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The personal roots of Bush’s open-borders treason
Newsweek, in a story about President Bush and the immigration issue, has finally found something for which it can treat the president kindly—his tender-hearted love for his Hispanic nannies, maids, retainers, and clients. It is this deep affection, the article suggests, that is the true source of Bush’s support for Mexican immigration, or, to put it more accurately, his fanatical desire to Hispanicize America. Indeed, from reading Newsweek’s portrayal, you get the feeling, not just that with the Bush clan everything is personal, which we already knew, but that George W.’s fundamental orientation to the world is through a network of patron-client and patron-retainer relationships, organized around his family and his political career, both with Mexican-Americans like Alberto Gonzales, and with such people as Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Harriet Miers. The epitome of this Bush clannishness was seen in his nomination of one of those cronies, the totally unqualified Miers, for one of the highest offices in the land, a decision he made on the basis of consultations with several other of his cronies.
As Howard Sutherland wrote in an insightful comment at VFR, Bush’s experiences of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, whether as loyal family retainers or as high-rolling amigos from south of the border, are entirely positive, while his experience of his fellow white Americans is ambivalent at best. As Bush sees it, and as he said in Africa, Americans still harbor the same racism that drove slavery, and they have far to go before they get over it, while Mexicans are these fine upstanding brown people whose very presence in America will either cure whites of their racism, or so disempower and marginalize whites that their racism will be made irrelevant. What a perfect merger of the personal and the political! By advancing the folks who just happen to be his favorite people in the whole world, Bush becomes the president who finally defeats American racism! Email entry |