Perry Plays Politics With The Lives Of Refugee Children

In the last few months, a few thousand children from Central America have turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents on our southern border. These refugee children, trying to escape the violence and poverty in their own countries, pose no danger to Texas or the nation, and don't represent a significant influx of immigrants without documentation.

But that doesn't matter to Rick Perry. Perry has presidential ambitions, and he knows he can't get the GOP nomination unless he pleases the anti-immigrant racist teabaggers in his party's base. So, instead of taking a rational and humanitarian approach to these young refugees, he has decided to play politics -- and show the teabaggers that he can be as hard-hearted and ridiculous as they are.

As a Texan, I'm disgusted with Perry's recent actions -- and so is one of Texas' leading progressives, Jim Hightower (pictured here in a photo from tankriot.com). Here is what Hightower wrote on his own website:

Great news for you lovers of Wild West, shoot-'em-up, pulp-fiction tales: Rick "Rootie-Toot-Toot" Perry is making a one-man stand on the Texas-Mexico border!

A political stand, that is. He's been tongue-lashing Obama for not doing enough to seal the border by dispatching a human line of armed National Guard troops to protect America from… well, from what? Children, that's what. Nearly 60,000 terrorized, impoverished, and traumatized little ones have fled their hellish existences in Central America – where rape, murder, conscription into drug cartels, and hopeless poverty is their future –trekking all the way to the USA for a chance at something better.

No way, shouts Sheriff Perry. This guy routinely flaunts his Christianity for political purposes, but he seems to have forgotten that Jesus said: "Let the little children, come to me, and do not hinder them." Instead, the presidential wannabe bellows for their immediate deportation, claiming they'll commit crimes, bring diseases, and burden taxpayers with welfare costs.

Burden taxpayers? Perry's "Grand Stand on the Border" will cost taxpayers about $20 million a month to cover the state police and 1,000 National Guard troops he has deployed to the border. It's a political stunt cynically exploiting children trying to escape unspeakable violence and poverty. But it's not his money, so what the hell?

It is, however, his morality. He's so morally stunted that he's willing to militarize a humanitarian crisis and summarily send children back to their death. But it's not their future that concerns Perry. Rather, this whole show is about his own political future, for he's playing to the fear and loathing of tea party extremists who'll dominate the upcoming Republican presidential primaries.

Perry is not just callously ambitious, he's disgusting.