Bush tells senators he wants amnesty for illegals—No! You’re kidding!

The thing about a true believer, whether he’s an anti-Semite like David Duke, or a jihadist like Samir Azzouz, or a leftist Bush-hater like Howard Dean, or an open-borders fanatic like President Bush, is that he cannot suppress his real beliefs. Circumstances may occasionally force him to engage in a subterfuge to cover up what he feels, but it is always transparent. The true believer can’t be bothered even to attempt to present a believable act of not believing what he really believes. It would go too much against his grain.

Bush’s commitment to open borders was clear from the start. As I wrote in September 2000:

Since his adoption of a multicultural vision of America makes no sense in political terms (indeed, it would tend to alienate his own base), the only explanation is that W. really believes in it. Watching his speech in Miami, you couldn’t help but feel that W. is genuinely moved by this “We’re all one family” sentiment. It is as central to his heart (about which he is always telling us) as the love of big government is to Bob Dole’s. [Italics added.]

Bush, in other words, is a true believer in a merger between Latin America and the United States, meaning a Latin American takeover of the United States. But ever since he first announced his immigration plan on January 7, 2004, Bush has been presenting himself (or, to be more precise, he has been going through transparently false motions of presenting himself), not as an open borders true believer, but as a sensible moderate, telling us that his illegal aliens proposal doesn’t involve an amnesty. The proof of this, he said, was that his bill would require illegals to pay a fine in order to be legalized; or that it would require them to return to Mexico and apply for a green card like everyone else; or that it would allow them to stay in the U.S. under a special guest worker status for only three years at a time, or maybe for a total of two three-year periods, or maybe for an endlessly renewable number of three-year period … or whatever. Bush and his open-borders allies like McCain kept indignantly insisting that whatever it was, their bill was NOT an amnesty, and that it was a dastardly lie to call it one. Fortunately, the folks on our side, having been burned by these disgraceful deceivers so often, didn’t buy it for a second.

All of which leads up to tonight’s story—the predictable moment in this saga when Bush plainly expressed (to a group of Senators, who then publicized it) where his heart and his intentions have been all along. It’s an AP story quoted by Michelle Malkin:

Privately, Bush Says He Favors Citizenship
By DAVID ESPO, Wednesday, April 26, 2006

WASHINGTON—President Bush generally favors plans to give millions of illegal immigrants a chance at U.S. citizenship without leaving the country, but does not want to be more publicly supportive because of opposition among conservative House Republicans, according to senators who attended a recent White House meeting.

… The Republican and Democratic officials who described the conversation did so Wednesday on condition of anonymity, saying they had not been authorized to disclose details.

Bush convened the session to give momentum to the drive for election-year immigration legislation, a contentious issue that has triggered large street demonstrations and produced divisions in both political parties. Senators of both parties emerged from the session praising the president’s involvement and said the timetable was achievable.

“Yes, he thinks people should be given a path to citizenship,” said Sen. Mel Martinez., R-Fla., a leading supporter of immigration legislation in the Senate.

Martinez said it was implicit in Bush’s remarks that many of the immigrants illegally in the U.S. would be permitted to remain during a lengthy wait and application period.

In other words, he’s been (transparently) lying to us for the last 27 months, and he finally got tired of the (transparent) lying, so he let out the truth. When Bush kept pledging during the 2000 campaign that he would respect the honor and dignity of the presidential office, all he meant was that he wouldn’t have Monica Lewinsky over for a visit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 26, 2006 09:56 PM | Send