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Bill Clinton gave Donald Trump a free ad the other day when he hit the campaign trail in Georgia and declared that Laken Riley would still be alive if the illegal migrant who allegedly killed her had been “properly vetted.”
The 78-year-old former president was trying to defend Kamala Harris’ record as the border czar, who presided over the invasion of more than 10 million illegal migrants.
“You had a case in Georgia not very long ago . . . a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” Clinton said Sunday.
“Well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Trump wasted no time packaging up Clinton’s damaging admission as a campaign ad.
“I’m Donald Trump and I approve of this message” is all he had to say.
But Clinton wasn’t just having a senior moment on Sunday.
He was slyly pretending that someone other than the Biden-Harris administration was to blame for the lack of proper vetting at the southern border that has allowed floods of rapists, murderers, gangbangers and assorted other thugs to enter the country illegally.
Bursting libs’ bubbles
To a low-information voter listening to him, whose media diet consists of The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC or MSNBC, that is a plausible scenario.
And Clinton then told them who the real culprit is: Trump, of course!
Clinton had to tell an outright lie to get there.
But he was no different from any other Democrat or their media handmaidens when he tried to spin the myth that if it were not for Trump, the magical “bipartisan border bill” would have solved the problem, millions of illegal aliens would disappear and the border would seal itself.
That’s the “Big Lie” of this election campaign, the talisman brandished by Harris whenever she is forced to broach the uncomfortable topic of the border.
But the truth is that the godforsaken “bipartisan” border bill crashed and burned before delivery in February.
It never had the blessing of congressional Republicans.
It wasn’t Trump who nixed it. It never had a hope of getting through the House.
The lie behind the lie is that Harris and Biden even needed Congress to close the border.
All they had to do was reinstate the Trump border security measures Biden dismantled the minute he took office and end their boondoggles that have effectively legalized illegal migration, such as “humanitarian parole” and entry via the CBP One smartphone app.
The various parole programs instituted by this administration protect illegals from being deported, allow them to obtain a work permit and the sorts of privileges that legal immigrants receive — and then some, when you count free hotel rooms, cash cards, medical, education and legal services.
The boondoggles allow Democrats to pretend that illegal migration is now lower than it was during Trump’s presidency.
It’s just a dishonest rebranding exercise.
As for the stillborn border bill, it was a disaster that would have maintained the status quo while making Republicans complicit in the illegal migrant invasion.
For one thing, it would have allowed a daily average quota of up to 5,000 border “encounters” over a seven-day period before measures were taken to temporarily close the floodgates.
The bill didn’t “solve” the border crisis at all. It perpetuated it.
Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stitched up the neophyte Republican Sen. James Lankford, who had been deputized by his leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, to get any old deal done so that he could get his beloved Ukraine funding through the House.
Doomed & duped in DC
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson had tied Ukraine to a crackdown on illegal migration which McConnell couldn’t care less about.
McConnell griped to Schumer last October that Johnson was insisting on a border security package as a condition for passing a massive foreign aid bill, including $60 billion for Ukraine.
Even Schumer warned McConnell: “Lankford is not a good negotiator.”
But McConnell stuck by his hapless protégé.
Lankford, a ginger-haired Baptist minister from Oklahoma notable only for having once run a successful youth group, spent four months imagining he was negotiating the bill when he was really being shaped by Schumer and friends — who laughed at him behind his back.
“We were playing chess, they were playing checkers, and we ended up with a Ukraine bill,” Schumer later boasted to Politico.
“We also end up in much better shape on the border than we were three months ago.”
That’s because the aborted Lankford bill gave the Democrats a potent talking point for the election.
Now they could pretend, firstly, that Congress was needed to fix the border crisis.
And secondly, that they had concocted a bipartisan solution but that the ogre Trump had killed it.
It was a get-out-of-jail-free card for Harris and Biden.
Thankfully, Lankford’s Republican colleagues in the House got an early warning from a whistleblower about what a dog’s breakfast the bill was.
A tweet on Jan. 11 from a formidable new nonprofit group, the Immigration Accountability Project, let the cat out of the bag, saying Lankford’s “border deal would . . . increase green cards by 50,000/year, [give] immediate work permits to every illegal alien released from custody . . . taxpayer funded lawyers [and] expulsion authority for a limited number of days ONLY if encounters exceed 5K/day over a seven-day period.”
For a tiny account with about 150 followers on X, that tweet went viral and it became the lead story on Fox News all weekend, with a screen caption that read “The Bipartisan Sellout of America.”
That Sunday, Jan. 14, Speaker Johnson tweeted out the Fox graphic of the IAP revelations about the bill along with two words: “Absolutely not.”
And that was it.
The House speaker killed the deal two days after the details were leaked.
He knew no Republican could support it if they ever wanted to win re-election.
Two weeks later, Trump joked at a rally in Las Vegas, “A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming [the bill’s collapse] on me. I say, that’s OK. Please blame it on me. Please . . . There is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America.”
Trump doesn’t mind taking credit for killing a bad bill, but the fact is that he didn’t have to kill it because it was already dead.
Even Clinton can’t spin that away.
Kam’s blame-shift in high gear
When the potty-mouthed “Morning Joe” Scarborough describes the ever-courteous Bret Baier, of all people, as “shockingly rude” to the filibustering Kamala Harris, then you know the VP’s Fox News interview went badly for her.
Blame everyone but their hopeless candidate.
Stay out of weeds with Rogan, Don
He won’t toke on a joint like Elon Musk but let’s hope Donald Trump does not get lured by Joe Rogan down the marijuana-normalization path if he appears on the popular podcast as flagged.
It’s a bad drug with piles of long-term evidence showing it triggers psychosis in a significant proportion of susceptible people — especially in adolescence and early adulthood, when the brain is still under construction.
Not the benign chill that Rogan suggests.
Big Weed is a toxic industry and shame on the politicians and pundits who have empowered it.