Killing the Kill-America bill, and killer acronyms

I began reading John Derbyshire’s immigration-bill autopsy at National Review Online. His opening point is most heartening: that even if the executive branch has not Gotten It, the legislative branch certainly has, and therefore the Comprehensive Kill America bill is truly defunct for the foreseeable future. (I think one can pick up the same definitive judgment between the lines in Julia Preston’s New York Times article, discussed here, about the unquenchable righteous passion against amnesty that resides in the hearts of a decisive number of Americans.) Also, though on the negative side, Derbyshire’s bit about two killer acronyms in the immigration field, EOIR and AILA, made for chilling reading. But then the rest of the piece descended into the usual Derbyshire desultory chat, and I lost interest. Derbyshire is virtually the inventor of the non-article article—something that would not have been tolerated prior to the Internet Age.

But what am I talking about? The founder of National Review, William Buckley, has been writing non-article articles for the last three decades or more. And at least Derbyshire’s have the virtue of being intelligible. Between an intelligible non-article article, and an unintelligible non-article article, I’ll take the first every time. Maybe NR has not been heading downhill after all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2007 08:19 PM | Send