Grieve for Mollie Tibbetts, and demand justice, but spare us the libel against immigrants
Editors note: Mary Sanchez is filling in while Mr. Page is away.
It's not hard to imagine Mollie Tibbetts and Kate Steinle together in heaven, observing their lesser human brethren exploiting their deaths for political gain.
Guess the politicos and blowhards just can't help themselves. The November midterms are around the corner.
The murders of both these young women were quickly politicized. Their suspected murderers fit a popular -- and false -- narrative for conservative Republicans and hyperventilating talk radio and cable news hosts: Undocumented immigrants are violent predators stalking clean-cut U.S. citizens.
Steinle died in July 2015, shot by a man who had been deported five times before. On a San Francisco pier, he fired a gun that had been stolen from a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger. A bullet ricocheted and struck the 32-year-old Steinle.
Tibbetts' body was found this week, covered by cornstalks in an Iowa field. The 20-year-old had been missing for a month after going out for a run. Police this week arrested a Mexican man apparently illegally in the country. The latter fact sealed the storyline.
President Donald Trump led the charge. He goaded his followers at a rally and then posted a video on Twitter that said the University of Iowa student is "now permanently separated from her family."
That's code -- and it's not particularly subtle. What Trump is saying is that his cruel policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents -- and the lifelong trauma this will cause in the lives of these innocent kids -- is retroactively justified by Tibbetts' murder.
It's not hard to detect a certain gratification in Trump's words that this murder, and the pain and suffering of the victim's loved ones, has allowed him to hold his head high on family separation.
A similar macabre glee was detectable in comments made by the Republican honcho Newt Gingrich. "If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble," Gingrich commented to a journalist in an email Wednesday.
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