The state Republican Party’s depravity would be breathtaking were it not, sadly, so damn expected. But the Louisiana GOP’s desperation in these waning days before the runoff to get a smarmy, vindictive adulterer elected governor reached a nadir Wednesday when it issued a release saying that “David Vitter had to notify the Obama Administration that a Syrian refugee who had been living in Baton Rouge has gone missing.”
Woah! Gone missing? Really?
Not really, no.
With Vitter down anywhere from 10 to 20 points, depending on the poll, and just a few days before the runoff, the state GOP found the perfect bogeyman via the Paris attacks last Friday and the specter of Syrian refugees flooding our cities and setting up terror cells to pollute our milk and honey.
When the “10,000 Syrian refugees are about to flood New Orleans” canard courtesy of a right-wing Louisiana website failed to gain traction early this week because it wasn’t true — it was 14 refugees resettled in NOLA by the archdiocese for which the senator’s wife, Wendy Vitter, is general counsel (you can’t make this up) — we should have assumed state party operatives wouldn’t give up.
Sen. Vitter’s “open letter” to Obama claims the refugee in question had settled in Baton Rouge “just this week.” In fact, it was months ago. And the refugee isn’t unaccounted for — he relocated to be near family.
As the Associated Press reports:
Col. Mike Edmonson, head of Louisiana State Police, said at a Tuesday news conference that to say a Syrian refugee was on the loose and missing would be “a mischaracterization,” according to WAFB-TV. Edmonson had joined officials of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which helps refugees resettle in the Baton Rouge area, to discuss a threat against refugees phoned into that agency.
The director of the agency, David Aguillard, said Wednesday the individual in question arrived in Baton Rouge in June, not this week, and that he had legally relocated to be near family.
“Just because a person moves out of our area doesn’t mean that they’re lost or missing or wandering the countryside,” Aguillard said.
Yet the Louisiana GOP lied anyway in an effort to scare voters with racist fantasies of dark-skinned malevolence, a fact that wasn’t lost on the Twitter-sphere:
