By the way, Frum has a long history of this kind of thing. Back in the early ’90s, he published articles savaging immigration restrictionists as demagogues and racists, but then, in a letter to me, opined that he, too, favored immigration restrictions. I told him to take a leap. (It would be interesting to dig up that correspondence.) And, if I remember correctly, he played the same game in his big National Review article attacking the antiwar paleocons back in ‘03.

In defense of President Bush, there is something to be said for fighting one war at a time. Any executive who attempts to solve every problem at once will fail.

Those who follow Russian affairs may remember that Vladimir Putin was despised at first as a Yeltsin protegé and a puppet of the oligarchs. For a long time, Putin lay low, allowing people to think and say whatever they liked about him.

When he struck, he did so with the suddenness of a scorpion. Putin broke the power of the oligarchs in a matter of days. He surprised everyone.

peter brimelow’s influence on his unlikely friend occasionally shines through.

One of the criticisms of us conservatives prior to the election, was that we gave W a pass on a whole host of issues. Re: Richard Poe’s comment above about fighting one war at a time, we can’t afford to do so. We have to fight on many fronts, including closing down these borders— if a bus boy from Mexico can cross our lines, so can our enemies. Now that the threat of the inept Kerry is behind us, we have to start pressing the President to do more— to tackle the budget deficit, to bring about sane immigration, and to fight the war.

Frumm’s strategy might have worked to elect Kerry. The third part of his outline interests me the most.

I think that if Kerry honestly projected a sincere determination to actually support the war he voted for, then blasted Bush on the immigration disaster that places thousands of potential terrorists into America proper, he would have received a larger percentage of the conservative vote.

He was a loyal slave to his liberalism, which he defended against all objective evidence, to his own detriment.

The battle of Fallujah is raging as we blog, thousands of miles away from America. But the battle yet to be waged may well erupt in any given American city by Islamists who have been granted privileged status and access to our society. Think of Israel’s dilemma.

Compound that with the flood of immigrants from across our southern border who by virtue of their sheer numbers are simply displacing us with the assistance of the liberals and multiculturists.

In light of these depressing facts, I think it is fair to ask exactly what our soldiers are really fighting for.

Mr. Iovino wrote:

“Now that the threat of the inept Kerry is behind us, we have to start pressing the President to do more …”

Exactly. The threat from the left prevented any serious debate and discussion on the right. Now that the left is defeated and in disarray (but only for the moment, remember), conservatives will be liberated to criticize the president. The conservative honchos who sought, successfully, to suppress all conservative criticism of the president have now lost their main argument.

Senator Kerry has been having wet dreams about the White House since he was a kid. To see his long, sad face on the late President Kennedy’s boat from a picture taken back in the early sixties tells that tale. What should trouble us is that even Kerry, who would push his Gandmother to the ground to get into the White House, would not use the open borders issue to win the election. If Kerry came out for reasonable border control, a cut-back in legal immigration numbers, and a regular, stable deportation program…..the White House was his. He could have lifted the Jordan Commision recomendations from the Clinton Administration that were not put into practice and the American people would have put him in office. The fact that he could not even do these small measures that would have giving him his life long dream of the Presidency ought to tell us that any real immigration reform is going to be almost impossible to accomplish.

Maybe a miricle will occur and Bush will realize he can effect immigration reform without the worry of re-election looming over his every decision.

Notice how soon after the election fallujah was attacked.

I’m holding out hope that all his pro-immigration rhetoric was political posturing. I know that it is highly unlikely, but I can’t believe the President hasn’t seen studies warning of this threat to our national security and our future viablity as a country. Would there be such briefings, or does his staff ignore the problem?

Perhaps the ghost of Reagan can visit him in the night and remind him what a mistake any amnesty for illegal aliens would be for starters.

I have also seen Frum flip-flop on immigration reform in his writings over the years. I guess when his hero WFB went south on the immigration issue Frum followed.3

J.Hagan

You hit the nail on the head. I was thinking along similar lines. Kerry would sell hs mother into white-slavery for da house, yet he balked at the one issue that would have gotten him a whole new base of broad support and possibly the 70,000 votes he needed.

Why? We know scruples had nothing to do with it, Kerry never had any. So is there a message in his unwillingness to embrace that one cause yearning for a messiah?

andrew2:

Bush look at studies? Bush actually consider evidence in making a decision? Please. He was dead serious about giving amnesty, regardless of what it means to the future of the United States. I guarantee you that when Jeb runs in 2008, he will make a huge deal out of his Mexican wife and Mexican kids in order to continue the Bush dynasty.

Well in Europe, any opposition to immigration is simply outlawed. I don’t understand how they can be so… stupid for lack of a better word.

Link beneath teaser:

“What happened in Brussels today is unique in the Western world: never has a so-called democratic regime outlawed the country’s largest political party,”

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/041109/1/3odtu.html

Andrew writes: “Maybe a miracle will occur and Bush will realize he can effect immigration reform without the worry of re-election looming over his every decision. Notice how soon after the election fallujah was attacked.”

By this logic, maybe Bush will also revive his plan to send men to Mars! Remember what a big impact _that_ made?

I disagree with Andrew’s and Mr. Hagan’s idea that Kerry “balked” at supporting immigration reform, even though doing so could have won him the election. To say that he “balked” assumes that he considered doing it. That’s impossible. Kerry is a Totally Orthodox Left-Liberal. The very notion of seeking real immigration enforcement and restriction would never even remotely occur to him. Look at the way the Dems are saying now, post-election, that they will never surrender the homosexual marriage issue, even though it’s hurting them in the polls, because it’s a supreme moral issue and the very core of their identity. They feel exactly the same about open borders.

Mr. Auster

LOL! You know as well as I that every politician yearns to have a Kennedy moment.

Did you hear NJ Governor McSkeevy, I mean McGreevey pull a Robert Kennedy today at the press conference by reciting RFK’s favorite poem by Aeschylus.

I didn’t hear anyone else in the press mention the shameless copy cating in search of public sympathy and acceptance of his “discretion”.

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/robertkennedyonmartinlutherking.html

Mr. Auster brings up a point I had not considered: that Kerry is so blinded by his leftism that he would dare not even think about immigration reform. Perhaps that is so, but like GWB during the debates, he gave a us a differnt answer when questioned about immigration. He, like Bush, talked about border control, and deportation, so on some level, he understands that he needs to at least fool the public on this issue.

Of course unlike McSkeevey, RFK actually read Aeschylus. But the point is he was having his Kennedy moment.

Bush was trying something, anything to motivate and grab the imagination of the sheeple. But you’re right I haven’t heard anything about it since January.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/09/bush.space/

McGreevey is a superlatively low character. I had a bit of his farewell speech on the tv yesterday. As before, he did his mea culpa, but his slick, buoyant demeanor and expression completely belied his words of guilt and apology. I didn’t hear the Aeschylus part. That’s incredible, even for a shameless slickster like McGreevey. He was caught and brought down by the lowest possible scandal, and so he reaches for Aeschylus to provide a high-toned gloss for it. Losing one’s brother-president in the prime of his life and power to an assassin, or getting caught giving a six-figure state job to a man one is having a homosexual affair with, for McGreevey it’s all the same, an opportunity to strike an “idealistic” posture.

Plato used the Greek word for “shamelessness” to describe male sodomy. McGreevey, shameless in his private life, is shameless in his public life as well.

Mr. Auster,

Plato used the Greek word for “shamelessness”, I use the neighboorhood vernacular. McGreevey is a slime ball in a sea of pus. His mea culpa sympatico was total theater.

It’s as though the shame gene is missing in him. For him to become an imposter reciting poetry he probably only heard from old RFK footage is pretty despicable.

Mr. Auster

I don’t wish to digress the discussion, but I wanted to clarify my comment on Kerry’s refusal to take on immigration reform in his campaign.

You said that his liberal ideology precluded any commitment to immigration reform. But what was keeping him from merely engaging in empty rhetoric until he was elected to office? I can easily see the Demon-crats reneging on any commitment.

Afterall, Kerry has been faking his whole life to be president, why not lie about this as well?

I think that Democratic cost-benefit strategists miscalculated the immigration issue in favor of the multiculturalists costing Kerry.

JOHN RING

Brother JEB claims he’s not going to run in ‘08.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/11/09/gov_jeb_bush_not_eyeing_presidential_run?mode=PF

“But what was keeping him from merely engaging in empty rhetoric until he was elected to office?”

The fact that to someone like Kerry it would be akin to making public racial slurs. The man does have morals, after all.

Andrew is assuming that Kerry could even have grasped the fact that immigration is a major problem for this country and that millions of people are very unhappy about it, want the laws seriously enforced, and want the numbers substantially reduced.

But Kerry does not grasp that for a second. It’s not within his ken. To a somewhat slighter degree, it was not within his ken to suggest a better, alternative strategy in the war on terror, simply because he is instinctively alienated from the idea of the use of American power. Whatever he suggested in that area (hand Iraq over to the UN) was transparently fake and empty.

All the more so with immigration, which touches on the core doctrines of of liberalism: openness and non-discrimination. What position on immigration are you suggesting that he might have taken? Enforce the law? Start deporting illegals? Put U.S. troops at the border? Kerry couldn’t have taken even a transparently fake position on these issues because such thoughts _ would not even occur to him_, any more than it would occur to him to pretend to support a repeal of Roe v. Wade or of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Mr. Auster,

I understand the problem now as you see it. Kerry has no situational awareness whatsoever of the issue. He can’t grasp the severity of it because he has not experienced it up close and personal.

He inhabits the world of the rich and privileged and has probably never seen parts of Queens or Brooklyn in his entire life, let alone South Central LA.

I am having trouble imagining such delusional ignorance. But in Germany, there is the same tendency to idealize multiculturalism because many Europeans still have not yet experienced it.

We have the same problem with both Bush and Kerry when it comes to immigration reform. Neither will treat seriously with those who favor restricting legal immigration and ending illegal entry. Those who favor such positions are simply racists, evil, and probably - eek - anti-Semites to boot. One does not demean oneself by dealing with such people at all. I am convinced that Bush and Kerry are exactly the same in this respect. In addition to immigration reform, Carl mentions the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Roe v. Wade. Both Bush and Kerry unquestioningly support the CRA, and I believe Bush’s faux-opposition to Roe is entirely tactical, and not backed by action. Those who guide our president, from the neocons who sell him wars to his wife and mother, are not pro-life. Both Bush and Kerry operate within an establishment with a very narrow, and quite liberal, range of acceptable thought.

I just got a market bulletin that Commerce Secretary Evans and Atty-Gen Ashcroft have resigned. Anyone want to bet against at least one (most likely Ashcroft) being replaced by a hispanic? HRS

No, Andrew, I’m not saying it’s because he hasn’t personally experienced the problem. I’m saying it’s because he’s incapable of experiencing it _as_ a problem. A liberal does not have attachment to his country, since he sees it as a guilty, oppressive, arrogant entity that deserves to be brought down. He takes it for granted that his country owes an endless moral debt to all the non-whites of the world. Therefore he cannot conceive of seeing an influx of third-world immigrants as something that one could be alarmed about.

One point to add to Mr. Auster’s reply to andrew2:

Liberals are thoughtless in the sense of being heedless of consequences. It is virtuous to prefer non-white aliens to one’s own countrymen, so one does, regardless of the result. That is what liberalism demands, so the result is irrelevant (although the result of change is always presumed to be progress). When the disastrous consequences are pointed out, the liberal (i) doesn’t see them as disastrous and (ii) doesn’t care, because the demands of liberalism are what they are and must be satisfied anyway. As I said above and elsewhere (please forgive my repetitions), this is as true, or almost, of Republicans of the Bush variety as it is of Democrats.

Willful blindness is essential to modern liberalism. HRS

Mr. Auster, it seems to me liberalism is a pyschological disorder.

Bingo…..Andrew2 :)

Andrew2, some of us here think of liberalism as a psychological disorder, others think of it as a religion. Either way, the end result is the same - described very elegantly by Mssrs. Auster, Sutherland, and Matt.

liberalism as a psychological disorder?

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

You all were wise not to take the other side of my bet of last evening.

Read this and weep:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041110-124024-8016r.htm

Expect the second Bush II term to be one relentless, nationally degrading hispander - and it hasn’t even started yet! HRS