Posted on 05/16/2006 5:36:42 AM PDT by kellynla
For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I will perform a death-defying stunt -- no, not climbing a 300-foot ladder, diving through seven rings of fire and landing perfectly safely in a glass of water. That's easy once you know how to do it.
Instead, I shall advise you on how to interpret President Bush's speech on immigration that you heard last night but that was delivered several hours after this column was written. Very simply: Ask yourselves the following questions:
Did the president use the phrase ''comprehensive immigration reform'' several times? That's revealing because this phrase is an example of smuggling. He hopes that by wrapping a ''temporary guest-worker program'' and the ''not an amnesty'' provision to legalize the 12 million illegals already here -- both of which are unpopular -- inside a tough-sounding popular promise to secure the border with the National Guard, he will persuade most Americans to accept the first two proposals.
Did the president spend a large part of his speech on promising to secure the border by sending the National Guard there? Heigh-ho. This is the umpteenth time that Bush has promised to toughen up border security with a new initiative. He does so whenever there is public disquiet about illegal immigration.
Yet this kind of mini-initiative is fundamentally irrelevant. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, porous borders are the result of uncontrolled immigration as much as its cause. You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
All of that is long gone. The state has a RINO governor, a liberal Democrat dominated legislature, and a Congressional delegation that is lopsidedly Democratic. What tipped California politics to the left was the enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people through the 1986 amnesty. As these new citizens and their children began to vote, moderate to conservative Republicans like Pete Wilson and Bob Dornan were voted out of office, to be replaced by the likes of Grey Davis and Loretta Sanchez. In the last two Presidential elections, the GOP virtually conceded California to the Democrats, rightly assuming the state was a lost cause.
It is foolish to imagine that Texas will be exempt from a similar political transformation should the illegals be allowed a path to citizenship. Signs of a like transformation are in evidence. Dallas County, a Republican stronghold since the 1960s, is shifting to the Democratic column, as evidenced by the recent election of a Democratic Hispanic lesbian as sheriff. Harris County is on a similar path. Should newly added Democratic voters who were formerly illegal aliens, what happened to California will happen to Texas. Should Texas, along with the other Southwestern states, swing to the Democratic column as the result of the illegals becoming citizens, the GOP will return to the minority status it had for over a half century and political conservatism will be a dead letter.
I don't care if the States, the Feds, or the Minutemen build the fence. It needs to be built, from Brownsville to San Diego.
I gave as I got, but I'll cease not per the moderator's advice. And your hands are not really very clean either.
I disagree.
The hispanics more than anything want us to 'get tough' with Fox and Mexico, which I believe he should do.
Did I say he was?
No, Rockefellers are socially liberal as well.
But he has chosen to keep company with them, which is almost as bad.
Unofficial Goldwater presidential campaign song
As did Ronald Reagan. What would you do? Exile all of them?
Both Bush and Reagan believed that government could do good things for people and has a role to play.
The realities they face are different however but the comparisons still are valid. Reagan faced a down turning economy due largely to very excessive taxation and a bloated bureaucratic mess, and he dealt with it via compromise with the Democrats who held the power in the House and Senate at one point.
Bush has the House and Senate, yet to get anything done he has to still deal with the Democrats in the Senate and he has to compromise to get 80% of what he wants. Reagan did exactly the same but Bush has actually achieved more..
The problem with the purists, is that they don't believe in compromise, which is really the definition of politics.
I find them to be about as relevant as the liberal left wing who seem to have the same bent. They scream bloody murder and raise hell, but the ship of State continues in the same direction in spite of it.
We will always have extremes in the parties on both sides, and it is a dance to hold them all together. Right now, that dance music has stopped because someone threw a rock through the speakers and the stage curtain has fallen, exposing the mess backstage.
All this will self repair in time. It won't be so pretty, but it is sausage making politics and it never is pretty.
So just do your thing and try to stay focused on the prize. All will play out as it should in the end.
Your objection to this is fear of Mexico?
Pray tell, please, how is the Prez's position on this 'conservative'?
You're ignoring what I'm saying, the point that 'conservative' means something this Prez is *not* doing. Again, if you're not going to address my points, then perhaps I should just let you go back to insulting the parentage of others?
You can't speak for Texas or Texans. In fact, I think you're in the distinct minority.
I just finished writing a reply to the wall Street Journal.
I'll shorten the substance since it addresses you as well.
It is a sign of desperation to invoke Reagan as a means of silencing, distracting, or minimizing conservatives' feelings on this issue and how it has been handled.
I take the fact you've done so as a sign you are desperate and fearful a split is happening right before your eyes that you cannot control.
I am.
This fall, I will vote for the candidate that is for actually solving this issue. Otherwise, I will write in my father-in-law.
I hope you're right. I'm worried US voters who are friends and relatives of illegals or just sympathetic to them won't favor tougher measures, like deportation or employer penalties for hiring illegals. It's the only reason I can see why the president hasn't been tougher on this issue. He's worried about losing a block of voters. Like I said, though, I hope I'm wrong, and this is purely a political calculation on my part--nothing to do with what actually IS RIGHT TO DO ON THIS ISSUE. That much is certain.
I'm in Austin. With Family ties in Laredo and down in the vally, by Harlingen.
He does *not* speak for Texans. And his opinion *is* in the minority.
As I understand it, the Prez and other politicans are for this for 2 reasons:
This is our chance to save the R party from itself, I think.
If left to their own devices, the Ds will take Congress. If we agree that Congress needs a wholesale change, but insist on replacing republicans with better republicans, we can save the day.
Some days, it feels like FR has been infiltrated by a bunch of Dims and MSM pukes hell-bent on performing the coup-de-grace on the country.
That may be true, regardless of security risks--but they won't be voting in this election. Nothing moves that fast in government.
The 'guest worker' program is for this election -- the $$$ from the business lobbyists.
This plan has a short-term and long-term payoff for politicians. Just not for current voters.
Oh, we're going to have a marxist state on our southern border, Mr. Collitch Perfesser, you can count on that. That train has already left the station.
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