Yesterday’s honored guests of the U.S. Senate

Howard Sutherland writes:

The most interesting aspect of today’s New York Times article on the cloture defeat is the accompanying sob-story shot. It depicts four casually dressed, lounging fellows, one with his hat on indoors, who all look like they are from down Mexico way or points even farther south, along with—at some remove from the (other?) Latin Americans—one equally casually dressed, sitting black man, also with his hat on indoors—all parked on a fine carved and upholstered Victorian bench, under even finer wooden and plaster paneling and an imposing portrait showing what United States Senators used to look like. Can’t tell from looking whether the black man is an American, but given the circumstances it’s unlikely in the extreme. As for the visibly Latin American hombres, well, I think we know the answer to that one for sure.

Clearly these gentlemen are within the august, and very heavily guarded, precincts of the United States Capitol, the symbolic and geographic beating heart of Our Nation’s Capital, one of the most heavily secured cities in the world. (Supposedly—and if not, what are our taxes buying in Homeland Security, anyway?) The caption hints at what they are, and why they’re there: “Day laborers from the Washington area gathered in the Senate to wait for the results of the immigration cloture vote.”

The caption made me think of Dashiell Hammett’s immortal Continental Op, Hammett’s first fictional detective—the (superior) precursor to The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade. In The Golden Horseshoe, the Op runs down from San Francisco to Tijuana round about 1924 to smoke out a murderous blackmailer. Killing time in a Tijuana dive waiting for his mark to show his hand, the Op has a drink at the bar:

I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:

ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE

I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more …

Let’s play the Op’s game reading the caption under the picture. Try to count how many lies could be found in those 20 words. “Day laborers”: how about “illegal aliens”? “from the Washington area”: how about “illegal aliens from Latin America”? “gathered in the Senate”: how about “illegal aliens from Latin America safe-conducted into the Senate by Kennedy or some other open-borders fanatic as emotional blackmail”? “to wait for the results of the immigration cloture vote.”: how about “illegal aliens from Latin America who wouldn’t know cloture if it clobbered them over the head, but we’ll use ‘em as poster boys for amnesty”? I have reached four, with promise of more…

Does anyone doubt these gentlemen are illegal aliens engaged in continuous and ongoing violation of a slew of federal statutes, most punishable as felonies? Yet there they sit, within the U.S. Capitol. How did they get in? What would happen if your average native American citizen just turned up at the Capitol in a t-shirt and sneakers and said, “Hey man, let me in—I wanna go hang out outside Teddy Kennedy’s office”? What would happen first, getting maced or face-planted on the pavement?

Yesterday was a great victory, but even if Bush has given up (I doubt it), Kennedy surely hasn’t.

LA replies:

Indeed, as made clear elsewhere, the four men identified by the Times as “day laborers” are illegal aliens, brought by Democrats to the U.S. Senate so that they could observe the proceedings, sort of the way President Bush brings selected heroic citizens to the Congress to observe the State of the Union address.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 29, 2007 12:02 PM | Send