Babe in the woods Brown heading south on immigration

Sam H. writes:

Unfortunately, Scott Brown seems to be in over his head. He’s been told that Ted Kennedy had the best immigration staffers. He did, of course—those staffers that are specialized in bringing in as many people as possible to the U.S.

And so what does Brown, hero of the Republicans, do? He hires Kennedy’s main immigration staffer.

From an interview with the Boston Globe:

We heard you may be hiring one or two from Kennedy’s office?

“Yeah, yeah.”

Is that an olive branch gesture?

“I just go—I don’t care who they are as long as they’re good people and they’ll be trustworthy and loyal and they’ll do their jobs, I don’t care. Kennedy had some of the best people in the country and I’m honored to have some of them and I have the best immigration person in the country, and—”

Is it Elizabeth-?

“It’s uh, it’s Emily, uh, what’s Emily’s last name? I just call her Em, so. And I have it all written down. I don’t even know my own name right now.”

[The staffer is Emily Winterson, the late Sen. Kennedy’s immigration liaison.]

LA replies:

What’s particularly troubling is his comment that “I don’t care who [my staffers] are as long as they’re good people and they’ll be trustworthy and loyal and they’ll do their jobs.” This means that Brown has no concept that there are such things as ideas, belief systems, ideologies. In particular, it means that he has no concept that there is such a thing as a liberal ideology, the ruling ideology of our time. It means he lives in a one-dimensional intellectual framework where the only distinction is between things that “work,” and things that don’t “work.” People who are not aware of liberalism as liberalism, are incapable of opposing it. Because liberalism is the default position of our society, the air we breath, only people who are consciously anti-liberal can effectively oppose it.

Sam H. continues:

I forgot to include this snippet, from the same interview:

On immigration, you sounded excited about the aide you hired. Is that a big issue for you?

“It’s huge, it’s huge now, especially with Haiti. It’s huge, it’s the no. 1 issue affecting—that will affect my office, and I have the best person in place to handle it. And I’m so honored—I’m just like overwhelmed, I almost, like, you know, cried when she said yes, she’ll stay. Especially, you know, there are a lot of single kids, kids that are being adopted, people—Americans and citizens that are still there trying to get home, they’re not getting help with the embassy. When I met with the ministers, they actually gave us some names which we forwarded off to try to find out the status. So yeah, immigration is important, but my policy hasn’t changed with regard to how we deal with the immigration issue. It’s just a question of, we have to immediately provide the resources to process these people quicker. It’s immoral to let them wait in line so long. If we can find money for the banks, we can find money to process people through immigration quickly.”

- end of initial entry -

Ben W. writes:

How is Scott Brown different from Sarah Palin? Seems like the same political species to me…from looks to speech to beliefs…

Ben W. continues:

Perhaps conservatives should view Brown and Palin strategically, as chess pieces. They shouldn’t be regarded as major pieces but minor pieces, to be used in stop-gap measures to check or stymie liberal, Democratic ambitions. Brown and Palin should be seen in short-term roles. Difficulties arise when such people are viewed seriously and in-depth for the long-term.

Jake Jacobsen writes:

A little over a week ago I suggested that our jubilation over a Brown win should be tempered by the knowledge that his success would help usher in more excitement and support for Republicans who pose, at best, a slightly smaller existential threat than the Democrats.

Now with this news that Brown will be championing “immigration reform,” E.G. the Republican White population replacement project, if you would, remind me what I was supposed to be excited about again?

LA replies:

Uh, stopping Obamacare? Defeating Obama’s socialist agenda? Crippling America’s first radical leftist president, who had been believed to be an unstoppable messiah?

Just a few things like that.

Jake Jacobsen replies:

Yes, as you keep saying, but you also avoid my main point, that the price of defeating the Democrat White replacement policy is the reinvigoration of the Republican White replacement policy which is much more difficult to defeat.

I realize there is a “immovable object—irresistible force” aspect to this debate, but all I’m saying is this: this whole game is rigged and we are the losers, so there are no wins unless we can reboot the whole system at its core.

LA replies:

There is a logic to what you’re saying but I think it’s flawed, as it leads to a nihilistic indifferentism to all issues other than immigration.

Jake Jacobsen replies:

I may be explaining this poorly but for me immigration is merely the current example in this conversation. The larger point is that by empowering the Republicans we may defeat whatever horrors the Democrats have planned for this country, which is a good on its face. But, at the exact same time we are simply loosing a different monster which will attempt to subdue and destroy us from a slightly different direction.

To wit: we have spent the last several years fighting GWB, and that fight was made extremely difficult because America is a center right country and GWB was allegedly a conservative, with the rise of Barack Obama we see Sam Francis’s MAR’s rising in fury against the alien usurper, but ironically the unintended effect of electing Scott Brown is to placate and pacify the MAR’s and cause them to go back to sleep as they were for the most part during the reign of GWB, allowing the monster of Liberalism to advance once again, where it is currently being pushed back.

This is not nihilism, it is the acknowledgment that the game board has become fundamentally corrupted, or should both of our political parties be existential threats to America and her traditional peoples? Is this the normal state of affairs?

Because if so I will shut the hell up, but while there is no perfect in politics, I get that, but should we have to fear an actual genocide from our elected officials against our people no matter who gets elected? I wish some other readers would chime in as I feel you and I are at loggerheads on this issue.

LA replies:

Well, there are two different perspectives here. My view is that the bad should be opposed. Your view is that opposing the bad only empowers a slightly less bad, therefore we shouldn’t oppose the bad. It seems to me that your logic would lead to positively wanting the worst and most damaging person to be president, and then not to oppose his agenda, but to support it, because if we oppose his agenda and succeed in stopping it, then we only hand power back to the “slightly less bad” side. Your logic leads to the conclusion that we should want things to be bad as possible, because that is the only way that there is hope for a radically different politics; therefore we should not oppose the bad.

My view is: we as right-wingers in liberal society can only deal with the liberal evil that is before us at any one moment. We lack the power to manage reality beyond that, to get rid of all the liberal evils we’d like to get rid of.

Let me ask you this: If you were in Massachusetts, would you have voted for Brown? When Brown won, were you glad? Or did you think it would have been better for him not to win, and for Obamacare to be passed, and for the country to be damaged more rather than less, because it is only by the country being damaged much more than it already is, that there is any chance of conservatives rising up against all liberalism, not just against the Democratic Party brand?

Jake Jacobsen replies:

Yes I probably would have voted for Scott Brown and almost immediately regretted it as per the information we learned today. I’ll just keep repeating what I’m saying and hope that perhaps someday you’ll see my point. While we may need to make strategic votes for things, as I said in my first email, we need to be careful about getting excited when voting for someone like Scott Brown who will turn out to be very—very bad (see: hiring Ted Kennedy’s key immigration staffer and vomiting out nonsense about how important it is to import more Haitian rapists and murderers)

I feel like I’m looking at this strategically and you are blinkered by thinking tactically,

So long as we play our opponents’ game on his game board with his rules we will lose, and lose badly while he laughs at us. We need to funnel some energy into trying to find ways to preempt and disrupt this losing game for conservatives.

LA replies:

Ok, then, that’s clear enough. If you had the choice to stop Obamacare or not, you would choose not to stop it, because you think that the only way for things to get better is for things to get infinitely worse. I fundamentally disagree. And I do think that your position is tantamount to nihilism, because it requires you to want the worst possible things to happen, and not to try to prevent them.

Jake Jacobsen replies:

I have the sense you just want to call me a nihilist! Are you getting some sort of discount on that term? Use it three times and get half off? :P

LA replies:

But at least I haven’t called you a gnostic.

Rick U. writes:

Let’s face it, Brown is going to be some version of a RINO. He is from Massachusetts: No??? Nevertheless, his victory has been a landslide against the Democrats no matter how you slice it. His victory represents a paradigm shift in current American politics, but he will disappoint us in the future, probably on immigration, and sadly, he won’t be the only Republican with that distinction.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2010 01:22 PM | Send