We will see at the State Of The Union Address if GWB has backed off on this nonesense; of stands before the public as tone deaf as ever.

Count me in as someone who is neo-con on foreign policy, greatly against this Rove/Bush scamnesty. Reward illegal immigrants (with guest worker status) and you will get a lot more of the same. This nation will be flooded with 3rd world desperados a lot worse than today.

GWBush’s plan has no provsions for more serious enforcement

The problem is, is that even if the lunatic scheme goes nowhere, it still sends an official message throughout the government and society, throughout the world for that matter, that mass illegal immigration is not to be resisted - that it is, in fact, strongly encouraged by the highest “authority” in the land. This is very bad and dooms us just as certainly as if every element of the Lunatic Scheme were successfully rushed through Congress.

Shrewsbury writes:

“The problem is, is that even if the lunatic scheme goes nowhere, it still sends an official message throughout the government and society, throughout the world for that matter, that mass illegal immigration is not to be resisted - that it is, in fact, strongly encouraged by the highest “authority” in the land. This is very bad and dooms us just as certainly as if every element of the Lunatic Scheme were successfully rushed through Congress.”

That is an excellent point. As an illustration of the same thing, consider Bush’s “Middle East Road Map to Peace.” It was crazy, it had no chance of success, and it immediately flopped despite all the initial hooplah. But Bush didn’t abandon it either, he has kept it alive. And the net result has been the continuing legitimizing of Palestinian terrorism, because the road map abandons Bush’s earlier position that we would never again seek to get a state for the Palestinians as long as they included terrorists.

So, even if the Bush illegal aliens proposal initially goes nowhere, Bush has now set radically new markers of what the U.S. president believes in. Therefore stopping the plan is not enough. Bush himself must be defeated. And he must be defeated as the visible result of popular opposition to his immigration policy. In the absence of such a defeat, his radical re-articulation of U.S. immigration ideology, in which the well-being of illegal aliens and the welcoming illegal aliens is now a central American value, will remain in place.

Obviously we have very little realistic hope of causing Bush’s defeat, but even a failed attempt will help. The stronger our voice is, and the more we weaken him electorally, the more his immigration policy will be discredited.

Shrewbury’s point is key. Any president has only a tiny amount of time, energy, and power which he can husband for only a very few changes in public policy. That is why, despite the horribleness of the prescription drug benefit and the education bill, there is at least the argument that moving these things quickly off the table possesses a realistic political purpose. Immigration is an issue which the president could have ignored, if necessary, but instead he is wasting months of his presidency on a horrible policy which will go nowhere but will set terrible precedents. Why? I guess because he likes Hispanics, and wants them to like him too, and he is unwilling and unable to understand the issues at any deeper level than that.

We’ve got to face it, folks. William Jefferson Clinton was a better president than GWB.

Agricola asks why Bush is pushing this immigration scheme, and answers: “I guess because he likes Hispanics, and wants them to like him too, and he is unwilling and unable to understand the issues at any deeper level than that.”

More and more I am drawn to the Steve Sailer/Howard Sutherland view that a key to Bush’s immigration policy is his personal relationships with Hispanics, and particularly his own Hispanic relatives. Remember that Bush is at heart of man of feeling, not of thought. He speaks openly and frequently about his “heart.” He says the top qualification for high government officials and even Supreme Court justices is that they have a “big heart.” His political motto, which was a true expression of his personal feelings, had as one of its two words the word “compassionate.” Then combine that with his particular feelings toward Mexicans and his own relatives, heightened by the Bush cult of family, and you’ve explained a lot.

This shows, among other things, how fatal for a society is mass diverse immigration and the resulting racial intermarriages. As I’ve said for years, once a white person has a spouse or children or grandchildren or in-laws of another race, it becomes in most cases impossible for that person to take any stand against mass Third-World immigration and against other anti-American and anti-white policies.

I see no evidence that Bush has a big heart. To the contrary, his heart is restricted to his pet ideas and to getting re-elected. He doesn’t care what he is doing to his opponents’ hearts. He doesn’t care about the victims of crimes by his pet illegal aliens, to give just one example. So hopefully no one here will be fooled by his self-righteous, self-centered hypocrisy. Even tyrants have their pets. It is therefore sickening to hear Bush people talk about compassion.

As Mr. Murgos says, Bush’s claim to have a “big Heart” is for effect, though he may think he does. His handlers know this sounds good to the suburban soccer moms. He doesn’t have a place in his heart for American workers, does he? Wealthy liberals have long claimed to have a “big heart” in relation to fashionable minorities, while showing stony disapproval to White Middle Class Americans.

Don’t indulge the belief Bush is a “good” man who is just following his good heart; the fact is, no one knows what the heck kind of a man he is. Only God knows whether he is a “good” man. It is counterproductive to speculate about whether one’s enemy is good. Judge his actions towards others and yourself and go after him like a junkyard dog.

Trying to figure out Bush’s motives seems to be a different issue, which possibly can be discussed profitably.

Bush is trying to take away things that are ours and is inflicting a great deal of collateral damage in the process. That is all we need to know about his goodness.

I made no assertions concerning Bush’s moral goodness or lack thereof. I was speaking of his own self-understanding, of what makes him do the things he does.

As for Mr. Murgos’s and David’s attack on Bush’s goodness, it’s besides the point. All men, including all national leaders, think that they are good. All people who think that a particular national leader is doing very harmful things think that he is bad.

Perhaps we should try to look at the positive side of all this. Before, we have the horrific status quo of de facto mass illegal immigration that nobody discusses. Not the democrats, who instead rush to get aliens to the polls, or naturalize them in time to vote with no criminal background checks, and not the republicans, who don’t want to get beat up as racists by the media wing of the democrat party. In the meantime, our borders are a sieve. Now we have a proposal on the table that is generating tremendous media coverage, and Bush is not getting bashed from the left. Obviously the plan, or any plan, is quite unworkable without effective border policing. Isn’t that where this discussion will lead? It is also something we need for national security. Perhaps what we are seeing is a very clever means of building a consensus for increased border control measures in such a way that the administration is not vulnerable to the usual attacks from the left. If we could get to strict border control, plus actual identification of illegals presently here, we would have made great progress on a very tough issue. In fact, there are large majorities out there for strict immigration control, but the political issue is how can a republican administration elevate the issue without getting demagogued. As for theories that Bush is in a plot with ultra rich Mexicans to go to open borders, this is too tin foil hat for my taste.

Lest all my tough talk (I am not tough) mislead any of our few extremist allies among us, I should add that if we vanquish our foes, we must be merciful and forgiving like Jesus or we will either become like our foes or worse than our foes.

Thucydides has added yet another Bush theory to the mix, that Bush is proposing an open-borders plan that he KNOWS is irrational and unworkable and unacceptable because he figures that this open-borders plan will lead to a closed-borders plan for which he won’t be blamed as a racist!

Thucydides says the “Mexican connection” theory is too tin-foil-hat for his taste, but I must say that his own theory seems equally improbable to me.

Last year, I suggested the hypothesis that Bush might really be a Macchiavellian genius who was pushing the insane road map scheme because he KNEW it would fail, and that this would then liberate Israel to drop the peace process and take proper actions to defend itself. Later facts proved the theory wrong. Thucydides’ theory about Bush’s immigration scheme proposes an even greater degree of genius on Bush’s part—indeed a superhuman ability to manipulate reality—than my exploded theory about the road map.

Mr. Auster writes that his theory about the road map was exploded. Really? Isn’t Israel building the wall? Isn’t it continuing to kill Palestinian terror bosses? While these actions may seem like common sense to us, remember they were unthinkable to “informed” opinion not so long ago. We also hear that European funding of the Palestinian authority has been cut way back, and they will soon be unable to meet payroll. This is progress, even though I will not believe Israel is really serious about survival while people like Arafat and Rantisi remain alive. So maybe Mr. Auster’s road map theory has in fact been correct. And perhaps we are seeing a more Machiavellian approach to starting to do something about the immigration issue. However unworkable this specific plan is, I believe we are better off for having the issue placed in the public spotlight, which proposing it did.

Re Thucydides comments: Fantastic as it seems, Bush IS getting bashed from the left over the immigration scheme — even total surrender isn’t enough for these people. As for Bush’s relations with wealthy Mexicans: there may not be a conspiracy here, but Bush’s behavior in other matters suggests that he feels closer to such people than he does to the ordinary American.

Mr. Auster, Mr. Poe has posted your support of voting Democratic this fall and has voiced his objections. http://www.richardpoe.com/blog_single.php#newComment

I submitted a response, but I am sure you can do better.

If Thucydides’s elegant theory about President Bush’s machiavellian policy were correct (and it ought to be!), one would expect the president and his minions at least to wink or nod in the direction of conservatives—and the American workingman, for that matter. Unfortunately, they have instead gone into supercilious overdrive and are treating their critics/victims like a bunch of ignorant jerks. One would also expect them to expend very little energy on these pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-economic justifications of Bush’s lunacy. (The illegals will now pay sales taxes!) It’s these various tonal indications which cause one to realize with a sinking sense of moral nausea that, yes, they really do mean it. They really do think it’s all just great, and that they’re riding the wonderful wave of the future.

¡Arriba!

Shrewsbury has nailed it.

This is what’s great about a discussion site like this. Someone tries out an idea, others disagree, others respond to that, and we all get a bit closer to the truth.

Compare to the comments section at, say Front Page, which consists to a great extent of a lot of ranting and sounding off.

I can testify to the idea that truth can’t always be rationalized; even my modest brain knew with 100% certainty that Bush really meant it before he was ever elected and before I read the above brilliant reasonings. All of which is why I voted for Buchanan. I should have voted for Gore. Our drastic situation calls for drastic peaceful measures.

I read Mr. Murgos’ comments in the thread at Poe’s Blog and they were all excellent. Many thanks to him for representing the traditionalist position so well there. (His comments are found in the thread there under this log entry:

http://www.richardpoe.com/blog_single.php?rowID=371 )

Clinton was not a better president than Bush. Granted, the divided government of six of the eight Clinton years served as a check on what Clinton could do moreso than the GOP-dominated government of the Bush years (I think things have gotten worse, i.e. more liberal, since the GOP took back the Senate).
Nonetheless, Clinton got us into unnecessary wars - in the Balkans we were fighting FOR Muslim terrorists. He tried to bring socialist medicine to everyone. He signed lots of gun control bills. He tried to give the UN more control over us. He even tried to get us into a war to overthrow Saddam (a war which, contrary to many opinions, a lot of people were very against and would have protested had it advanced further than it did).

However, we need to realize that on issues from gun control to socialized medicine, Bush is simply Clinton lite, and on immigration he is quite possibly as liberal as Clinton. He is still better than the democratic candidates, but let’s be honest that he is a pretty lousy choice for conservatives.