“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said in November 2008, shortly before becoming White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration. Left unsaid: Even if you have to make something into a “serious crisis,” molehill-to-mountain style.

There are plenty of real crises. There’s almost always something important that’s going wrong.  But real crises are difficult to exploit. Getting important things done well is hard work, and who deserves credit isn’t always obvious. Political grandstanding is easier, leading to what I call the Dairy Farm strategy of crisis exploitation:

First, have a cow.

Then, milk it.

Democrats have been milking the January 6 Capitol riot for going on two months now. Congress is holding hearings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wants to establish a “1/6 Commission,” with a pre-stacked 7-4 Democrat/Republican split, to “review” that day’s events and ensure blame for those events falls squarely on Republicans.

Naturally, Republicans object to the partisan imbalance. Some of them loathe the idea in its entirety, some want its purview reduced to Capitol security failures, others want that purview expanded beyond the “right” to include other riots in other places on other issues (i.e. Black Lives Matter and antifa), versus the “right-wing extremism” Pelosi wants to milk and milk and milk.

I’m not saying members of Congress were unjustified in having a cow after a mob overran police lines and chased them from their chambers. But it was what it was: A one-off riot.

Incited? Yes, in various ways and by various people. Planned? Not much if at all, at least so far as the available evidence indicates. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, et al. spent two months winding up a mob of unstable non-geniuses, then set that mob loose to do short-term, uncoordinated mayhem.

It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the JFK assassination. It wasn’t an “insurrection.” It wasn’t a “coup.” It was a poorly scripted and typically stupid Donald Trump publicity stunt run amok.

The problem with milking the cow you had is that milk goes sour relatively soon.  Pelosi’s pail has become a petri dish for what she sneeringly dismisses as “conspiracy theories” when regular people spout them.

She wants us to drink a tall, warm glass of that sour milk to wash down government censorship of media (both “mainstream” and “social”) and other “emergency” infringements on civil liberties. We should pour it down the drain instead.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 02/25/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 02/25/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/26/21
• “Capitol riot well past its sell by date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hammond, Louisiana Daily Star, 03/01/21
• “Capitol riot story is well past its sell-by date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star [web and print], 03/02/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Roundup, Montana Record-Tribune & Winnett Times, 03/03/21
• “Knapp downplays seriousness of Capitol riot,” by Bobby Anderson, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free-Lance Star [web and print], 03/06/21
• “Democrats have milked Capitol riot long enough,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingsport, Tennessee Times News, 03/08/21
• “Capital Riot Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Florence, Alabama Courier Journal [web and print], 03/09/21

As Texas went dark last week, with much of the state’s population experiencing blackouts under severe winter weather conditions, US senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his family jetted off to Cancun for a warm, sunny family vacation. Mockery and outrage ensued.

The mockery was quite fun and often on point given Cruz’s political positions (“heroic father crosses Mexican border and travels 1200 miles to find running water, heat, and electricity for his family”). The outrage, well, not so much.

Cruz doesn’t work as a lineman for any of the several utilities serving Houston.

Nor does he staff a complaint desk handling public calls reporting power outages.

In fact, he doesn’t even work in Houston. He works in Washington, DC.

For some reason, though, he’s taking hits for a  “failure of leadership” because he didn’t stay in Texas to suffer along with his constituents.

Ted Cruz isn’t a “leader.” He’s a US Senator. He casts one of 100 votes in a national legislative body. He is not the energy tsar of Texas. The most his constituents could reasonably expect of him would be to lobby US president Joe Biden for emergency assistance from the federal Emergency Management Agency. That’s something he could more easily do by phone than in person, especially given pandemic-related social distancing norms, and his phone presumably works as well from Cancun as it would from College Station, Corpus Christi, or Caldwell.

Is a sun-soaked vacation during a winter weather event “bad optics?” Only to people who place greater value on and trust in Ted Cruz, his position, and his activities than they should. Making sure you have electricity just isn’t his job — and if it was you could probably expect longer and more frequent blackouts, not shorter and fewer ones.

Whose job is it to make sure Texans have electricity? That would be the mission of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Well, sort of. ERCOT, a “membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,” is overseen and regulated by Texas’s Public Utility Commission and state legislature.

In other words, by a bunch of politicians and government employees.

A case could be made that last week’s storms and freezes were a rare and unforeseeable circumstance and that ERCOT and its political masters aren’t really to blame.

There’s no case to be made that Ted Cruz IS to blame. Or that his family trip to Cancun somehow insults his constituents. Lighten up, folks.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 02/20/21
• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Chester County, Pennsylvania Daily Local News, 02/21/21
• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pottstown, Pennsylvania Mercury, 02/21/21
• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/22/21
• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 02/23/21
• “In defense of Ted Cruz,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Orangeburg, South Carolina Times and Democrat, 02/24/21
• “Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Madill, Oklahoma Record, 02/24/21

On February 9, more than 50 Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent President Joe Biden a letter decrying his “open border” policies. Of all the hyperbolic claims I’ve read regarding the Biden administration since Inauguration Day, that one takes the cake. In neither word nor action has the new president come within a country mile of supporting “open borders” in  principle or in policy.

As the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier notes, “Biden has been in office for less than a month. Many people keep saying ‘give him time.’ But what’s concerning isn’t that Biden hasn’t ‘gotten around to immigration yet.’ It’s that he has, and is intentionally choosing to perpetuate one of the worst immigration regimes in American history.”

That’s true of both his early executive orders (yes, he cut off misappropriated funding for Donald Trump’s “border wall” boondoggle, but boondoggles being boondoggles, the wall wasn’t stopping anyone anyway) and the legislative proposal he unveiled on February 18 (he wants a “path to citizenship” and is asking for some visa caps to be raised, but not for immigration freedom).

For the most part, Biden’s just carrying on in the Obama/Trump tradition of gaming immigration to satisfy authoritarians on both the “right” (the “won’t say we’re white nationalists, but you get it” wing of the Republican Party) and the “left” (Democrats beholden, like Biden himself, to the corrupt remnant of what was once a vital, universally pro-worker “organized labor” movement but over time became a protectionist racket).

House Republicans have mistaken a fellow authoritarian “border security” cultist for a pro-freedom activist. And they think that’s a bad thing!

Would you like to know who DID support “open borders?”

The framers of the US Constitution,  in Article I, Section 9 forbade the federal government to regulate immigration for 20 years, after which a constitutional amendment would have been required to create any such federal power (see the Tenth Amendment). It never was so amended, but in 1875 an activist Supreme Court miracled the power up out of whole cloth in Chy Lung v. Freeman.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (some Republicans may remember them) also supported “open borders,” in those words, during the the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. And eight years later, even after mass migrations from Vietnam and Cuba, Reagan still supported “open borders” in his farewell address:

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life …. a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

Immigration freedom has always been an unalloyed social and economic good. When a politician supports anything less, he outs himself as an enemy of both human freedom and economic prosperity.

Republican politicians abandoned “open borders” for Joe Biden’s long-time position. Now they accuse him, essentially, of being a closet Reaganite! It doesn’t get much sillier than that.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Joe Biden and ‘open borders’: As if,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 02/19/21
• “Joe Biden and ‘Open Borders’: As If,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/19/21
• “Joe Biden and ‘Open Borders’: As If,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 02/22/21
• “Joe Biden and ‘open borders,’ as if,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sterling Heights, Michigan News-Herald, 02/26/21
• “Joe Biden and open borders, as if,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 02/27/21