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The unreality of Bush—and of those who attempt to rationalize his actions
Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard explains how President Bush’s “comprehensive” immigration bill—a bizarre combination of stringent law enforcement with amnesty for lawbreakers—could pass the Congress. Barnes’s even-tempered, nondescript persona as a journalist makes the sheer unreality of the legislative agenda he is describing and seemingly advocating stand out all the more. In the end he recovers and says this could all be a “fantasy … nothing more than presidential or Republican self-delusion.” But up to that point Barnes seems to subscribe fully to the delusion himself. As an index of the president’s real intent in proposing this bill, Bush insists that at the end of the “guest worker” period, the aliens not be required to go back to Mexico, but be allowed to stay in the U.S. to apply for citizenship. So this bill is literally an amnesty bill, just as its critics have been saying all along. As a further index of where Bush is really coming from, Barnes tells how six weeks ago the president spoiled the amity of a gathering with Republican lawmakers in the White House East Room when he unexpectedly launched into his song and dance about the glories of illegal immigrants. “They want to provide for their families,” he said sympathetically. “Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande River. People are coming to put food on the table.” But wait. If that’s the way Bush feels about illegal aliens, why would he want to keep any of them out of America? And what moral basis does he have to keep them any of them out of America? Why would he want to keep out some, and not others? In short, how can any sentient person imagine for two seconds that the president is sincere about enforcing our immigration laws, let alone the tough new laws he is now proposing?
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