It`s Alive! Bush Betrayal Tries To Climb Out Of Coffin
After letting
Ted Kennedy and
John McCain lead the fight for his illegal
immigration cave-in earlier in the year, President Bush
has now re-emerged to push publicly for the amnesty and
guest worker plans that have obsessed him from his
first days in office.
In tandem with the May Day
"show of force" by hordes of
marching illegal aliens, the impact on Bush`s
popularity appears to have been brutal.
President Bush`s public approval ratings have dropped
this
month to Nixon-during-Watergate
levels. According to the
Gallup Poll, Bush`s rating among Republicans has
been plummeting a point per day for the last two weeks!
And yet Bush can`t resist going back for more of the
hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-him. He is still prodding the
Senate to pass his disastrous immigration
legislation—what we have called “The
Bush Betrayal.” On Friday,
Senate Democratic minority leader Harry Reid and the
White House`s main man on
Capitol Hill, Republican majority leader
Bill Frist, announced that the misbegotten bill they
almost shoved through earlier this year is
now ready again to be voted on by the Senate.
To cover up this historic sell-out of the American
people, Bush reportedly will address the nation Monday
night (8 pm EDT) and announce some
cosmetic toughening-up measures.
The White House`s working philosophy seems to be what I
call "marketing major post-modernism": the
belief, often acquired through osmosis while studying
public relations or advertising in college, that some
egghead over in Europe proved that there`s
no such thing as truth or reality, so … spin away!
The
New York Times reports, in effect, that Bush
operatives believe they just haven`t been clever enough
in their lying:
"White House officials
said Mr. Bush had always understood the need to protect
the border as a former governor of a
border state, Texas. But they acknowledged they had
perhaps erred in not emphasizing that understanding as
they pushed provisions granting
illegal immigrants working here legal status,
angering Republicans." (Bush
to Unveil Plan to Tighten Border Controls,
by Jim Rutenberg, May 13, 2006)
This is comically mendacious. As President, Bush has
killed off the last remnants of the once grand-seeming
grand compromise in the
1986 immigration legislation, in which
amnesty for current illegal aliens was supposedly to
be combined with strict
employer sanctions to prevent new illegal
immigration. As VDARE.com`s
Edwin S. Rubenstein noted:
"Under the Bush
Administration worksite arrests of illegal aliens
fell some 97 percent,
from 2,859 in 1999 to 159 in 2004."
It is rumored that the President will announce that
National Guard troops will be headed to the border. (Why
the National Guard? Don`t we have an Army?)
[VDARE.COM note:
It`s been repeatedly suggested that using the Army for
border control would violate the
Posse Comitatus Act,
designed to prevent the Army from being used on
Americans. (E.g. Raoul Lowery Contreras, in the middle
of an attack on us here: “It
is illegal to put troops on the border.")
No, it wouldn`t. Aside from the multiple modern
exceptions to the Act, what is at issue here is a matter
of guarding the border from foreign invaders. This is
what armies are for.]
My question: Exactly how can the Bush Administration
round up enough National Guardsmen when so many are
deployed—as VDARE.COM`s own
Allan Wall was—in
Iraq?
The answer: it can`t.
The
Washington Post reports:
"One defense official said military leaders believe the
number of troops required could range from 3,500 to
perhaps 10,000, depending on the final plan. Another
administration official cautioned that the 10,000 figure
was too high."
[Bush Weighs Deploying Guard to U.S. Border, by
Lolita C. Baldor, May 13, 2006]
Sounds impressive!
But do the math…
- Our Mexican border
is
1952 miles long.
- There are 168
hours in a week, so each Guardsman would be on duty
on the border for, say, one quarter of that or 42
hours per week. (That is unreasonably optimistic,
considering how much work time these days is devoted
to training, leave,
sexual harassment seminars, diversity
sensitivity workshops, and the like.)
So, if each one of the 3,500 National Guardsmen was on
patrol an average of, say, 21 hours per week (which is
1/8th of the 168 hours in a week), that would provide
one soldier per 4.5 miles of border.
For some reason, I`m not reassured.
Particularly because this deployment would certainly be
withdrawn as soon as Bush feels what might be called a
“decent interval”
has elapsed.
Some of the news stories on how the Bush Administration
is going to "militarize" the border sound like
the first draft of an
Evelyn Waugh story. The New York Times`
Rutenberg reports:
"Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld met at the Pentagon with Mexico`s
defense minister, Gen.
Gerardo Clemente Ricardo Vega. Officials said they
had discussed, among other things, potential United
States help in training and equipping Mexican forces at
the border."
Of course,
Mr. Rumsfeld is part of the same Administration that
is evidently
tipping off the Mexican government on where the
Minutemen are guarding the border.
So we can only imagine what he`s been passing along to a
foreign military that has staged hundreds of
incursions onto American soil while escorting
Mexican drug and immigrant smugglers.
The Bush Administration has seemed never to notice that
Mexico is not the 51st state, but a foreign country—one
that is engaged in a slow-motion invasion of America.
Of course, Bush will make no mention of any attempt to
actually, well,
deport
the illegal aliens he has allowed to sneak in—even
though there are
many ways short of
mass round-ups that
public policy could encourage them to leave.
And Bush is unlikely to propose the one border
enforcement step that couldn`t be quickly reversed once
public attention is diverted: an
Israeli-style security fence along the entire
frontier.
But even if Mr. Bush announces Monday that he favors a
fence, the plain fact is that he simply can`t be trusted
to provide any honest leadership on such a project at
all. It would be easy for him to delay its construction
for, roughly, ever.
Here`s just one obvious opportunity for obstruction:
environmental impact.
Look at the endless delays in California
golf course construction. It only took 18 months to
build the
superb Barona Creek golf course outside San
Diego—because it is on an
Indian reservation immune to the less crucial
environmental
regulations. In contrast, Barona Creek`s designer
Todd Eckenrode told me that he had other courses
that were still on the drawing board after 8 to 12 years
due to environmental impact hassles. The
TPC Valencia course north of Los Angeles was
proposed in 1985 but didn`t open until 2002. Most of
these delays are driven by the
Not-In-My-Back-Yard interests of
neighbors rather than by legitimate
conservation needs.
Construction of a
14-mile fence along the
border in San Diego began 13 years ago. But the
final three miles next to the
ocean are still not finished due to wetlands
lawsuits.
Congress has the right to override environmental
regulations, which they finally did last year to get the
San Diego fence project moving again. But that won`t
happen on a
national fence unless we voters demand it as part of
the initial legislative package.
Just as the public was betrayed on immigration by its
elected leadership in 1986 and 1996, we can expect more
of the same in 2006.
This is shaping up to be a disastrous moment in the
history of the Republic. The full impact of immigration
legislation does not become visible to voters for
decades (and, apparently, not to Senators for
centuries). If recent history repeats itself, Congress
won`t consider immigration again until 2016.
Why is Bush doing this? I have
suggested that his motives are dynastic—that he is
selfishly sacrificing the GOP to build a family vehicle,
much like Brian Mulroney sacrificed the Canadian
Progressive Conservative party in a vain effort to build
a personal fief in the French-speaking province of
Quebec. Brenda Walker speculates he is a
"MexiChurian Candidate."
What he is not is an American patriot.
So, my fellow Americans, it`s now or never—unless Tom
Tancredo`s
Immigration Reform Caucus in the House of
Representatives can persuade Republicans there to hold
the line.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


