Posted on 05/19/2006 9:18:31 AM PDT by Bob J
Ths was never going to work. The House and Senate simply have too many RINO's to effect the kind of change that reformists dreamed of. Anyone who thought it would was blind. Thanks for the effort, but the strategery wasn't thought all the way through.
By bringing the immigration question to the top of the table, they have handed the dems a bat with which to beat us over the head for the next 20 years. Conservative and pub reformists looking for real progress and change will be characterized in the media as meanspirited racists and bigots while the dems nickel and dime the legislation and take the teeth out of any new law. They will be portrayed as the real champions.
I especially liked the land mine and machine gun emplacement comments....They went a long way toward making this issue totally divisive...
"Ok...so we should have all been good little boys and girls that stayed content with unrestricted illegal immigration?"
Now we have unrestricted legal immigration. Feel better?
Maybe......But I ain't counting the chickens yet...
"Instead of ignoring it, we are now going to deal with it."
As long as you're definition of "dealing with it" is capitulation.
Prior to the 2000 election, Free Republic was split in half between those who supported George W. Bush, and those who opposed him. The Freepers who supported G. W. Bush as their next President, followed Trixie and formed their own website.
Freepers who did not trust George W. Bush (to include Jim Robinson) held out and continued to support the Free Republic website. The majority of Freepers supported Alan Keys for President instead.
The dynamics of politics is always interesting to observe. You never know what will happen next, but it is always a fun ride.
Today, stand up and demand that the GOP represent you!
No we don't. What are you talking about?
I appreciate your optimism but the handwriting is on the wall.
Unrestricted legal immigration and million of new dem voters.
That's pretty rich.
El congreso de ESTADOS UNIDOS está muy loco.
Instead of calculatedly ignoring millions in the streets, you weren't organizing FReeper protests... uh, isn't that exactly what your position in the FreeRepublic Network is supposed to organize?
But Freeper protests never accomplished anything... uh, except maybe getting the President elected when Gore tried to steal it?
So now, after having ignored reality for MONTHS, you declare defeat and blame the membership, when we still don't even have a bill and STILL have an opportunity to flush the Senate version!
By this behavior, one would rationally conclude you wanted such an outcome.
Ah, so it's all the fault of FReepers who want our nation's laws enforced and sovereignty respected?
They really overshot the mark on that and I agree with you.
What there is, appears to be confusion cause by Sessions and his estimates.
They need to tie the numbers to economics somehow, and have them trickle to zero if the economy and assimilation falls behind.
I think if they did that, it would go a long way toward clearing this part of the debate up.
They need to tie it to a indicator, or indicators, and if they don't have one, they need to make one.
Sure...and one could rightly say that conservatives played into their hands.
But at the same time, border control IS a serious issue and illegal immigration IS a big issue as well. The administration could not ignore those issues whether the Liberals were carping on them or not.
It would have been nice to have crews appearing on the border with building materials over the course of several years and slowly beefing up the infrastructure and personnel levels, but we live in a real world and know that isn't going to happen either. We might build a few sections of roads and fences, and the MSM would have been right on that like stink on $hit.
The thing is-this was going to come to a head NO MATTER WHAT. No matter how you approach it, and no matter how you address it, the same components to the problem need to be solved.
Most of us agree that amnesty is not a good idea. And we would also agree that putting in place bureaucracy, money, infrastructure and manpower to do a mass deportation of millions of people is not only not a trivial task, but is politically very difficult, if not impossible in this atmosphere.
I readily admit I am baffled by the Administration's handling of this issue. From the standpoint of looking at illegals as future voters, that is a loser and they have to know that. I am not all that politically sharp, but hey, they aren't going to be Republicans if they do vote. And we will piss off a lot of Hispanics who came here illegally (though not all...there is power in numbers, after all)
If one looks at it from a security perspective only, and if you accept the premise that a mass deportation of millions into perhaps even into eight figures worth is impossible or impractical (I readily admit that premise may be false) then you are left with very few options. You cannot hunt them down and kill them on the spot. You cannot MAKE them citizens out of hand. You HAVE to figure out some way to deal with them.
My view on a fence, as an ex-sailor, is like that of a ship with a hole below the waterline. Pumping out water is fine and even necessary to buy time. But you cannot, and will not avoid sinking UNLESS YOU PLUG THE HOLE beneath the border...oops...waterline. I think most of us in this forum would agree on that. The question is, how do we get the President and our elected officials to see it the same way?
I take my hat off to the President for even letting the issue cross his lips. None of the previous ones have even done that. Of course, none of them inhabited the Oval Office on 9/11 either, so they didn't really have to.
If it's bigoted to want illegals shot on sight what would you call allowing them to get in and kill innocent American citizens either intentionally or unintentionally?
Oops. Fixed it to anyone who picked that up...:)
Thats not my recollection. The odd-bigot always got smoked out and zapped pretty quickly.
Hell, even the non-bigot anti illegal FReeper got zapped, if his argument became uncomfortably cogent.
The fault with the GOP is that we elected a bunch of spineless, RINO's who didn't show their true colors till this.
We've identified them, they are on notice AND we are going to vote them OUT!!
sw
HEY! AREN'T YOU ONE OF THEM????!!!!!
:)
sw
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.