Cruz: Only migrant Christians should be admitted

A woman in a doctor's office in our area was heard to  say she was happy  to know that any effort to keep out refugees would  stop all of those  "Sicilians" from landing on our shores.  That was a head-turner as various nations desperately try to figure out what to do with massive war-driven migration  across European borders.  It once again  alerted us  to the unwashed views of many folks   about the staggering reality of a horrific world that defies  solutions.

So you can forgive the woman's error about  the terrorist peril and paralysis the past few days that even the right-wing presidential candidates and their playmates insist belonged in the lap of President Obama.

From the breast-pounding fringe has come calls that he resign, blaming him for not mentioning  "Islam" in his responses; Columnist Michelle Malkin  referred to Obama as the "Nobel Prize-winning workplace violence whitewasher," a  cheek-swelling  mouthful, if moronic.

Some of the Pavlovian candidates, their hearts pounding in feverish anticipation,  rushed off to Fox News to vent their shopworn political violence on the president with glib accusations but absolutely no solutions of their own. No one was more defiant than Sen.Ted Cruz, who asserted  that any admission of refugees should be limited to Christians because  they do not "commit acts of terror".  (Hitler, a Catholic Christian, rehabbed).

And  unsurprisingly, Jeb! challenged our short-term memory by accusing Obama of creating the "quagmire" in the Middle East.

His dysfunctionally hawkish brother - can we mention that?  - at least was inventive enough to don a pilot's uniform and land on an aircraft carrier to declare "Mission Accomplished". It was one of history's greatest theatrical allegories of presidential chutzpah  in action.

(His supporting cast  wasn't much more persuasive as Dick Cheney batted away questions about the duration of the Iraq war by assuring the audience that it wasn't likely to last more than several weeks and that Iraqi oil would pay for the high cost of the American invasion.)

Frustration and uncertainty  - that's what the whole civilized world faces.  You'd think that in these days of need, the fringe would try to understand that there are no bumper-sticker solutions. None.  For the superhawks, sending tens of thousands of American soldiers to Syria would satisfy the critics' needs to say something,  but what would we do about terrorists scattered around the globe? And even in Belgium,where the pot was stirred for the bloodshed in Paris.

If we decide to bomb Brussels, should we first drop warning leaflets, as they did  with Monte Cassino in WW11  with little  success?  The bombs killed more than 200 Italian civilians;  the Germans had abandoned the hilltop abbey without a single casualty. .

The Bush-Cheney class  now pretends that it is methodically in control and knows all of the answers.  So Belgium, beware.  And non-Christians, better fly business class.