Republican Hypocrisy Nurtured Mollie Tibbetts' Killer

Donald Trump twists the facts as always by saying of Mollie Tibbetts' accused killer, "He came into the country illegally - and look what happened," drawing a short direct line over the four to seven years between Christhian Rivera's US arrival and Mollie's murder.

During that lengthy interval, Rivera spent the last four years working at Republican-owned Yarrabee Farms along with hundreds of other immigrant farm workers whose legal status the company apparently doesn't really know.

Initially, Yarrabee's Dane Lang claimed Rivera was vetted through the government's e-Verify system. When it was discovered that Yarrabee farms are not registered in the system, the company stalled, then confessed the next day the e-Verify story was a lie and Rivera had given them false information. The prominent Lang brothers who own Yarrabee Farms include Craig, former president of both the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and The Iowa Board of Regents, currently running for Iowa State Secretary of Agriculture.

That prominent Republican officials can be so fuzzy and confused about insuring their workers are legal beggars belief. Everyone around town knew the killer by his real name, Christhian Bahena Rivera, yet the Langs were paying Rivera under a different name while claiming not to know his real name. Here is a glimpse of the unspoken 800-pound gorilla in the illegal-immigration debate.

Illegal immigration is supported and nurtured by the largely Republican farm industry and many other employers who want cheap labor, and no wall is going to keep them out as long as there are jobs calling from hypocritical corporate profiteers who will break whatever laws are required to retain them. That they then scapegoat and demonize the very people they exploit is nothing new in Republican hypocrisyland.

A typically mindless and immoral Fox cultist running for the Senate, Kelli Ward, blames John McCain and Jeff Flake for Mollie's death because they would not surrender to the "build-a-wall" hysteria and chose instead to work hard for comprehensive immigration reform.

The truth is the immigrant crime rate is way below the domestic, and one could just as easily argue that Rivera only "snapped" after spending seven years becoming "Americanized" like our genital-grabbing leader.