What is going on?

This is incredible and incomprehensible, but according to Mickey Kaus in an item posted early Sunday morning at Slate, Jorge W. Busherón has not actually signed the Secure Fence Act that everyone thought he had signed, but only an appropriations bill separate from the Secure Fence Act itself.

Also on Sunday Dan Stein of FAIR posted this:

Fence Plan Passed by Congress Has Holes

“No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts,” the Washington Post reports. “But shortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects—not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and ‘tactical infrastructure’ to support the Department of Homeland Security’s preferred option of a ‘virtual fence.’”

Shrewsbury, who informed me of the Kaus article, writes:

Looks like you’ll have to do a major update on your Oct 4 piece, “A major defeat for Jorge W. Busherón.”

Of course it was too good to be true. And even if the traitor signs the bill, you know the wall will never get built anyway—absolutely nobody in the government wants it to get done, so it won’t. There will be all kinds of legalistic b.s. to baffle the voters, interminable environmental studies, appropriations shenanigans, etc., world without end.

Our governing classes are rotten to the core. Shrewsbury really believes the U.S. is finished, and only hopes that some stripped-down but vital European nation will emerge from the collapse, as Russia did from the USSR, but without their social pathologies. And the wealthy liberal class, barricaded in their expensive condos behind the requisite steel doors with fifty locks, can sneer at us as we sit with our children in quiet ice-cream parlors….

LA replies:

Shrewsbury, don’t despair.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 09, 2006 01:32 AM | Send