Only the most trusting among the general population believe a single utterance from establishment Washington, D.C.
In fact, an inverse relationship exists between an issue’s importance and the likelihood entrenched D.C. speaks about it honestly.
The more important, the less probable the public will hear the truth.
The best the populace can hope for is that decades after the damage has been done, architects of the ruinous policies will make half-hearted apologies.
For example, in the mid-1990s, 20 years after 58,000 American soldiers died in Southeast Asia, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Vietnam War’s chief prosecutor, confessed, “We (President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara) were wrong, terribly wrong.”
The war cost $168 billion, or adjusted for inflation, $1 trillion in today’s dollars
Then, in March 2003, speaking from the White House, President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly kept at the ready.
Bush ominously added that those weapons could “kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.”
But in January 2004, David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector, told Bush that his intelligence was wrong; Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and he resigned.
Nevertheless, and largely on Bush’s bad information, the Iraq War lasted from 2003 until 2011, and cost $2 trillion. About 4,700 U.S. and allied troops were killed, as well as more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens.
In 2022, Bush sheepishly admitted that the Iraq invasion was “unjustified and brutal.”
The 20-year war in Afghanistan, 2001-2021, purportedly launched to beat back the Taliban, ended in a humiliating withdrawal, but not until the Defense Department squandered $2.3 trillion, and 243,000 U.S. soldiers, allies and citizens died, exclusive of fatalities by disease, inadequate diet, dehydration and other indirect consequences.
Two decades, apparently, isn’t long enough for Presidents Bush, Barack Obama or Donald Trump to apologize for their collective misjudgment in sustaining the Afghan war that the nation could never have been won.
President Joe Biden’s administration has kept Washington’s commitment to dishonesty alive and well, this time as it mischaracterizes the Southern border invasion.
To hear Biden and Homeland Security Department Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas describe conditions, agents have operational control of the border, asylum seekers have been thoroughly vetted, and Biden’s open borders largesse reflects Americans’ generosity.
The inconvenient truth is the opposite of the official narrative.
Since Biden took office, Customs and Border Protection has encountered 6.2 million illegal immigrants and released more than 2 million of them into the interior.
Another estimated 1.5 million “gotaways,” those who escaped the agency’s detection, are also now part of the general U.S. population.
Although the official patter is that the border crossers are vetted, the statistics tell a different story. A significant portion of arriving migrants have criminal convictions for rape, assault and murder.
A 2021 Justice Department report revealed that 64% of federal arrests in 2018 involved illegal aliens, despite then comprising only 7% of the population.
Biden’s open border has lured hundreds of migrants to their deaths.
For example, 38 illegal aliens were killed after a fire broke out in a Ciudad Juárez holding facility. Last year, more than 850 illegal aliens died while trying to traverse rough southwestern terrain into the United States.
In 2022, fentanyl overdose deaths hit 110,000, a record, and are climbing daily. About 150 people overdose every day from the drug that smugglers bring across the poorly defended southern border.
The Biden administration’s welcome-the-world approach to immigration has spawned other crises: sex trafficking, migrant child labor abuse, overwhelmed school districts and hospital overcrowding.
Comparisons between the fallout from long foreign wars and today’s border crisis are not exact. But the similarity is that when a subject affects all Americans — wars and sovereignty-busting open borders — people are lied to.
The border mess is still in its earliest stages; Biden has been in office 30 months with 18 months remaining, and possibly four more years if he is re-elected to a second term.
The annual taxpayer cost per the ever-mounting illegal immigrant population, including its U.S.-born children is $8,766 per illegal alien. Americans oppose everything about Biden’s law-breaking immigration agenda.
A quick rule of thumb: when the subject is immigration, the Biden administration speaks in forked tongues.