The “Surprised” Club

First it was Kathryn Jean Lopez who was surprised that President Bush still wants to pass the Comprehensive National Suicide bill that he’s fanatically pushed for the last three years, and that now has a real chance to pass. Then it was a bunch of commenters at Free Republic who were surprised by the same thing. The next “surprised” person is David Frum. Given that Frum believes that there can be an “End of Evil,” the title of the book he co-wrote with the once wise-as-a-serpent but now naïve-as-a-dove Richard Perle, it should not be a surprise that he’s surprised that a fanatical supporter of open borders is … a fanatical supporter of open borders. In the same way that liberals can’t really believe in the existence of evil and can’t really believe anything negative about minorities, mainstream conservatives can’t really believe anything bad about George W. Bush.

Thus Frum writes at his blog:

Meanwhile, death wish watch: Tell me it ain’t so that the president intends to use his 1 p.m. press conference to ask Dems to work with him to pass an immigration amnesty? Does a wounded presidency really need to embark on an adventure that is simultaneous bad politics, bad policy, and bad national security? He’d do better to ask Congress to finish the wall—better still to ask for a national ID and employer sanctions—best of all to fight the Democrats on their least popular issue!

See, in addition to being unable to absorb the fact that Bush really, really seeks open borders, Frum thinks that Bush is a rational person. He wants to persuade Bush that amnesty and open borders is a bad idea. That’s like trying to persuade a Communist that Communism is a bad idea. You can’t persuade a Communist, you just have to stop him, just as the House GOP stopped Bush’s open borders bill this past year. But then, tragically, they failed to tell the country that they had done so, and so gave voters no reason to vote for them. Meanwhile, voters wanted to stop an otherwise unpersuadable Bush on his Iraq policy, and so they voted for the Democrats.

Because of their inability to understand the unyielding quality of Bush’s open-borders commitment, conservatives failed to bring out the point that I have stressed over and over at this website since last spring: that a Democratic victory in the House would allow Bush to push through the Comprehensive bill that failed in 2006, and that this fact therefore had to be front and center in the Republican Congressional campaign. If this point was talked up by any of the established immigration reformers, who have several orders of magnitude more influence in the Republican party than I do, I’m not aware of it.

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Roy Beck writes:

You have certainly tried for a long time to make these points and you’ve made them quite well.

I am not so much surprised by Bush as amazed at his arrogance. Even though I expected him to use the Republican loss to push through an amnesty, I didn’t expect him to dance on the graves of the Republicans whose political careers he had killed, and to do so only hours after he had buried them!

LA replies:

Bush loves to do things like that. He loves showing his contempt for the people on his side, for the people who supported him. He does this to express his true allegiances, which are to his family, to his circle of cronies and retainers, and to little brown people, or, to be more precise, to Mexicans. I’ve written about this a lot. These groups matter more to him than conservatives, Republicans, or Americans.

As an example: His nomination of Harriet Miers, the most blatant act of contempt by a president for his supporters in U.S. history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2006 10:59 AM | Send