That’s a stunning and hard hitting letter, Mr. Auster! If you want to place it as an ad in the NY Times (as hard as it is to stomach the idea of giving any money to the Sulzburgers, surely one of the most evil families in history), count me in.

Great letter Mr. Auster! I agree with it wholeheartedly. I congradulate you, Mr. Auster, for your forceful, principled, and persistent opposition, on this weblog, to Bush’s “stab(s) in the back” on the immigration issue and on other issues. It is naturally easy to sacrifice one’s principles for the sake of fitting in with the crowd or being loyal to one’s group; many self-professed “conservative” Republicans have fallen into this mistake. Is every issue now irrelevant because Bush was right on the Iraq War?

While I consider this course of action to be imprudent, I feel the same rage at the betrayal of our nation by a scion of one of our ruling families.

This issue is galvanizing conservatives. If Pat Buchanan were inteligent, he would announce tomorrow and re run his “meatball” ads from 2000.

Talk show host, Michael “Savage” Weiner hasone uped you. He wants Bush impeached:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36567

I just started my Spring Semester at Auburn University, and have been talking to students on campus about Mr. Bush’s decision regarding immigration.

As should be stated, Auburn is arguably one of the more Conservative Campuses in America.

Mr. Bush came here in the Fall of 2002 to campaign for eventually Republican Governor Bob Riley, and was greeted with a massive crowd of close to 20,000.

Mr. Auster’s letter is dead on target, but what Mr. Savage is incredible, and the overwhelming majority of the people I have talked to on campus agree with what Mr. Savage.

And these aren’t your wacko www.moveon.com type individuals, but Conservatives who would be better classified Classical Liberals.

It would be amazing if Mr. Buchanan had the fortitude and strength to throw his hat in now.

I remember reading on Vdare.com the speech Mr. Buchanan should have given (written by Peter Brimelow) that he could give now, of course with major updates.

http://www.vdare.com/pb/immigration_speech.htm

Its wishful thinking, but a Buchanan/ Tancredo ticket would be a major distraction to the Bush campaign.

(Although as Mr. Auster correctly pointed out, Mr. Tancredo’s speaking ability leaves something to be desired.

Mr. Auster’s letter sums it up. I confess that in missives I have sent President Bush I have dissembled slightly, leaving the impression that if he were to reverse course on immigration and affirmative action he might regain my support. While I want Mr. Bush to reverse course on those and many other issues, nothing could make me vote for him - or any member of his family - again. I can not trust them, any more than I can a member of the Kennedy and Gore political families.

I must be a slow learner; I have now voted Bush for president three times. I guess I have struck out. If Patrick Buchanan does not want to jump into this race (I suspect he does not, at all), I hope he will support and counsel a third party candidacy that will make immigration its overriding issue. As Weiner/Savage says, the time when we can discuss this issue openly and freely may be running out.

As for impeaching President Bush: even if it were possible, all it would get us is President Cheney. A smarter man who believes what Mr. Bush does would only be more dangerous. As far as I can tell, the vice president is just as globalist/multiculturalist as his boss. Better to fight this one straight up in the electoral arena.

Follow on to my previous: in one respect at least, a President Cheney would almost certainly be even worse than President Bush. If Mr. Bush gives an object lesson about how family ties (to Mexico, in his case) may lead to bad and emotion-driven policies, what ought one expect Mr. Cheney, proud father of an openly homosexual daughter, to do in response to homosexualist pressure? HRS

Here’s a note I received from a correspondent who, while having many traditionalist views, does not describe himself as a conservative:

Dear Larry

I agree with you. I think Bush may lose because of this issue.

How can a country with so much talent offer Bush and Dean as the 2 candidates for president? Actually, I think that the Republican party should institute proceedings to impeach Bush for not following the laws of America. This is worse than getting a b-j-b in the oval office. Let Cheney or Rumsfeld run instead with Condi Rice as VP, and have the immigration issue as one of the keys. It would be a landslide if they took an anti-illegal immigration position.

I am convinced that is the reason why Schwartzeneger won for governer; his anti-illegal alien position for driver’s licenses. Now George W. is reverting back to some of his daddy’s foolish political strategies which will make him a one term president.

An acquaintance of mine in Southern California told me that Gray Davis was recalled (a drastic step for voters to take) for one reason. His all-out pro illegal aliens posture which his governorship seemed devoted to. Bush seems to be devoting his Presidency to the same end. Perhaps if Bush loses, he can commiserate with ex-Governor Davis. Or even better, buy himself a ranch in Mexico.

David, Your friend is wrong about why Davis lost the California recall election. He lost because of financial mismanagment and gross overspending. He only signed the ‘driver’s licenses for illegals’ bill after he discovered that the recall election was going to happen. Up to that point he opposed the bill. Davis thought that by signing the bill he would garner Latino support and would be able to save his job. He was wrong.

Not sure that either David or Daniel has the Davis recall exactly right. As one living in exile in horrid Southern California I had a front-row seat, and what I think I saw was this: the impetus for the petitions that led to the recall election was Davis’s almost unbelievably inept fiscal mismanagement, but a key factor in his *losing* the election was the widespread outrage and disgust provoked by his entirely cynical granting of driver’s licenses to illegal invaders er I mean immigrants.

That’s a useful clarification by Shrewsbury.

Unfortunately I highly doubt that Schwarzenegger will ever say anything against, much less enforce the law regarding, illegal aliens. He’s a PC liberal whose sole “conservative” position is a better business climate.
As for Bush, I used to think that Clinton made a useful comparison when confronted with all those anti-war types who suffer from “Bush Derangement Syndrome”. But the Clinton defenders who said that it was all about his private doings I fear have a point. At least he wasn’t selling out his country. Bush ought to stay in Mexico with his buddy Fox.

The clarification by Mr. Shrewsbury is still wrong. I’m also a SoCal resident (and voter for Arnold, BTW) Davis was losing the recall going in. Signing the illegals bill did not push him over the edge. He could have sat on that bill and he still was going to lose the recall. He was way down in all the polling prior to signing the ID for illegals bill. All signing that bill did was make people who were already angry, and willing to vote against Davis because of the budget fiasco, even angrier. It did not mobilize a new movement to remove Davis from office. Like I said it was Davis grasping at straws.

BTW, if Mr. Shrewsbury is really ‘living in exile’ here in sunny Southern California where is he in exile from, and why doesn’t he go back?

The issue of driver’s licenses for illegals did not defeat Davis, but it did destroy Cruz Bustamante’s campaign. Bustamante led Arnold by a good 10 or 12 points, as I remember it, before the signing of the license law. During the campaign Bustamante became the living embodiment of Mecha.

I must take issue with Gracian’s assertion that Clinton didn’t sell out the country as Bush is doing. What about all of the ICBM technology to the Chinese, along with allowing the Chinese to steal all the top secret nuclear weapons designs - including that for the neutron bomb? To top it off, there was the notorious “Citizenship USA” fraud, in which thousands of foreigners with felony records were granted citizenship. Heather MacDonald’s outstanding article (linked on another thread) mentions this is some detail.

One of my major complaints about Bush has been his continuation of treasonous policies of his predecessor. As I’ve remarked before, George W. Bush is a Tranzi. He has no actual loyalty to the United States Constitution or its people as they are traditionally understood. In many important ways, he is indistinguishable from Bill Clinton. Both men represent the oligarchy or ruling elite that is really running the show. What is needed is a truly populist candidate who will work to against the control over government policy excercised by the Jack Welches and Larry Ellisons.

Mr. Shrewsbury is a native of Gotham’s noble canyons, and will exit the arid wasteland of Alta California the moment circumstances permit.

Almost everything that galls Mr. Shrewsbury about California he will find choking Gotham’s canyons. HRS

By the way, this article by one Tod Lindberg, who has apparently overdosed on smug-and-insolent pills, inadvertently makes it quite plain that George W. Bush’s appeals to conservatives during his earlier campaigns were nothing but exercises in cynicism of the purest water:

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040112-091551-3882r.htm

“I have been writing in this space for some time now that it seems pretty clear Mr. Bush means to minimize the influence of the social-issues wing of the Republican Party. He is doing so through co-optation, a rewriting of the rules of GOP coalition politics and the staging of strategic confrontations. The idea would seem to be a party modernization that enables the GOP to attract voters who are turned off by an emphasis on social issues.”

And Lindberg loves it. Quick question: How is preserving your nation and culture, your very existence as a people, a “social issue?” As opposed to WHAT?

We are getting a look inside the evolution of the neoconservative/liberal project to transform America. Step one was to declare the United States a Proposition Nation, which requires purging public life (at least) of any ethnic or sectional particularities that might make a proposition-holding foreigner who arrives feel anything less than fully at home in America. That is what I thought our rulers were in the process of doing now.

Thanks to Lindberg, I’m beginning to wonder if we aren’t moving on to step two: whittling the Proposition down so that it consists of nothing but economics by eliminating those annoying social issues from consideration.

This is risky and may fail because step one is not yet accomplished. If it were there would not be a VFR around for us to complain on. HRS

I think Mr. Sutherland is oversimplifying and over-rationalizing both neocon and liberal positions — the two differ. The neocons do genuinely dislike ethnic awareness among new immigrants as well as citizens (some no doubt hypocritically overlook their own Jewish ethnic attachments!); they conveniently overlook the problems such things, along with multiculturalism pose for their favored program of assimilation. Liberals and leftists hate WASPs and other whites having such loyalties, while practically fawning over outright hostility and chauvinism among new immigrants. They openly oppose assimilation. Neither set of views is primarily motivated by economic considerations; and it should hardly be necessary to note on VFR that large-scale immigration is completely unjustifiable on economic grounds.

Tod Lindberg is a fixture of the GOP/journalist establishment, an enemy of conservatism, a supporter of the Dole candidacy in ‘96 (he didn’t just support Dole out of resignation, he positively believed Dole was the best possible candidate), and college roommate of John Podhoretz. I commented on his article on Bush and conservatives in another thread:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002075.html#12442

Also, I disagree somewhat with Mr. Levine that G.W. Bush appealed to conservatives in the 2000 campaign. His motto, “compassionate conservatism,” was the logical and rhetorical equivalent of “socialist conservatism,” or “Marxist conservatism.” With that motto he was telling us in the plainest manner that he was not a conservative. He said, in the plainest manner, that he was for a major opening of immigration and the Hispanicization of America. Bush is unusually honest for a politician. But conservative voters in 2000 let their wishful thinking win out over what he was plainly telling them about himself.

It reminds me of the way people got mad at Clinton for pushing the homosexuals in the military issue so hard at the start of his presidency. They complained: “He said he was a New Democrat!” True, he did say that. But he also said over and over in his speeches that he wanted to advance homosexuals in the armed forces. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault that people didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

Mr. Levine is right, I was focusing more on what I think the neocon view is. Neocons make the unfounded (and liberal) assumption that immigration will shed their own ethnic attachments when they come here, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Because this is a Proposition Nation in their view, one with no ethnic core, the natives must shed their own ethnic encrustations and become good Propositionalists. As I originally understood “conservative” propositionalism, it contained a some measure of social conservatism. If I read Lindberg right, he is applauding the fact that Bush is snubbing the wing of his party that is attached to social conservatism. It seems to me, at that point, all that is left is economics and flexing America’s military muscles to keep potential economic rivals in their place.

Of course the process is less intense and bloodless - so far - but I cannot help being reminded of the Bolsheviks’ attempts to convert Russians, et al., into the soul-less New Soviet Man. HRS

Make that “immigrants” not “immigration” in my second line above. Apologies. HRS

This just to mention that that guy Lindberg is not just a moron but a very abrasive writer. (I’d never heard of the guy before.) Reading that op-ed piece of his in the Wash. Times was truly a harrowing experience.

Yeah, that article was awful. It was also full of straw men and false dichotomies. One of the best ways to get rid of illegal immigrants and prevent future illegal immigration is to ENFORCE EMPLOYER SANCTIONS and ENFORCE LAWS AGAINST ILLEGAL ALIEN WELFARE USE. Also, what about taking federal action against unconstitutional and illegal “sanctuary” laws for illegal aliens that allow criminal aliens to roam free? How hard is it to do those basic things? None of those things require government officials to go door-to-door in immigrant neighborhoods, as so many of the illegal immigration suporters like Lingberg try to make people believe.

Also, the economic illiteracy behind the pro-mass unskilled immigration position is astounding. Don’t these idiots (sorry, I’ve lost my patience with Bush and his unconditional supporters) like Jacoby and Lindberg understand that when something is subsidized, demand for it will continue even if its overall costs (price plus subsidy) exceed its overall benefits (increased profits plus savings for consumers)? That’s economics 101.

These “conservatives” either (a) don’t understand basic economics, (b) are willing to sell out taxpayers to corporate interests, even though taxpayers lose more than corporations gain, (c)are really multicultural leftists at heart.

To Matt W.:

What about (d) all of the above?

I suspect all three apply to why Lindberg and Jacoby support the immivasion, which makes it hard to convert them to our view. They do not share any aspects of it.

I would also suggest, and here I’m picking up on things Mr. Levine has said in other threads, that a lot of the neo-conservatives, especially the New York area Jewish ones - which I believe would include Lindberg and Jacoby, and certain includes Kristols and Podhoretzes - are untroubled by what immigration does to America because they don’t feel any strong tie to the rest of the country. They are the descendants of very recent immigrants (in the case of such as Boot and Frum, they are very recent immigrants themselves), and their families never left New York City and its suburbs. Their America is New York City, Washington, D.C., and ivy league campuses. They have very little knowledge or experience of the America that lies outside those places and because they have no roots there (and assume that most of those who do are probably bigots) they don’t much care what happens to it. Except, of course, that they want it to remain economically productive to fund their very aggressive utopian foreign policy preferences.

If that is an overly ethnic comment, forgive me, but I believe it helps explain their welcoming Bush’s amnesty proposal. HRS

Howard Sutherland wrote:
What about (d) all of the above?

Yeah.

The economic ignorance of these pro-mass unskilled immigration “conservatives” is what really galls me, though. The pro-immigration “conservatives” try to frame the debate as practical, thinking people who favor of a stronger economy vs. backwards xenophobes and racists. But that’s just not the case. It’s practical, thinking people who realize that mass unskilled immigration is harming America economically vs. those who will sell taxpayers and low-income Americans out to corporate interests and who are ulitimately multicultural leftists.

Here’s more cluelessness:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/billmurchison/bm20040113.shtml

More economic ignorance—another pro-mass unskilled immigration conservative who completely ignores that (a)our immigration problems could be substantially reduced with employer sanctions and (b)that unskilled immigrant labor, and unskilled labor in general, are heavily subsidized, making additional unskilled labor costly to taxpayers and creating an artificially high demand for unskilled labor.

I have to differ a bit with Mr. Sutherland, especially as he may be misinterpreting some things I have said. He exaggerates the Jewish neocons isolation from and suspicion of the country outside the NE Corridor. (Hard line leftists and some of the rank and file members of ethnic organizations are far worse in this respect than the neocons.) They also feel a genuine loyalty however twisted around the Proposition Nation nonsense it may be. God knows the neocons are jackasses, but some of the Country Club Republican types are far more coldly calculating and exploitative in their view of our country than the neocons.

Mr. Levine,

My observations were based on watching neo-conservatives in action, reading what they write about what they want for their country and living in and around New York for quite a while. New York City and New Yorkers, whatever their ethnicity, are often extremely parochial in their attitudes about the rest of the country. What you say about hard-line Leftists and the ethnic treason lobby apparatchiks is true - there we agree completely. The CC Republicans deserve all the scorn we can give them, although I don’t think they are as calculating as you do. They have failed to calculate that - especially for the WASP ones - they are signing on to their own extinction. As for the New York neocons - not only Jewish ones - I call ‘em as I see ‘em. HRS

Mr. Sutherland is certainly right about the parochialism of New Yorkers in general, but only a minority are full of paranoid fears of the rest of the country. I have to say that element appears most often among Jews, though it is not unknown among others — some of the columns of Jimmy Breslin are proof of that. Neocons are not particularly bad in that respect. My reference to the CCR’s being “calculating” was overstated, although I think many of them do think of THEMSELVES as being that. I do believe that such people have even less loyalty toward our society than the Proposition Nation types. That the CCRs behavior is actually irrational and self-destructive, in any long-term perspective, we of course can agree on.
One point worth mentioning about the NYC area neocons, by the way, is that they have succeeded in not noticing, or repressing any thoughts about, what has happened to the NYC area over the last forty years. The New York City of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, an English-speaking majority Irish, Italian, and Jewish city with a (by later standards) relatively healthy and law-abiding black minority, the city the older neocons grew up in and liked, has long since been largely destroyed — first by mass immigration from the South and Puerto Rico, combined with crazy welfare and economic policies,then by mass immigration from abroad. Now the city is composed of groups that have little in common and can barely communicate with each other. The original population of the city has largely been displaced to the suburbs.

Lawrence,

This is a link to a piece of news about MoveOn.org, a Web site that has become too powerful for President Bush to ignore.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/12/moveon.org.ap/index.html

I do hope your unequaled-in-quality site grows in a similar way, to represent the silent majority of white american people and others. I will certainly do my best to pass it on.

Regards,
WA

Thank you very much.

Wow.

That was dead on.

Everyne take a deep braeth; now settle down, boys! What we are dealing here with is politics, pure and simple. But, please, do not worry about Mr. Bush. Everything will turn out alright, believe me! Be patient, pray, and show more love than bitterness. Thank you all.