GOP used ‘alien’ phobia to attack Mayorkas. The ones on flying saucers were next door | Opinion
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The House committee hearing on UFOs — alien sightings officially referred to as UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena — and the orchestrated Republican bid to oust Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took place on the same day.
And the same time, 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 26, in committee meeting rooms right next to each other.
Good thing.
The hallucinatory nature of one helped spectators survive the hallucinatory nature of the other.
The extraterrestrials-are-here hearing had the veneer of a Netflix thriller, with a handsome, mysterious leading man as whistle-blower, and the dash of comic relief provided by a room full of grown, scared, white men.
One of them, Florida U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, infamous Pensacola Republican, seemed to shape-shift as he looked intently into the camera, describing the case of “a diamond formation … orb” spotted by an Eglin Air Force crew flying over the Gulf of Mexico.
A weirdly intense look on his face, Gaetz reminded me of the alien on a movie poster onen of my daughters once hung on her bedroom wall, upsetting a nosy neighbor. Spooked, I clicked off the TV.
Alas, I returned to C-SPAN for the more-pressing House Judiciary Committee hearing — being staged by Republicans obsessed by “aliens” of another kind — to impeach Mayorkas for doing his job.
And Gaetz reappeared.
Alien transference?
‘The Mayorkas Doctrine’
Eyebrows eerily raised, the congressman bore into Mayorkas, calling U.S. immigration policy “The Mayorkas Doctrine,” and the app now available to asylum seekers to apply for entry from outside the country — meant to cut out the smuggler middle-man — “the Disney fast-pass into the country.”
“Congressman, that is false,” Mayorkas kept telling him.
But Gaetz kept going, easily making the transition from stoking an alleged government conspiracy to hide extraterrestrial sightings to linking immigration to criminality by using all the pejoratives he could find: “violent criminals,” “the power of the cartels,” “encountered and released.”
He had a lot of Republican company.
You wouldn’t know that you were in an immigration policy discussion by the unhinged rants of one Republican after another calling migrants and asylum seekers “criminal aliens” and “illegal aliens” in an attempt to strip displaced people of their humanity.
One after another, they created, “apocalyptic scenarios to scare America,” as Pennsylvania Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon aptly described it, and continued to spread the false message that Biden is running an “open border.”
“Are you running an open-border policy?” Mayorkas was asked.
“No, we’re not,” he said to deaf ears.
They repeated the accusation that Mayorkas was hiding huge numbers of undocumented.
Yet near the end, Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, of New Jersey, spewed an abundance of figures — along with a final dose of derogatory commentary, such as the inference that immigrants are killing Americans with fentanyl.
Not to be left behind, Rep. Troy Nehls, of Texas, evoked Trump and had a meltdown over losing “the best president of my lifetime” while accusing Mayorkas of “criminal actions.”
After the three-hour hearing of questions pregnant with demonizing intent, one thing became obvious: The one thing Mayorkas is guilty of is being a Democrat.
A Cuban-American career lawyer and civil servant who fled Cuba’s communism as a child, Mayorkas rose through the ranks as a federal prosecutor.
When he was tapped by President Biden to lead DHS, he took on a highly controversial job that includes the impossible task of enforcing immigration policy, securing the border — at a time of record worldwide displacement — and operating with the resources of a wrecked U.S. immigration system that hasn’t been updated in decades.
“I don’t know where to even begin with the grotesque distortion of information,” Mayorkas said at some point, frankly, too composed for the display of GOP talking points disguised as questions.
Closing the door
It’s hard to take people like Rep. Victoria Spartz, an Indiana Republican, seriously.
A Ukrainian who met an American on a train in Europe and married him, thus becoming a U.S. citizen, Spartz has such a thick accent that she’s hard to understand. But here she was on full-on attack mode, disparaging Mayorkas as a “most dishonest witness” while sneaking in accusations of Biden corruption in Ukraine that hurts her own country’s war effort.
Who’s interest is she serving closing the door on her people?
The impeachment threat is nothing but an attempt to obscure Donald Trump’s very real criminality, his third pending indictment and his presidential bid.
Immigrants are expendable collateral being used to portray a nation in chaos that doesn’t exist.
Add to the mix the flying-saucer inquisition next door, and now you have Mayorkas and Biden — deep state, alert! — also guilty of keeping us in the dark about visitors a billion light years away.
Maybe Trump will build a wall around Mother Earth.
If the displaced people of the Americas think the United States has open borders, it’s only because Republicans keep telling them so.
Maybe “non-human biologics” heard the message in outer space, too, and tried to sneak into the“free” state of Florida to pay Matt Gaetz a visit.
