December 31, 2006
Happy New Year 2007!
By New Year I don't mean
Chinese New Year, Hmong New Year, Vietnamese New
Year, Buddhist New Year or
Muslim New Year, but good old American New Year,
Gregorian Year 2006.
Interesting incidents from 2006:
The
Mohammed Cartoon Riots.
Actually, the cartoons were drawn in 2005, but Muslims
started rioting in February and went on for some
time, and in a
"Diversity vs. Freedom" note, Old Media publications
in America refused to print the cartoons, because there
are a whole bunch of Muslims in America. How did that
happen?
See
Federal
legislation:
In immigration politics, the main thing that happened
was something that didn't happen. The Senate Bill,
S. 2611, failed to pass the House of
Representatives, because the GOP Leadership in the
House, (and some Democrats of good will)
acted like a third party, standing between the
pro-immigration Democrats and the pro-immigration
White House.
Does that mean we're safe now? No. Because….
The
election.
I Told You So is the traditional American
formulation when a disaster like this happens, but
immigrant
Peter Brimelow picked a European one:
J’Accuse…!
"It means ‘I
accuse’ in French and was the
title of the novelist Emil Zola’s famous 1898
open letter alleging a miscarriage of justice in the
Dreyfus Affair spy scandal. Before National Review
immigration enthusiast
John J. Miller accuses me of being
un-American, I must note that Norman Podhoretz
used the phrase a few years ago one of his articles
claiming that Israel was being mistreated in some way or
other that I forget….
“The full measure of
Tuesday night’s disaster is not simply that the
self-appointed leaders who leaped on board the [conservative] movement
as it came to power—the
Bush dynasty, the ex- (and
no doubt future) Democratic
neoconservative publicists and intellectuals—have
led it to shattering electoral defeat.
“Instead, the full
measure of the disaster is that the
conservative movement has essentially nothing to
show for its moment in the sun. The discontents of the
Religious Right are well-known.
Economic conservatives are confronted with
relentlessly increasing federal government spending.
To mention
one of my pet interests, far from being willing to
break the
power of the teacher unions and introduce market
forces into public education, the Bush Administration
has done exactly the opposite: moving to federalize the
K-12 system in a way that is certain to be captured by
the education Establishment. And, of course, Bush turned
out to be bent on actually increasing immigration,
already running at record nation- (and
party-) breaking levels.”
For the (potential) good news, check out
Time To Rethink Immigration (II): Freeing America From
The Immigration Gulag, also by Peter Brimelow,
June 05, 2006
“On innumerable
issues—wage
and price controls, welfare policy, the efficacy of
military intervention overseas—the American conventional
wisdom had changed out of all recognition over
relatively short periods of time, without the
conventionally-wise seeming to feel much need to
reproach themselves for being wrong.
“It can happen in
immigration policy too.
“Or, to put it another
way: the Soviet Union—completely unexpectedly—collapsed.
The gulag was dissolved. Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned
from exile.
“The nightmare will end.”
And here are some of the things we wrote on previous New
Years:
