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A further thought about Bush’s speech
Reader N. argues, and I tentatively agreed, that if President Bush in his Monday speech supports real border enforcement and drops amnesty, that would disprove my view that Bush is an irrational open-borders ideologue. But this “test” is logically flawed. Suppose that Bush indeed announces, as Powerline urges him to do, that he’s going to institute real border protection and employer sanctions and stop pushing any amnesty/guest worker proposals for the foreseeable future, because he recognizes that there is not sufficient public agreement on the latter. That would not mean that Bush is not an open-borders ideologue. It would mean that he has been defeated. When Clinton in his first initiative as president tried to get open homosexuals in the military, he pushed for it as hard as he could, and he finally gave it up, not for lack of genuine commitment, but because the political support was not there. Similarly, when Bush withdrew the nomination of Harriet Miers, that did not mean that he had repented of his fanatical desire to place a totally unqualified female crony of his on the U.S. Supreme Court. It simply meant he had lost the battle, and was surrendering. N’s premise is that if a person with a long-established record as an irrational ideologue is defeated and gives up the fight, that proves he is not an irrational ideologue. That is as wrong as saying that the death of the U.S.R.R. proves that the U.S.S.R. was not the Communist threat that its opponents said it was. The Soviet regime did not change its mind; it was defeated and killed.
(It is true, however, that some individual Communists, such as Boris Yeltsin, did sincerely change their mind and give up Communism.) Email entry |