Like most of us, I’m sure, I’ve been watching the situation regarding Syrian refugees develop, especially after the unfortunate events in Paris and elsewhere this weekend. This sort of thing, it can bring out the best in people, or it can bring out the worst of people. I’m seeing some absolutely awful stuff from folks on the right, and most of them are parroting the words of the many, many Republican candidates for President, who are spouting off all sorts of awful things, many of which harken, unfortunately, back to stuff I remember hearing fourteen years ago, only with the crazy dialed up a few orders of magnitude higher. All of it’s pretty uncharitable toward people in need, and in flagrant violation of the two disparate documents these sorts of people proclaim to revere above all others, those being the Bible (see, among many other places, Leviticus 19:33-34 and Luke 10:25-37) and the US Constitution (specifically Article VI, paragraph 3).

To play the scripture game with these folks, we’ve got a whole lot of loudly self-proclaimed Christians (most troublingly, at least 19 state Governors) taking on the part of the innkeeper in Luke 2:7. Even the Christmas/Easter types and those who slept through Sunday school ought to be able to figure out that’s the wrong side of that equations to be on.

Luckily, despite all the garbage being spewed over the airwaves, the internet, and from journalists in press conferences who should know better, there are cooler heads prevailing, and one of them happens to sit in the Oval Office, which makes me feel pretty good. Quoth President Obama:

The United States has to step up and do its part. And when I hear folks say that well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims — when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test? For which person, who is fleeing a war-torn country, is admitted? When some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution? That’s shameful.

He’s got a cool head and definitely has the right idea, though much has been made of the frustration he showed at that press conference yesterday. I understand the frustration, especially after being asked, and answering in thoughtful detail, the same question multiple times,. It seems the reporters present were simply not getting the answer they’d like (which one journalist, CNN’s Jim Acosta, kindly articulated bluntly, would be “to take out these bastards”), lending credence to the axiom “if it bleeds, it leads”.

The response people keep talking about, to me, seems pretty reasoned, and exactly the kind of thing I want to hear from my head of state (emphasis here and there is mine):

But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough, or make me look tough. And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed, and I see a 25-year-old kid who’s paralyzed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle. And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may.

We’ll do what’s required to keep the American people safe. And I think it’s entirely appropriate in a democracy to have a serious debate about these issues. If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisors are better than the Chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate. But what I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning, or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people, and to protect people in the region who are getting killed, and to protect our allies and people like France. I’m too busy for that.

The President was a lot cooler in the presence of idiocy than many others would be.