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Stephen Miller vs. Jim Acosta: No Holds Barred
Despite CNN’s protests, there might be a reason White House staffers don’t call on Jim Acosta more often. On Wednesday, the aggrieved correspondent had an intense six-minute back-and-forth with Trump aide Stephen Miller on the administration’s immigration reform plan. It got … testy.
Throughout the exchange, Acosta seemed less a reporter than a Democratic candidate. Who do you think got the better of the debate: Miller or Acosta?
Published in Immigration, Politics
Miller handled him well at the end but he spent way too much time saying Acosta’s first name over and over again. Miller had the microphone, he should have acted like he was in control the entire time.
I caught the radio broadcast before going in to teach. It was satisfying. For those of you unfortunate enough to miss it, I have recreated the experience using MS Paint and my laptop track pad.
Acosta didn’t get beaten enough as a child. Miller did OK after a couple of minutes of interrupted grandstanding.
The majority of the media are progressive spokespeople instead of journalists. That’s why they have no credibility.
He does seem anxious to make up for lost time.
It is just so gratifying to see Miller nail him on that Statue of Liberty nonsense, he hammered that point home and I think the criticism was felt keenly for once.
Someone needs to tell Acosta to just shut up.
I made it three minutes in and wished they would both burst into flames.
I think my primal antipathy for Jim Acosta helps me tolerate Stephen Miller…
This bill has no chance of passing, but it’s fun to watch liberals argue that immigrants with no work skills or English proficiency should be allowed entry at the same rate as technically skilled people with high English proficiency. This is a debate that even a Republican would have trouble losing. I was listening to NPR today (there’s no political talk radio where I live), and the host was trying to explain why new immigrants should be allowed to collect welfare benefits. I guess she realized how preposterous her completely unexamined liberal talking point was, because she just kind of trailed off mid-sentence.
So, Acosta attempted to run a classic Statue of Liberty play and got sacked for lost yardage.
Looks like Miller was just letting Acosta’s rudeness and ignorance shine.
I remember Jim Acosta from when he was a reporter in Chicago, but only barely.
I have no problem with the bill, as long as those admitted get a green card from the get-go so they would be free to compete on the open market. The companies currently bringing in H-1B visa holders would squawk because their market for
indentured servantsnew talent would shrink.Is there a good place to read a summary of the details of the bill?
My Chinese wife was offended when she found out that Jim Acosta thinks she can’t speak English. For the record, she learned English long before coming to America. She was also offended when she found out that our kids will be discriminated against when they apply to college. They will be members of the despised but physically attractive Anglo-Asian race.
Jim Acosta. I am from Canada. This system that the Trump Admin is putting into place, is almost a verbattim copy of our immigration system.
Are you saying that Canada is a country of racists for having this system that goes back decades?
Mr. Miller should have ended by saying that he was handing things over to Mrs. Huckabee-Sanders and that she was going to go out and bitch-slap Jim because he is an obnoxious moron.
Here is one at NRO.
What is most grating about Acosta is not the partisan bias, that’s just a given now, it is his utter dishonesty. He won’t just come out and admit he’s an open border advocate, he has to dance around and pretend that the U.S has never adjusted its immigration policies.
And of course he has to make the racism charge.
Seems like pretty sensible reform to me, although if we’re shifting from family based to skills based immigration it seems to me that we would want more immigrants not less – let’s steal all the best people from the rest of the world and make them Americans!
So how is the repeal of DACA coming?
At the end of the clip (when Miller was talking to someone else) you can hear Acosta muttering “You called me ignorant on national television!”
Well, Jim, we can turn the cameras back off if you like. But then you wouldn’t get to grandstand on national television.
Using points is a way to avoid consular officers using judgment. I don’t like it but the criteria are right. We don’t need legislation to give our officers priorities. If some applicant is likely to become a public charge they are not supposed to get a visa. I did visas as a junior officer for two years in two countries over 50 years ago. Immigrant visas were handed out to categories the DOL had concluded were in short supply. That wasn’t very good either, but it was criteria junior officers exercised. I set up a system to investigate fraudulent credentials. If we were taking mechanics there was a flood of mechanics, if we wanted plumbers we got them. Immediately some entrepreneur started producing credentials. We tried to track them down. Most consulates didn’t. The bottom line is we can have as many legal immigrants we want from anywhere we want with the skills we need. We don’t really know what those skill are, but if we don’t give welfare or other free stuff they’ll sort it out or go home, or become hookers and crooks. I approved some of those as well I was subsequently told. We don’t need illegals and we should exercise choice, impose criteria. We wont get it right but we have to try. Tourist and student visas are a problem as well. We had to determine if they were really intending to stay illegally. It was a guess, but if they were beautiful it helped, good for the gene pool. In Cali Colombia a lot of girls got tourist and student visas. The system is run by humans so there will be mistakes and personal criteria. God knows what choices the Hillary Obama hires will use.
For all of his progressive hackery, former Obama aide Ben Rhodes was right about reporters:
Nothing. Not just about foreign affairs, but especially about the basics of their own country’s constitution and history. Oh, they know the narrative, namely that the country was founded by a bunch of angry white men bent on suppressing women and blacks. Then there was a bunch of unchecked immigration that created more suppressed minorities. There was a depression and Franklin Roosevelt put us on the slow road to socialism and then there was a good war, followed by a bunch of imperial conquests. Oh, and there was Tricky Dick, Ronnie Ray-gun and then the golden era of Obama.
When that’s the extent of your knowledge you act like Jim Acosta.
Miller didn’t just do it with Acosta. Here he takes on Glenn Thrush, the NY Times reporter, who, as we learned from Wikileaks, seeks pre-approval from John Podesta for his pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uZOZeWp2Dk
While showing what a racist he is, as @bloodthirstyneocon pointed out.
I, for one, am delighted to see a complete restart of our ridiculously untransparent, multiple track, idiotic legal immigration policy.
For a long time I have advocated open borders – to college-educated, English speaking people who share American values and pass the AP US History test, and have no call on welfare of any kind for the first 10 or 20 years.
Europe would empty of capable people, and America would flourish beyond imagination.
Acostas anal reaming was well deserved. Unfortunately, he’s not smiling right now.
Miller is effective because he is calm, factual, and argues using the inconsistencies that progressives have in their immigration argument. He’s actually driving wedges between parts of the left coalition. Mickey Kaus, where are you?
This is how you do it. Too often we’ve had discussions here that are artificially binary – either you are with the GOP leadership, who are reluctant to get aggressive, and mostly inept when they do, or with Trump’s random ramblings because he’s a fighter, no matter how counterproductive much of it has been. I like those who fight effectively.
If the GOP had any brains it would make sure this is how they start any argument over the proposal (I know, I live in a dreamworld). Repetition and clearness in messaging is all. Trump’s most effective messaging by far has been Fake News. He took something started by Democrats, adapted for his own use, and turned it around on them. It works because he uses it all the time (branding) and the Dems and media cannot resist playing into it by their constant deployment of fake news which reaffirms his point every single day.
“Bad poetry on a old French statue is not an immigration policy.” — Kathy Shaidle
The fact that this proposal is controversial is proof that America is doomed. It’s based on axiomatic assumptions about what is good for this country without regard to what ethnic group or political party Americans belong to. It’s as if a couple was arguing about whether to open their house to homeless people they didn’t know to let them come in and live with them and their children. What’s there to argue about? That’s exactly what is going on in America now.
Most American’s can’t even do that.
That’s right. In America, we choose how we live by laws, not poems. But that may change…
I liked the part when Acosta mumbled something about a wall, and Miller pointed out that walls don’t prevent people from applying for green cards. It just goes to show you that you really don’t need to know very much to be an MSM reporter.