We all knew it was coming. It just took a few days longer than I thought.

He’s ostensibly upset that the media showed no interest in the Newark shootings until one of “the undocumented” emerged as a prime suspect. No kidding; if there’s one thing the shamnesty coverage proved, it’s how vehemently anti-illegal the media is. Bill first reminds him that border enforcement is in fact a bit of a hot-button political issue these days, which may explain the interest in the immigration angle, then makes the basic point about but-for causation with respect to the ICE deportation hold that should have happened but didn’t. Geraldo continues to dismiss these cases as isolated incidents with no larger policy implications despite the fact that he’s on O’Reilly or Gibson’s show every other week having to spin another facet of the systemic breakdown in immigration enforcement. Bill calls him on that at the end, too.

The one thing he doesn’t call him on is the hypocrisy of his position here vis-a-vis the Zina Linnik case. Geraldo’s answer to the but-for argument is that the judge never should have let Carranza out on bail with a child rape charge pending against him, irrespective of whether he was illegal or not. True — but in Zina Linnik’s case, it wasn’t judicial incompetence that put the suspect back on the street, it was the incompetence of the immigration tracking system that kept the feds from finding out about the conviction in 1992 that would have authorized the suspect’s deportation. Geraldo’s answer to that at the time was to misreport the suspect’s immigration status and then claim that that status would have prevented the feds from deporting him at all. Wrong wrong wrong. And so far as I know, he still hasn’t corrected the record about it. I guess he’s too consumed with waiting for his apology from Michelle.