislation I’ve introduced …prohibits President Obama from granting any more amnesty because the only way to solve this crisis is to stop President Obama...
Cruz went on and on saying he wanted to focus on “solving the problem” and then actually focusing on Obama and “amnesty.” As Wallace noted, Cruz is also at work blocking a deal in Congress to deal with the problem.
Finally, Wallace questioned whether Cruz really had a solution. He asked whether ending "permisos" (which is what Cruz wrongly called "amnesty") would "deal with the problem?"
CRUZ: Yes, and let’s be clear, you know, one of the things in the course of a lot of debates in Washington is that, sadly, they're fact free. Several weeks ago, the border patrol did a confidential study. They interviewed over 200 people who would come here illegally. They ask, “Why are you coming?” And a whistle blower passed this report on at the Senate Judiciary Committee. 95 percent of those coming in said, “We’re coming because we believe we’ll get amnesty, we believe we’ll get, as you said, a permiso.”
It’s pretty darned funny for Cruz to complain about falsehoods in others when less than a month ago, this very claim was debunked by PolitiFact, specifically with respect to the term “amnesty.”
But speaking of dishonesty, Cruz went back to his phony-baloney compassion:
CRUZ: If the bill doesn’t fix a problem. Then it’s not helping the children. The objective here should be to help the kids. And the way you help the kids is you eliminate the magnet, which is President Obama’s amnesty.
Finally, Wallace called him out on it:
WALLACE: You keep talking about helping the kids. One question I have is how do you help the kids? I understand how it helps the United States not to allow them to come into this country. How does it the kids to just say, hey, you have got to stay in Central America. You talk about the violence in Central America, the murder rate in some of these countries. I’m not saying it’s our responsibility to help the kids, but it doesn’t help the kids.
Check out how little interest “compasionate” Cruz showed in helping the kids, beyond keeping them out of our country, and how much interest he showed in promoting his bill and attacking his political foes.
CRUZ: Because a child being entrusted to a vicious drug dealer is being horrifically mistreated. You know, several weeks ago, I was down at Lackland Air Force Base where there are about l200 children being kept there. And a senior official there described to me how these drug dealers, they have these kids. And sometimes in the process of bringing them illegally to this country they hold them for ransom. And they reach out to the families, they say, "Send more money." And if the families won’t send money, horrifically, they are cutting off body parts and sending it back to the families. And they are forcing little boys and little girls, they are putting the gun to the back of their head, and they are saying, "Cut off the fingers, cut off the ears of another child." And if the child refuses, they are shooting and killing that kid. And what this senior official said is, we’re having kids arrive here, some of them are maimed, have been through horrific torture and others have enormous psychological trauma from being forced to carry that out on pain of death.
Continuing this regime where tens of thousands of kids are being brutalized by drug dealers is not humane, it’s not compassionate. And that’s what Harry Reid and the Democrats want to do. They don’t want to fix the problem. They want to keep having children come in in a situation where they are brutalized. That doesn’t make any sense, and it’s not consistent with rule of law.
Wallace then moved on and changed the subject.
If you haven’t already seen Colbert’s brilliant takedown of people like Cruz, check it out below. It’s underneath Wallace’s discussion with Cruz.