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May 25, 2006
Hillary: Please Don't Read This
Kathryn Jean Lopez notes a press release from "La Casa Blanca":
I commend the Senate for passing bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform before the Memorial Day deadline set by its Leaders. I appreciate the hard work of the Leadership and Senators on both sides of the aisle. An effective immigration reform bill will protect our borders, hold employers to account for the workers they hire, create a temporary worker program to take pressure off our border and meet the needs of our growing economy, address the issue of the millions of illegal immigrants already in our country, and honor America’s great tradition of the melting pot. The House of Representatives began a national dialogue by passing an immigration bill last year. Now that the Senate has acted, I look forward to working together with both the House of Representatives and the Senate to produce a bill for me to sign into law.
Emphasis most definitely mine. With respect, what in the bloody hell is the President getting at? "[A] temporary worker program [will] take pressure off our border..." Is he even thinking about the words he is saying? He has an MBA; is the concept of supply and demand foreign to him? Who's writing this stuff for him?
Since my readership is tiny, I'll go out on a limb and throw out a can't miss strategy for Democratic control of Congress and the presidency. All you candidates repeat after me: "I advocate hiring thousands of new agents who will actively patrol the 2000 miles of our new border fence. Yes, it is expensive but I believe this is the only way to control illegal immigration, and we owe this effort to relieve the pressure on and provide opportunity for the legal working poor already in our country. Once we have control of our borders we can deal humanely with the problem of the millions of illegals already here."
Any candidate, Democrat or Republican, who advocates this simple message will win in a landslide.
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Comments
I think that'd be a great idea, and it could be effectively wedded to the 'Bush ignores the law when convenient' meme.
I'd love to see that happen; hopefully the hippies in my party don't stop it. (by the by: I'd love to take the strident democracy hippies* from your party and the strident anti-"corporatist" hippies from my party and send 'em all to New Hampshire or something.
* aka neo-cons. Democracy promotion is a good thing, but when wedded to a sunshine-and-rainbows optimism (they remind me of a community college art teacher: "People just need to express themselves. Then they'll find peace/love America"), they're insufferable.
Posted by: jpe at May 27, 2006 12:49 PM
I was going to invoke JFK...but then there's McNamara who was several orders of magnitude worse than Rumsfeld will ever be. There's been a lot of ink spilled over the disappearance of the Scoop Jackson Democrats.
I agree that there have been some big problems in the implementation of the neocons' ideas (more than I'm aware of, I'm sure)--but what appeals to me about them is that they refuse to fatalistically accept totalitarianism as the status quo in some countries and cultures. Problems (including US mismanagement) in the new Iraqi government for example--really just a matter of process after all--should not be held up as proof of the old saw "Arabs can't do democracy", a concept works on something much bigger than process.
Which makes me all the more p.o.'d about the mundane (and preventable) mismanagment that's occurred--both in Iraq and now on the immigration front.
As far as "sunshine-and-rainbow" optimism goes: I'd bet a lot of that comes from a fundamental lack of knowledge about a lot of the cultures in which we're trying to cultivate democracy. The old European colonial powers were corrupt, cruel and hidebound but I bet they had a lot better working knowledge of the cultures they ruled than we do. You won't find any Henry Fords in Angola.
Posted by: Jeff at May 28, 2006 03:25 PM
