ROGER KIMBALL: Alejandro Mayorkas has no shame.
Mayorkas is the perfect bureaucrat for this new agency. He is totally on board with whatever narrative his masters are emitting this week, and he lies with aplomb. Just now he is attracting a lot of ink because it has been revealed that he lied when presented with some melodramatic pictures of border agents on horseback trying to corral some illegal migrants. The media screamed that the men on horseback were “whipping” the poor defenseless undocumented future welfare recipients. “Oh, my God, they are being mean to these unarmed potential Democratic voters!” The El Paso Times got the bulletin and reproduced it precisely: “The agent swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.” Ginning up his parrot imitation, Mayorkas repeated after Jen Psaki (remember her?) and said he found the pictures “horrifying.”
“Horrifying!”
The trouble was, however, there were no whips. What might have looked like whips to people innocent of the art of horseback riding were actually reins, items to control horses, not wayward aliens attempting to cross our southern border illegally. (See “Horse lesson for novices.”)
And here’s the cherry on top: Mayorkas knew that the media narrative was, if I may so put it, horseshit. This just out from Fox News’s Bill Melugin: “Mayorkas was alerted by DHS’s top public affairs official that the ‘whipping’ narrative behind horseback BP photos wasn’t true, but at a WH press conference 2.5 hours later, he didn’t refute that narrative, instead calling the images ‘horrifying.’”
As Jim Treacher adds, “Oh well. They got the narrative they wanted and they won that news cycle. So what if it was 100% caca del toro? If those Border Patrol agents wanted any public sympathy, they should’ve moved to Martha’s Vineyard.”
Yet another example of Obama-style “stray voltage” in action to get past that’s week’s brutal news cycle.