Bush’s Immigration Shuck & Jive
Heh. The President is going to give a major primetime address on Monday to try to convince the public that, four and a half years after 9/11, he finally cares about illegal immigration. It’s sorta quaint how the White House still thinks the public likes Bush enough to sit through one of his speeches and respects him enough to believe what he’s saying. It’s been a long, long time since he was a speech away from reversing his political fortunes. Too little, too late, Junior.
The big idea that’s apparently important enough to interrupt 24 to tell us about is a plan to deploy whatever National Guard troops the President can scrape together to help secure the border. This might be a good idea if illegal immigration was a sudden crisis, but the immigration “problem” has been brewing for more than thirty years. It’s not like the President can just pretend this snuck up on him. Besides, we already have an agency that patrols the border….they’re the border patrol. If you’re responding to a semi-permanent security situation on the border, you should devote more resources to that agency, not misuse the National Guard again.
Regardless of the merits of the Presidents proposals or their popularity with the public, as someone who’s firmly opposed to this latest bit of pandering, I see very little to worry about. After all, if we learned anything during Hurricane Katrina, it’s that the President’s promises to deploy National Guardsmen are worthless. Just like his pre-hurricane assurances to Louisiana state and local officials, George Bush just wants to give everyone the impression that he’s on top of things, but he doesn’t want to bother with paying attention to a crisis or taking any responsibility whatsoever. The only “crisis” the President is concerned about is the likelihood of Republicans losing the House. So on Monday night, he might give a cute little speech, but we all know it’s not going to mean a damn thing.
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You’re on the money on this one. Oh well, only 2 1/2 more years.
Comment by Mike Meyer — May 13, 2006 @ 8:23 pm
Bush’s border plan could include Guard
WASHINGTON — President Bush is expected to announce plans Monday to send thousands of National
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator — May 13, 2006 @ 10:02 pm
The increase in illeagal aliens is due to NAFTA which screwed them blue. The whole idea that Bush wants to do something to stop it is the biggest joke in the world. Bush represents big business, big business like Wal-Mart employs the illegal aliens Wal-Mart and companies like them would never stand for their little puppets in the Whitehouse and congress stemming the flow. The republicans tried to use it as a wedge issue but big business put a stop to that pretty damned fast as we all saw. Cheney’s ass is grass via the little scribbles he made on the borders of the Wilson article in the Times and they won’t be able to keep the mower off Bush’s ass much longer, all roads lead to Bush.
Comment by rob payne — May 14, 2006 @ 1:31 am
“all roads lead to Bush”. Let’s play the six degrees of seperation game. We can start with something easy like Bin Laden and Bush and work our way out from there.
Comment by Kamachanda — May 14, 2006 @ 7:46 am
All hat and no cattle, is my prediction. As usual.
Comment by chuck — May 14, 2006 @ 8:42 am
“This might be a good idea if illegal immigration was a sudden crisis, but the immigration “problem” has been brewing for more than thirty years.”
He’s treating the gas-price fiasco like this too.
One only has to look at the things W has actually *accomplished* to see the pattern: unless it involves routing lot of money to campaign supporters, it’s ignored.
Comment by Humbug — May 14, 2006 @ 10:20 am
That smell? Fish! Matter of fact, it’s herring. Red herring! You dont have to go far to find what they are using that smell to cover up, either. Ron Ray-gun and his bullshit cheap labor schemes.
Comment by patrick — May 15, 2006 @ 7:43 am
I hate to point out that this is, by their own admission, a publicity stunt that will allow Chimpy to ride around on an ATV. Why do I hate to point that out? Because merely engaging in the back-and-forth of this ridiculous debate misses the crux of the biscut: the whole immigrant “problem” is straight out of the fascist handbook. I don’t think you even need to make the comparison with what happened to the Jews in Germany; I’m not a WWII scholar, but I believe they played the immigrant card too.
The bottom line is you need a scapegoat for all your fuckups, and you need someone to hate. Historically, swarthy types work well for this, but it doesn’t really matter who it is, as long as you can work up enough people into a froth. Get them screaming at the telescreens.
The most important thing I’ve learned in the last six years is that humans will repeat the mistakes of history even when they’re so recent that we still have living, breathing witnesses who survived them.
Comment by Cakesniffer — May 15, 2006 @ 8:43 am
This is just an attempt by the Bush regime to shore up support with their base. Perhaps his approval rating will get a dead cat bounce up to 38-39%.
Comment by PoliticalCritic — May 15, 2006 @ 8:05 pm
Well he gave his speech and I didn’t listen to it, because the man makes me ill in audio.
However I did notice this smidgen in the NY Times transcript: “A key part of that system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law and leave employers with no excuse for violating it.”
Uh huh. And if you are brown and don’t have one, we’ll deport you. Oh, you say you are a citizen? Well, then everyone better have one. See, those brown people made you all get identity cards. Well, yes, they do work with the latest NSA 24/7 all-seeing surveillance satelites. Well, you want us to protect you from brown people and terrorists, right? Hey, buddy, you know we’ll take care of you….
Comment by janinsanfran — May 15, 2006 @ 8:09 pm