I hope you read that in a gravelly, nasally, Darkwing Duck-esque voice. I really do. :)

Donald Trump Jr. - the Republican presidential candidate's campaign manager and son - recently posted a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to Skittles. In case you haven't heard about it by now, it goes as follows: "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."

A lot of people have jumped on him for posting that. Not for bad grammar (though there's that cardinal sin as well, here) but for racism. They say he's demeaning the people by comparing them to candy, that the crisis is a humanitarian issue, that the tweet shows "white supremacist overtones."

I think that's true, though less true than the media is making it out to be. It's a metaphor, and looked at as a metaphor, it has a point.

The problem is, it's a BAD metaphor. And if you alter it so it's a good metaphor, you'll see how invalid that point really is.

Let's take a look at a few things. A bowl of Skittles like the one in the picture Jr. tweeted contains... I dunno. 100 Skittles? But Obama wants the USA to take in 10,000 refugees. That's 100 bowls. But you can't just scale up the number of deadly candies; claiming that we'd let in 300 terrorists, or potential terrorist, is ridiculous. The TSA and Homeland Security can hardly claim to be 100% accurate, but they're not that incompetent. For that matter, there probalby wouldn't be 300 terrorists who even try. So I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say that 3 should be raised to... 10. 10 Skittles out of 10,000 will kill you. Would you grab a handful?

But wait. We're not done. Because there's a bigger audience than just you. America has a pretty large population, after all. So you're not the only one taking candy out of the bowl. Let's make it so you take one Skittle - just one - and you pass the bowl around. 10,000 Skittles. 10,000 people. You have a .1% chance of choosing one of the bad ones. Which, in this analogy, means that one of the terrorist-refugees has settled near you and targeted where you live or work for his next bomb. I rather suspect the chances of that are much lower than that - America is big. But, whatever.

Still, 10,000 people took a Skittle. That means someone is going to die! Ten people, in fact! We can't have that!

Not so fast. 10 people might die. But a lot of terrorist attacks fail. Just look at the recent attacks in New York and New Jersey. What was it, 3 bombs? 5? Only two went off, and one of them was under the auspices of a bomb-squad robot at the time. The one in the dumpster exploded like it was supposed to, but although it injured 20 or 30 people it killed none of them. And other attacks get busted, or the terrorists blow themselves up with their own devices. These are not professionals, people.

So, for our analogy, 10 people will eat bad candy. But some of them will sniff it first, and throw it away. Some will vomit it up before it does much. Some will get sick, but not fatally. And yes, one, maybe two of those of people might actually die.

That means your chances of actually dying from that bowl of Skittles is .01% to .02%. Would you take a handful?

Don't answer yet! Because you have to remember that this is just an analogy. Each of those Skittles represents a real person. A refugee, in fact, fleeing war, poverty, disease. Trying to evade persecution, torture, and death. Not all of them would die if they'd remained in Syria, but a good many probably would. And even for those that would survive, I do hope you don't try to claim their lives would be better there than here in America. People don't flee their homes and apply for refugee status when things are just a little tough.

Which means you can save 9,990 lives. Nearly ten thousand lives will be immensely, immeasurably improved by your actions. All for just a .02% chance (and probably less) of being killed. Now would you take a handful?

You know what?

I think I would.