As a Milblog I don’t often weigh in on matters solely political, but in instances where I have predicted it right, I like to brag to readers (even if I have to go back some four years ago to find my prediction).
I had told my oldest son, Josh, a while back after he predicted a total debacle for the health care bill that it didn’t matter. Obama’s aims are much more nefarious than just a socialization of our health care system. He knows that he doesn’t have the soul of the American people with this scheme, but that is America as it is currently constituted.
America could change with “immigration reform,” with more of the votes going democratic. And despite the current political difficulties, Obama is going for broke, sooner rather than later.
Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already.
Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections.
In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators — Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who have spent months trying to craft a bill.
According to a person familiar with the meeting, the White House may ask Schumer and Graham to at least produce a blueprint that could be turned into legislative language.
The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally.
If this succeeds, 10 – 15 million new voters will be added to the roles, most of them voting democratic. The current objections to socialization of our society and nationalization of our industries won’t matter. It will be an artifact of history, and Obama will have thus ensured that his party remains in power in perpetuity.
One final note. With people like Lindsey Graham in the Senate, Obama doesn’t even need total control over the legislative process. The GOP will apparently help him do it. Maybe the GOP is on a suicide mission for some reason or other?
On Nov. 3, the day before Americans elected Barack Obama president, drug cartel henchmen murdered 58 people in Mexico. It was the highest number killed in one day since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006. By comparison, on average 26 people — Americans and Iraqis combined — died daily in Iraq in 2008. Mexico’s casualty list on Nov. 3 included a man beheaded in Ciudad Juarez whose bloody corpse was suspended along an overpass for hours. No one had the courage to remove the body until dark.
The death toll from terrorist attacks in Mumbai two weeks ago, although horrible, approaches the average weekly body count in Mexico’s war. Three weeks ago in Juarez, which is just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, telephone messages and banners threatened teachers that if they failed to pay protection money to cartels, their students would suffer brutal consequences. Local authorities responded by assigning 350 teenage police cadets to the city’s 900 schools. If organized criminals wish to extract tribute from teachers, businessmen, tourists or anyone else, there is nothing the Mexican government can do to stop them. For its part, the United States has become numb to this norm.
As part of my ongoing research into border issues, I have visited Juarez six times over the last two years. Each time I return, I see a populace under greater siege. Residents possess a mentality that increasingly resembles the one I witnessed as a Marine officer in Baghdad, Fallouja and Ramadi.
“The police are nothing,” a forlorn cab driver told me in September. “They cannot protect anyone. We can go nowhere else. We live in fear.”
An official in El Paso estimated that up to 100,000 dual U.S.-Mexican citizens, mostly upper middle class, have fled north from Juarez to his city this year. Only those lacking means to escape remain.
At the same time, with the U.S. economy in free fall, many illegal immigrants are returning south. So illegal immigration — the only border issue that seems to stir the masses — made no splash in this year’s elections. Mexico’s chaos never surfaced as a topic in either the foreign or domestic policy presidential debates.
Despite the gravity of the crisis, our closest neighbor has fallen off our political radar. Heaven help you if you bring up the border violence at a Washington dinner party. Nobody — Republican or Democrat — wants to approach this thorny discussion.
Mexico, our second-largest trading partner, is a fragmenting state that may spiral toward failure as the recession and drug violence worsen. Remittances to Mexico from immigrant labor have fallen almost 20% in 2008. Following oil, tourism and remittances, drugs are the leading income stream in the Mexican economy.
While the bottom is dropping out of the oil and tourism markets, the American street price of every narcotic has skyrocketed, in part because of recent drug interdiction successes along the U.S. border.
Unfortunately, this toxic economic cocktail also stuffs the cartels’ coffers. Substitute tribal clans for drug cartels, and Mexico starts to look disturbingly similar to Afghanistan, whose economy is fueled by the heroin-based poppy trade.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s pick for Homeland Security director, has argued for permanently stationing National Guard troops along the border. That response alone will do little to assuage American border citizens. To them, talk of “violence bleeding over” is political pabulum while they watch their southern neighbors bleed.
If Napolitano wishes to stabilize the border, she will have to persuade the Pentagon and the State Department to take a greater interest in Mexico. Despite Calderon’s commendable efforts to fight both the cartels and police corruption, this struggle shows no signs of slowing. When 45,000 federal troops are outgunned and outspent by opponents of uncertain but robust size, the state’s legitimacy quickly deteriorates.
The Mexican state has not faced this grave a challenge to its authority since the Mexican revolution nearly a century ago.
If you want to see what Mexico will look like if this pattern continues, visit a border city like Tijuana, where nine beheaded bodies were discovered in plastic bags 10 days ago. Inhale the stench of decay. Inspect the fear on the faces. And then ask yourself how the United States is prepared to respond as Mexico’s crisis increasingly becomes our own.
David J. Danelo is the author of “The Border: Exploring the U.S.-Mexican Divide” and “Blood Stripes: The Grunt’s View of the War in Iraq.”
To set background in place for the analysis below, see the following video. Mexican labor has become the new slave class for Corporate America.
The situation at the border with Mexico has become as classical an insurgency as anywhere in the world, and because of the complicity of American business fishing for cheap labor, lack of traceability of employment records, no health insurance payments, no retirement payments, and no social security payments, we are now relegated to the solution to militarize the Southern border.
Further, even militarization of the border won’t fully solve the issue unless massive changes are made to both the rules under which the military would operate and our understanding of the seriousness of the situation. In Guardsmen Attacked and Overrun at U.S. Border we discussed the horribly failed attempt to use the National Guard to secure the border. The National Guard had no ammunition in their weapons, could only put themselves at mortal risk in order to apprehend suspects, and weren’t even allowed to fire warning shots.
Unlike the citizens of New Orleans after Katrina who usually stopped for armed police (not realizing that the police are not allowed to use deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect), the border is infested with rogue elements who know better. Militarization of the border would mean full scale implementation of the rules associated with the SCOTUS decision Tennessee v. Garner 471 U.S. 1 (1985) on criminals who wouldn’t respect the military and would use the rules against them.
The intrusiveness of a seizure by means of deadly force is unmatched. The suspect’s fundamental interest in his own life need not be elaborated upon. The use of deadly force also frustrates the interest of the individual, and of society, in judicial determination of guilt and punishment. Against these interests are ranged governmental interests in effective law enforcement. It is argued that overall violence will be reduced by encouraging the peaceful submission of suspects who know that they may be shot if they flee.
Without in any way disparaging the importance of these goals, we are not convinced that the use of deadly force is a sufficiently productive means of accomplishing them to justify the killing of nonviolent suspects. Cf. Delaware v. Prouse, supra, at 659. The use of deadly force is a self-defeating way of apprehending a suspect and so setting the criminal justice mechanism in motion. If successful, it guarantees that that mechanism will not be set in motion. And while the meaningful threat of deadly force might be thought to lead to the arrest of more live suspects by discouraging escape attempts, the presently available evidence does not support this thesis.
Whether MS 13, other criminals and drug runners, or foreign terrorists who enter the U.S. via the Southern border, the U.S. is in real trouble concerning national sovereignty. David has done important work in informing us of the scope of the risk at the border.
I have said before that I wanted to write a post on “100 Reasons that McCain will Never be President.” It would simply be too wearisome to write, but I will give a little primer on this subject as well as a few links that may clear up some things.
Here are some points to ponder for anyone who truly considers themselves to be conservative:
He is in favor of government-funded embryonic stem-cell research.
He has said, “certainly in the short term or even in the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe vs. Wade.”
With Joe Lieberman he co-sponsored legislation to close the gun-show loophole and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in compliance with Kyoto accords.
He was one of only six Republican Senators to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment.
He betrayed his party to join the so-called “gang of fourteen” to end the filibuster threat of judicial nominees.
He supported the Dubai port deal.
He was the father of the manifestly unconstitutional campaign finance reform.
He is an open-border advocate (i.e., he favors the amnesty program and increased legal immigration, legal immigration that in the end would make illegal immigration unnecessary, another way of saying that he supports the Senate immigration bill).
He has led an effort to diminish the traditional war-power authority of the President.
He is no friend of religious conservatives, having said that he would kick the religious-right leaders “right in the ass.”
Well, this is only ten reasons John McCain will never be President (i.e., he will not get the Republican nomination — ever). I’m winded now, so I will catalogue the other 90 reasons for a later time.
Byron York has this rundown of a recent Gallup Poll:
Gallup has released its yearly racial breakdown on George W. Bush’s job approval rating. (Getting such a breakdown requires a larger polling sample than Gallup’s ordinary surveys.) The poll shows in the last two years, Bush’s ratings have remained virtually unchanged among blacks and Hispanics; it is among non-Hispanic whites that the president’s ratings have fallen significantly.
Non-Hispanic Whites Approve Disapprove
June 8-25, 2006 42 53
June 6-25, 2005 47 48
June 9-30, 2004 61 38
Blacks
June 8-25, 2006 15 78
June 6-25, 2005 16 77
June 9-30, 2004 16 79
Hispanics
June 8-25, 2006 38 53
June 6-25, 2005 41 49
June 9-30, 2004 40 52
The numbers suggest that Bush’s ratings among blacks and Hispanics fell to the floor between June 2003 and June 2004. Among blacks, Bush fell from 32 percent approval in June 2003 to 16 percent in June 2004. Among Hispanics, Bush fell from 67 percent approval to 40 percent in the same period. (Among non-Hispanic whites, Bush fell from 69 percent to 61 percent in that time frame.)
Apparently, the gushing that Bush has done over Hispanics had no effect and is having no effect. The GOP does not have the Hispanic heart. It is because, as I have tried to point out in the past, the Hispanic is coming to the U.S. with a completely different political paradigm. They are socialist in world view, and they do not relinquish that world view just because they are in the U.S.
However, as I also pointed out, the GOP could very well lose the GOP base over the immigration issue, thereby ensuring its own death. The votes are not there. They never were, and every word spent on pushing this loser immigration policy is another nail in the coffin of the GOP.
Michelle Malkin has a link to a Washington Times article about the overstatement of the worth of the alleged Hispanic vote, and Michelle observes that this romantic pursuit of the Hispanic vote is “quixotic.” Quixotic indeed. Will the GOP leadership see it in time?
I just can’t stand watching the Beltway Boys with Fred and Mort any more. Fred is not conservative, and Mort is not liberal. They are both rather vanilla, centrist pundits who make rather vanilla, centrist and uninteresting observations. When discussing the Utah congressional primary contest between Chris Cannon and John Jacob a few days ago (the race that saw Tom Tancredo weigh in and donate money), both Fred and Mort opined that if a district as conservative as this cannot put an immigration-control candidate in office, then no district can. Thus, the so-called “comprehensive” solution was the winner (I just hate that term “comprehensive” when referring to immigration; it is so dishonest. It doesn’t mean “comprehensive.” It means amnesty for those who are here and legal immigration to an extent that would make illegal immigration unnecessary). So with a shrug of the shoulders and ten seconds of talky-talk, both pundits dismissed this vote as a non-starter.
In fact, I don’t think Mort and Fred could have missed the boat any more than they did on this issue. Consider. A district which has an otherwise unobjectionable candidate (Cannon) votes 44.1% to overthrow the incumbent (who was also supported by Bush) over a single issue — immigration, and this with a candiate who has made some significant political errors.
Now the GOP has to wonder if it will be able to mobilize a large percentage of its base (and its more conservative part of the base, I might add). The inability to mobilize the base will be lethal to the party. If Jacob had gotten 5% of the vote, it might have been an interesting little sidebar tidbit for political junkies ten years from now to discuss when playing political trivia. If Jacob had gotten 20% of the vote, the GOP’ers at headquarters should be worrying over what had gone so wrong and whether they will be able to mobilize the base.
But Jacob got 44% of the vote. In political terms, this is a seismic event.
I think that the usually brilliant Michael Barone is dead wrong on this. I don’t think that there is life in the “compromise” plan. But as always from Barone, a good read.
Here I addressed the increase in voters who will vote socialist policies into place. After quoting from “Contours of the Mexican Left,” I said:
The coming years will see a cataclysmic shift in the political scene in America with the addition of millions of voters who have been trained to believe that they are “oppressed
Elsewhere, using Phyllis Schlaffly, I wrote about crass politics and the Hispanic vote. Now, hat tip to Kathryn Jean Lopez over at the Corner (NRO), here is confirmation. Does this just make you sick, or what? Sigh … [the Captain’s head shakes sadly … he wonders how this could be happening in America … and what kind of country he is turning over to his children and grandchildren]
From an April 2, 2006, article in the Los Angeles Times (bold is mine):
During the 2000 election, Bush previewed a campaign video from ad-maker Lionel Sosa that used emotion-laden themes to woo Latinos.
As he watched, Sosa recalled, Bush’s face lighted up. “How much do you need for this?” Bush asked as the two men sat with Rove in the governor’s mansion in Texas, Sosa said.
Sosa replied that it would take $3 million. According to the ad-maker, Bush then turned to Rove, saying: “Give him five.”
Four years later, Sosa produced a variation of that video for the 2004 campaign that was mailed to Latino voters across the country.
The video includes images that would probably rile those who today are calling for the most restrictive immigration laws. At one point, Bush is shown waving a Mexican flag. The footage was shot, Sosa said, during a Mexican Independence Day parade in San Antonio in 1998, when Bush was running for reelection as governor.
The five-minute video, narrated by Bush, opens with an image of him fishing on his property near Crawford, Texas, as he essentially described millions of Americans who populate his home state as the true foreigners in someone else’s native land.
“About 15 years before the Civil War, much of the American West was northern Mexico,” Bush says in the video. “The people who lived there weren’t called Latinos or Hispanics. They were Mexican citizens, until all that land became part of the United States.
“After that, many of them were treated as foreigners in their own land,” Bush adds.
He says the “Latino spirit” was fueled by “strong conservative values” of family, a strong work ethic, faith in God, patriotism and personal responsibility. “These values are my values,” Bush says. “I live by them, and I lead by them.”
As Bush speaks in the video, the background music — a Latin beat — grows louder. The president is pictured waving the Mexican flag, hugging a Latino woman, and then holding a Latino baby.
Political strategists in both parties said the video illustrated how Bush, unlike other Republicans, had forged a personal relationship with Latino voters largely on his ability to convey empathy and invite them into his party.
I have been toying with the idea of writing a piece called “Ten Reasons why John McCain will Never be President of the United States,” but I am having a hard time culling the list down to ten. For now, one will have to do. See the informative piece “US Border Patrol Agents Angry with McCain.” McCain will not win as an independent, he will merely draw away enough voters to make one of the two other parties lose who would not otherwise have lost. He will certainly not run as a Democrat for President — he is too conservative. Finally and most important, he will not win the Republican nomination because he is a RINO (Republican in Name Only). His shameless trips to “rub shoulders” with the Christian right will not play well to the Christian right. I know, I am the Christian right.
I have spoken on immigration before here, here, here and other places. I have tried to point out how the financial burden for the poverty problem in Mexico will end up being shouldered by the American middle class (the employer gets the benefit, a form of corporate welfare). Well, Phyllis Schlaffly’s piece over at Townhall on immigration makes the point better than I can. She points out concerning the Senate bill that:
… the 795-page bill announces its “temporary guest worker” plan. Those words are lies because the fine print in the bill converts these workers, who are given H-2C visas, into permanent residents with the right to become citizens after five years.
The plan will start by importing 200,000 H-2C workers in the first year. The H-2Cers can immediately bring in their family members on H-4 visas, without any numeric limits and without being required to have a physical, and they will also get permanent legal residence and citizenship.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill would import 7.8 million immigrants, and convert another 11 million current immigrants, legal and illegal, into U.S. citizens over the next decade. The Heritage Foundation estimates that 66 million new citizens will be added to the current population over the next 20 years. The number would accelerate as the racket called family chain migration allows more new residents to bring in more and more relatives.
The bill gives these temporary workers some preferential rights that U.S. workers do not have. These new temporary workers can’t be fired from their jobs except for “just cause,” they must be paid the prevailing wage, and they can’t be arrested for other civil immigration offenses if they are stopped for traffic violations.
The bill assures the preference of in-state college tuition (something that is denied to U.S. citizens in 49 states), and certain types of college financial assistance will be available to illegals at the state’s option. As minorities, they might even get affirmative action preferences in jobs, government contracts, and college admissions.
After the so-called temporary workers and their spouses become citizens, they can bring in their parents as permanent residents on the path to citizenship. Although the parents have never paid into Social Security, they will be eligible for Supplemental Security Income benefits, and in 46 states they will be eligible for full Medicaid benefits after five years. Siblings and adult children (and their families) will be given preference in future admissions.
The demographics of the so-called temporary workers are expected to be similar to those of the illegal immigrants already in our country. More than half will be high school dropouts, they will work low-paid jobs that require payment of little or no income tax, they are 50 percent more likely to receive taxpayer-funded government benefits than natural-born households, and they have a 42 percent rate of out-of-wedlock births (all of whom, of course, will be granted automatic U.S. citizenship).
Estimates of the cost to the taxpayers of this gargantuan expansion of the welfare state are at least $50 billion a year over the long term. U.S. taxpayers will pay for entitlements to these tens of millions of low-income families, including Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Earned Income Tax Credit (cash handouts of up to $4,400 a year to low-wage households), public schooling and lunches, the WIC program, food stamps, public housing, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
In the beginning I could not decipher why Bush would spend his political capital on what I call his “loser” immigration policy. Now I see why after reading Phyllis. It is as naked, crass and unadulterated a political move as I think we have ever seen or experienced in America. We have seen some crass moves by the pols, but the problem here is the enormous cost associated with this new class of people. It is a class that the pols know will be the new “minority,” who will eventually have the vote — if the pols have their way — and who will be the recipient of endless give-away programs and subsidies and the subject of countless social engineering experiments. In short, as long as the middle class is funding this whole endeavor, the votes will keep coming to the GOP. Or so the thinking goes.
It might be a jaded and dark view of this administration (to whom I have given the benefit of the doubt), but it appears to me that this is all about the vote. It is as simple as that. As for the Democrats, they see it as all about the vote, make no apologies and just want to go faster. It is a choice between dark and darker.
To make this vision even more bleak, since the middle class American will be shouldering the burden, we might be watching the beginning of the end of the middle class in America. I know this sounds reactionary. If you think so, go back and re-read Phyllis.
Just watching the Beltway Boys and I went AARRGGGGGHHHH!!! when I heard Mort make the point that by standing firm on immigration the GOP is handing the Hispanic vote to the Democrats for the foreseeable future … and Fred agreed and gushed over the Bush plan.
Time after time polls have shown that the current Hispanic citizens are either split or leaning towards strong immigration control. So what is Mort talking about? Here is the hidden presupposition. In the end, the Hispanics will get across the border and be accepted as citizens (and hence get to vote), i.e., the amnesty provision(s) of the Senate bill will prevail over the House version of immigration reform.
Now. This is what logicians call reasoning in a circle (begging the question, or petitio principii). Mort has posed the argument thusly: in the end amnesty will prevail, so the GOP should go for amnesty and therefore get the Hispanic vote. It begs the question. No one has demonstrated that amnesty will prevail yet. If it doesn’t, then there are not newly sworn-in U.S. citizens to go to the Democrats (and further, the GOP might just have shot itself in the foot with currently registered Hispanics).
Mort! Think a little more clearly. Fred! You are on the verge of being a Rebublican first and conservative second (or third, or fourth). Please re-think your positions … you and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard. Good grief. It is hard enough to battle the liberals without having these internecine wars within our own camp.
14 years, 10 months ago
