This Immigration Bill is rapidly becoming The Issue that will separate the real conservatives from the lipstick conservatives.   As such the majority of GOP candidates have given some form of positive support for this third bill of illegal immigration falsehoods being sold to the American public.

But not Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney.

They have stepped out from the pack, not just with indecisive skepticism wrapped around tentative support like Guiliani…but in clear and decisive fashion these two men have established their credentials for Republican and American leadership.

Remeber when it comes time to vote in primaries and the real deal.

When Americans expressed outrage at the Dubai Port Deals maybe they should have taken a tip from old Doc Brown from Back to the Future and “think Fourth Dimensionally.”  I say this because having made several trips to the Emirates on the Uncle Sam World Travel Plan (otherwise known as the U.S. Navy,) I understood the true nature of the Emirates.  A collection of principalities that have been quietly in our corner for decades.

Another thing that Dubai itself has been doing is becoming a showcase for the staged implementation of converting traditional arab socio-political structure into something more palatable with the globalizing world.  In short laying out a roadmap for creating a progressive arab society as the Muslim Reformation movement has envisioned.

In Dubai the women are acquiring more freedoms, there was just a massive investment in creating a “knowledge-based” culture by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, and while they do not vote there, the rulers are engaged with the population and the population is involved in various aspects of policy…low grade forms of empowerment, if not actual representative democracy.  Some residents have the not unreasonable view that the upcoming generations are being carefully groomed by the current rulers to have the vote.

While in America we chaff at the thought of supporting arab autocrats and do not understand why if we get democracy to the people (like in Iraq) they go off and elect theocrats and autocrats who will take their newly won freedoms away.   Sort of like wondering why Americans would vote Democrat.

The truth of the matter in the Arab world is that the populations there are not ruled by far thinking men like Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, who is the modern embodiment of the Enlightened Absolutist.  However, Sheikh Mohammed makes Catherine, Frederick, Gustav, and the rest look like pikers.  The majority of arab states, Turkey excepted, suffer under varying degrees of autocrat or theocrat who have no great desire to visit an Arab Enlightenment on their countries.

Whatever form of globally palatable progressive society the arab world settles itself around in the future, it will be very unlikely that society will more than superficially resemble what we in America call Democracy.  But it also does not mean we should force the process, lecture them, and get in their way either.  It took Western society a couple hundred years to arrive at where we are today, with plenty of notable exchanges of “one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back.”

After all, any country with a 50's themed club can't be all that bad, can it?

In conversations with liberal acquaintances its is fairly safe to assume they have a seething hatred of President Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh.  However on the subject of Ann Coulter you can tell by the gleam in their eyes that you have just given them a rise.

The first thing they usually focus on is her faulty grasp of history.  This is particularly a fun bit of irony for myself in these exchanges, mostly because liberals either embrace revisionist histories, histories run through a leftist prism, or choose to be willfully ignorant of history if it does not suit them (you know like their collective amnesia over Democrats voting for the war.)

After a short romp through the relative merits of if the Canucks could beat a Vietnamese hockey team, the next stage of a Coulter discussion will circle the drain around how hateful she is.  It is just so shocking to them!  They think she is a hateful, evil human being who says mean spirited things about the nearly saints of their realm, the likes of Sheehan, Edwards, et al. who should be beyond the reach of Coulters vitriol.  Then I mention how they tossed the television remote at Bush during a news conference…ignoring the fact that the man was thousands of miles away through the magic of modern technology, and that their television was apparently not important to them.

After all of this the conversation returns to Coulter.  That poor misguided soul…all she needs is the right liberal man to set her straight!   The image of a naked liberal-wipped Ann Coulter in Birkenstocks,  munching on granola at the next Burning Man slips into my head – as it had no doubt entered the glazed over eyes of my liberal acquiantance who is also no doubt enjoying some form of Coulter-lust fantasy if not the one I had actually pictured him thinking.

I allow him a few moments to wallow in his Opie and Anthony dreams …then I say:

“It’d never happen.”

“Yeah,” says the friend.  “Just just too messed in the head for me, her loss.”

I nod in agreement.  It was her loss, but not because she would miss out on learning the wonders of liberal love from such a free thinking man.  It was her loss for not being able to shoot my liberal friend down for being the jerk he is.

Of course he would never see that in himself…because he’s a liberal.

  * The friend in this story is a representation of more than one person.

Goreintology - or how I learned to love the Nukes.

If you were not afraid of the army of lawyers that would descend on you for questioning the faith spawned from L. Ron Hubbards imagination, you could make a comparison between Scientology and the religion of the left – Goreintology.

The holy writ of Goreintology is what we could term the “indoctrin-mentary” known as An Inconvienent Truth.   By now the whole world is familiar with this film and his accompanying books and literature as it is evangelized globally by an army of faithful.

It is at this point that I should point out that no reasonable person doubts that something is occuring with the planet and that we humans could contribute to a greater or lesser degree to what is happening.

Yet what Goreintology prophesizes is global catastrophe, a “great flood” along the coastal regions, “drought and pestilience” along the interior, general mayhem will be the rule unless we Believe Right Now.

As many have pointed out this new religion of the left has great “big tent” appeal, something that can blithely cross into the political center of America with the sublime stealth of our most modern aircraft, dropping cluster bombs of fear and panic in its wake.

Yet does Goreintology actually accomplish anything constructive for the long term improvement of the world and America?

I would argue that what Goreintology does is to polarize the debate and divert attention, causing practical measures to be sidelined in favor of slapping ineffective band-aids over the plight of the soon to be extinct polar bears or the liberal equivilant of building bomb shelters in the backyard.

The point is that no one would disagree with removing America from the petroleum teet or otherwise increasing the effacy of our fossil fuel processes.  It is something that we already persue in a more vigorious fashion than for example, China. 

If you examine historical trends we are overdue for our next qualitative advance in power production.  America should take a mandate to invent that next great advance, we are very likely the most capable nation on the planet –  no one would argue with the economic boon we would enjoy on top of removing the Petromonkey from our back.

However that is a forward vision…Goreintology is a religious reactionary movement that is slowly spreading it’s obstructive tentacles deeper into the body politic, relying on gloom and doom prophecies that elicit fear from those who do not educate themselves as to the honest facts. 

Goreintology is reminiscent of the radical islam problem, because in their view there are only the faithful and the heathen and there is no discussion allowed.

I do not think there are many people who would say that the Bush administration has done a good job of selling the war in Iraq.  There are few wars in American history that did not have to be continually repackaged and resold to keep everyone on board, those that were not either did not last very long or were otherwise unpalatable.

Afghanistan has many of the same issues, however there is less need to re-sell that theater as a necessary front to the American public.  Osama Bin Laden and Al-Queda were allowed residency there by the Taliban leads to 9/11, QED.

Iraq on the other hand is another front in what amounts to a wider ideological war, a front we made the choice to fight on.  Regardless of all the flip flopping from prominent Democrats who voted for the war (if they were duped by that nefarious Bush then why they would be good Presidential material is beyond me,) or the continual carping about WMD's and how you want to interpret U.N. resolutions...all of that was likely beside the point when arriving at a "legal" cassus belli against Saddam Hussein's Iraq - very possibly the subject of another blog entry.

The hard fact is that we are there now and the loss of this front could actually prolong the wider ideological conflict we are engaged in, thus potentially costing more American lives in the long run than simply paying the cost of following through in Iraq.

One comment that often arises when discussing Iraq with my more liberal friends is their strange concept of if the Iraqi's are "worthy" of democracy, or more directly "worthy" of our cost in blood and gold to attempt to give them democracy or force it on them at gunpoint...it all depends on what day of month their liberal hearts are bleeding.

Of course the whole concept of being "worthy" of democracy smacks of Kipling, Colonialism, and the White Man's Burden.  My liberal friends do not like it if I point this out, apparently it makes me a bad person.  When I figure that logic out I'll write a psych dissertation on liberal hypocrisy.

This is where the White House sales job has failed the war in Iraq.  Allowing this "Iraq shall be a democracy" concept to float around willy-nilly.   When in actuality the goal is to introduce the ideals of classic liberalism into a greater society of araby that threatens to become moribund, bound to repressive theocratic ideologies and celebrating a culture of death.

This kind of reactionary direction by societies is not a new phenomena.  Cults of Death have sprung up numerous times from cultures that were either stagnant or otherwise held in thrall.   The modern "islamofascist" is no different in his death culture than the SS in Nazi Germany.   They both have populations they would like to eliminate entirely from their world and take active steps to make that happen; they both repress their own populations to live in a certain fashion.

Combined with the relative lack of power the modern islamofascist has, he must resort to taking his Cult of Death to the most extreme incarnation - that of the kamikaze, the suicide killer.  There is no moral restraint in this kind of person.  This is what allows them to bomb a mosque and ignite massive sectarian killings to keep feeding their cult of death.

The very ideals of classic liberalism, an open society with individual rights, is abhorrent to the death cult crowd.  When people of their own culture assert individualism they can be murdered out of hand by the islamofascist, be it man or woman, young or old.  This does not enable a free and fair market for the classic ideals to be debated and their merits weighed against the status quo.

That free and fair market of ideals and thoughts are what we are fighting to provide the Iraqis.  They turned out in droves to get their blue thumbs and vote in elections, some with the threat of death hanging over them, I would think they have shown the national desire to engage in the fair market of liberal ideals.  They may not pick every single classical talking point, but they are absolutely interested and involved.

Sounds like they are worthy enough as any of us, perhaps even more, to have the chance.  If just a few of those liberal ideals can get thrown against the wall and stick in Iraq or Afghanistan we will have a victory against the Death Cults who want to keep their brother muslims bound to a stagnant theocratic ideology and destroy the west to prevent all the corruptive influences produced there.

"Get In Line Like Everyone Else"

Best thing I've heard in a long while...and something that just needs to be said plainly to those persons violating our immigration laws.

There are literally millions of people who want desperately to come to the United States and be citizens...not all of them are Central American.  So exactly where do these illegals think they earn the right to "cuts" or "jump" the line?  Don't give me the "they do jobs that Americans won't" because thats already been shown to be bunk - in places where illegals are removed or otherwise unavailable, citizens do take "crap jobs."

I will give the example of two Latinos I have the honest pleasure of working with, let's call one "Juan" and the other "Raoul"

Raoul is here illegally, his family is here with him - illegally. He works hard but is always unhappy and always worried about him or his family getting caught...additionally his wife is unhappy with the conditions also.

Juan is here legally and has recently become a citizen. He works hard and is reasonably happy, although he misses his family who have lived in Mexico the entire time he has been undergoing the process (many years) and he has been preparing them for life in America through special classes in Mexico, etc. and getting them citizenship.

I like both of these guys...but I respect Juan 100% more than Raoul because he "Got In Line Like Everyone Else."

There are a whole bevy of people who claim we must confront the reality of the possibly tens of millions of illegals in the United States.  They would claim even if we build a fence and stop the flow that we would still have this huge population to sort through, so its easier to just amnesty them all.  The question of The Wall and The Process has everything to do with reality...the reality is that there is a line, and its not the imaginary one in the middle of the desert that separates two countries.

Illegals jump The Line...both figuratively and literally.

It is not a God Given Right for those south of the border to come here - The Immigrant as Job Applicant

Perhaps another way for people to wrap their heads around this issue would be to make the analogy of Immigrant to that of Job Applicant.

In that analogy being an American is a high paying, high perk kind of job to have.  There are many openings available for qualified applicants and not so qualified applicants.  The qualifications themselves are not even very rigorous anyway, compared to some other places you may choose to work.

Just the same, there is an insane amount of competition to get placed in America.  The level of demand to hold the job far outstrips the rate at which the employer in this case can be comfortable with granting new positions.

In other words - there are not, and will likely never be, enough "positions" to meet the level of competition.

No business in the real world cannot hire everyone who WANTS a job they offer, they can only accept the applicants they are willing to take on.

There are limits, there are boundaries -  It is a geographical accident that allows the poor of Mexico to stampede across to El Norte.

The limits in this case are the level of immigration the accepting country is comfortable with, as defined by their laws.

The boundaries are those lines on the map.

When you have a high demand item and a limited legal supply...the inevitable result is black market.  The black market in this case is the highly evolved border traffic, exemplified by the Coyote, the smuggler of human beings, drugs, and terrorists.

The Wall would be the first step in enforcing our legal boundaries on this black market.  Because a successful wall would severely retard the overland progress of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorist importation from the south.  Likely the Coyote organizations would shift gears in that case, raising their prices and engaging in more sea-based smuggling like the Chinese utilize. 

Maybe we would be more accepting of a level of illegal influx of Central Americans if they were on par with the level of illegal influx of Chinese.

I suppose if we shared a border with India it would be the same...instead we take the Indian nationals who can get the H1B's...some of them even are returning and improving the lot of India itself now.

If Mexico and the US were not in close proximity then only their people capable of meeting the screening would get access anyway, just like the Indians and EVERYONE ELSE who wants access to the American dream.

Of course there would still be those 10-20 million already here...but granting a blanket amnesty now would be like ignoring the barn door after the horse had come home.

The Process

The Process is the term I would apply to how America deals with those illegals who are here.  The "barn door" of The Wall is a much easier wicket to un-stick because the questions surrounding The Process are like a mine field.

Keep in mind that outside of dealing with the illegals already here that there should be no further question about what to do after they are handled.  "What?" You might say, but the truth is we already have immigration laws and limits, so outside of some possible adjustments to existing codes there should be no further accommodation for illegal immigration activities.

In some ways I am reminded of the movie "Conspiracy" with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci.  In particular the scenes when they are deciding the legal status of the Jews according to how much "blood" they are suppose to have, the implications for legal and social disruption with the discussed policy of "evacuation."

Another important historical footnote that comes to mind are the debates from the South before the Civil War about their Slave population, particularly the point that even if they could mobilize all the shipping of the United States they would only be able to remove the equivalent of the yearly increase in slave population (One of Calhoun's essays if my always faulty memory is correct.)

No reasonable person wants to see families ripped apart and lives destroyed to satisfy The Process.  Those persons and families who have made themselves productive members of the American society in the finest traditions of our forefathers...these are the immigrants we want to keep.  However, even with our desire to recognize those illegals who we would perhaps term as "desirable" - there needs to be some accounting, some recognition that they "jumped" the line.

We find ourselves facing a social event like the Reconstruction in the South.  An event where it is said "there will be profound changes because what has happened to date is no longer acceptable."  The trick is we must avoid the same mistake of our forefathers and allow the situation that we have expended so much energy to change to lapse back into existence under another guise.