The Bush-Senate amnesty plan is the ultimate in taxation without representation. It is revolutionary in its provocation and in its consequences. Perhaps we should stop calling the plan’s patron President Bush, and instead start calling him King George.
“A general pardon granted by a government, especially for political offenses.
“an act of clemency by an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted esp. to a group of individuals
“n 1: a period during which offenders are exempt from punishment 2: a warrant granting release from punishment for an offense [syn: pardon] 3: the formal act of liberating someone [syn: pardon, free pardon] v : grant a pardon to (a group of people)”
Immigrants are Our Future
I didn’t watch the President’s May 15 national performance. I had a choice between napping with my son (“The children are our future”) and napping through the Liar-in-Chief (‘Immigrants are our future’). But the transcript of his current lies is all over the ‘Net.
When George Herbert Walker Bush was the Republican presidential nominee for the first time, in 1988, he told the Republican National Convention, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” It became his most effective campaign slogan.
Bush the Elder ended up raising taxes. On Election Day 1992, his base responded variously by staying at home or voting for third-party candidate Ross Perot, which brought about the election of Bill Clinton.
Come on Down!
Bush the Younger fancies himself much smarter than his father. Thus, he did not announce, during either of his presidential campaigns, his plan to grant an amnesty to what now amounts to over 20 million illegal immigrants plus their parents plus their children plus their siblings plus anyone who will pay them to say they are blood relatives, much less his plan to bring in another 200 million legal immigrants over the next 20 years, or to mention the tidal wave of new illegal immigration (another 100 million?) this amnesty would bring about. He knew it would cost him the election, if he did. And so, he bided his time.
Well, George W. Bush still isn’t taking any chances, and so when he finally did announce his amnesty plan, he did the equivalent of saying, “Read my lips: No new amnesty.” (“What I have just described is not amnesty.”) He figures that if he lies enough about his planned amnesty, people won’t figure it out until it’s too late. “Too late,” meaning after the coming fall elections. And to sweeten the pot for his social and religious conservative base (or as Karl Rove would call it, "the suckers"), he will propose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
This is all a word game. Bush is simply calling amnesty by other names: “temporary worker program,” “rational middle ground,” etc. He insists that he seeks amnesty, er, rational middle ground only for veteran criminals, but not for rookies.
“That middle ground recognizes that there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years, and has a home, a family, and an otherwise clean record.”
And yet, as Bush well knows, under the plan he champions and the Senate just passed, we will end up with amnestied, naturalized, “temporary workers”; amnestied, naturalized, recently arrived illegals; and amnestied, naturalized, long-term illegals.
That Burning Sensation
The man who for years portrayed himself as a straight talker, is peeing on our leg, and telling us that it’s raining.
I voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
But I am not going to keep going down the same road. I have learned certain lessons, one of which is that, as with assertions made by the New York Times, I no longer accept as true anything the President says, unless and until I have found triple independent corroboration for it.
In a sophistic sense, I suppose President Bush can tell himself that his proposal isn’t really an “amnesty” or “illegal immigration,” because he is eliminating the very concept of American citizenship, along with immigration law and America’s borders. No legal citizens, no illegal immigrants.
The President says he is sending 6,000 National Guardsmen to the Mexican border, but he is sending them unarmed, forbidding them from guarding the border or interdicting foreign invaders, and in fact, not stationing them on the border at all, but rather in offices, where they will do “paper work.” (Yeah, probably reading the daily newspaper.)
But that’s just a stopgap. Mr. Bush’s plan is for the 6,000 do-nothing National Guardsmen to be replaced by 6,000 new, do-nothing Border Patrol agents by the end of 2008. That’s over $400 million of nothing per year, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
If El Presidente gets to force his plan on what is still known as the American people, there will be no more American citizenship and no more America.
It Citizens Didn’t Exist, We’d Have to Invent Them
And yet, there will still have to be something. The ruling elites will need something to distinguish themselves from the rest of those whose pockets they’re busy picking. And so, there will still be illegal immigration in-between serial amnesties that will occur every few years, because the elites will demand ever cheaper baby sitters, gardeners, cooks, cleaning ladies, dog walkers, car washers, etc. The elites’ll show how morally superior they are to us paupers who can’t afford illegal servants, by periodically demanding amnesty for their servants. This will also endear them to the servants. Then, as soon as the newest mass amnesty goes through, they’ll fire their newly legalized servants, and replace them for even less with new illegals. (‘I’m sorry, Maria, but I just can’t afford you anymore.’)
In order to distinguish themselves from commoners (the people living in the shadows aka the people formerly known as Americans), members of the ruling elite will in all interactions with strangers make sure to mention their “immigrant” employees. Thus, if a member of the elite smacks a commoner who got in her way on the street in front of the Free Range Chicken Mart, when the police come she’ll mention that she must call her immigrant employees to tell them she’s being held up, so the cops will know to arrest her victim, instead of her. (That’s assuming the cops even speak English.)
The commoners will also be identifiable by virtue of their being increasingly dressed in rags, but not the chi-chi kind that costs thousands of dollars.
Soy Yahoo
Neocon godfatherette William Kristol has his own word for commoners: “Yahoos.”
Echoing the Liar-in-Chief, and apparently cognizant that consistency is one of the three laws of lying, Kristol denies that the Bush amnesty plan is, in fact, an amnesty plan. Unfortunately, however, like President Bush, Bill Kristol seems unaware of the first law of lying: Plausibility.
At this rate, George W. Bush’s greatest political achievement will obtain in having rescued Bill Clinton from historical infamy. The Clintons’ reign of crime looks better with each passing day.
Taps?
On Memorial Day we say “Lest we forget,” in honoring our war dead, from the Revolutionary War unto today’s War on Terror. At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln exhorted, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
In the new dispensation according to George W. Bush, however, those men did die in vain. For all of the father and the son’s New World Order philosophical commonalities, the father is a patriot, who during World War II was the Army Air Corps’ youngest bomber pilot. I just can’t see the Old Man simply giving away our patrimony. Bumbling and stumbling and dropping it, perhaps, but not consciously, deliberately, handing it over.
And yet, if the House goes along with the Senate, and the People permit it, this Memorial Day will prove to have been a time to grieve for America itself.
The new Bush plan is the ultimate in taxation without representation. It is revolutionary in its provocation and in its consequences. Perhaps we should stop calling the plan’s patron President Bush, and instead start calling him King George.
Let’s look once more at Abe Lincoln’s words:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
We the People survived a civil war, but can we survive George W. Bush?
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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