The border crisis isn't Obama's Katrina, okay?

Where to start with all this? There is the absurdity of suggesting that the crisis does not yet have a “human face,” that it would require a photo op by the president to achieve that (apparently images like this don’t count). There is the hyperventilation and lack of perspective in Rogers declaring the border “ground zero of what essentially constitutes an invasion of America.” (For the record, Ed, this is what an invasion “looks like.”) Above all, though, there is the failure to consider even the most basic differences in context between the crisis in New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005 and what has been unfolding on the border. In the former instance, we were presented with an administration that willfully downplayed both the immediate threat of the approaching storm and the broader threat that, if the climatologists are to be believed, was represented by the storm.

In the latter instance, we are presented with an administration struggling to contain one particularly dramatic manifestation of a problem—a broken immigration policy—that the administration itself has been trying to fix, has indeed made its chief priority for the remainder of the president’s term, but has been stymied in comprehensively addressing by the identity crisis–driven obstructionism and indifference of the party that controls the House of Representatives. Other than that, yes, this is just like Hurricane Katrina. And the women and children lingering on the border, and the overwhelmed Border Patrol personnel trying their best to manage their presence, will be awaiting the magic word of whether the president’s caravan will be arriving on the horizon, which will surely solve everything.