President Bush has managed to anger
both the left and the right with his new plan to reward illegal aliens,
euphemistically called “undocumented workers”. Conservatives are angry because
he seems to be turning a blind eye to lawbreakers and using the federal
treasury to transfer taxpayer money to criminals. Leftists are angry because
Bush has taken away another one of their issues, and they are complaining that
Bush is only advancing his plan to pander to special interests in an election
year. And of course we all know that leftists and democrats never pander to special interests in an
election year.
The particulars of the Bush plan will be elucidated in
excruciating detail elsewhere, and will no doubt be debated endlessly. The
proposal is, at this point, just that – a proposal – and far from becoming law.
But before the right becomes too hysterical about what they think they know
about the plan, perhaps they should consider this: Both the radical leftist
group La Raza and the radical leftist Senator Teddy
Kennedy are infuriated by the plan. Anything that receives the condemnation of
both La Raza and Ted Kennedy can’t be all bad.
Consider the
following commentary from one conservative group: “President Bush's treacherous
proposal to grant amnesty (legal status!) for millions
of criminal illegal aliens could very well backfire at the voting booth in
November. Karl Rove, Bush's senior advisor, has insulted conservative and Republican
voters (Bush's key base of support) by claiming they have no where else to
go. Wrong!! 2004 could be reminiscent of 1996 – which was the lowest
voter turnout in American history since the 1920s – because many GOP voters
stayed home and were not excited about Bob Dole. While it is unthinkable that
GOP voters would cast a vote for any Democrat since all the Democrat nominees
also support amnesty, we predict that many of them may just sit out this
election (or vote third party) since President Bush has now given them one
really good reason to not even vote.”
Well, sitting out
the 1996 election really showed them, didn’t it? It gave us four more years of
Bill Clinton! Thank you very much! And now conservatives are threatening to really to show Karl Rove and the
Republican Party by sitting out 2004, so we’ll end up with Howard Dean or
Wesley Clark or President Hillary Clinton – yeah, that’ll really show ‘em!
After all, we
must stand on principle, mustn’t we? Regardless of the consequences?
During the debates in the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, some of the delegates were reluctant to abandon the
Articles of Confederation altogether (as most admitted would be required, if
republican government were to survive) and design an entirely new structure of
government (our present Constitution), on the grounds that the commissions from
their respective states did not contemplate and thus did not authorize such a
radical change – they thought that they were duty-bound to stand on principle,
by a limited reading of their authority, regardless of the consequences. To
which Edmund Randolph (a delegate from Virginia)
responded, “When the salvation of the Republic was at stake, it would be
treason to our trust, not to propose what we found necessary.” George Mason
(another Virginia delegate) added, “…there were, besides, certain crises in
which all the ordinary cautions yielded to public necessity”, and he cited the
example of those who negotiated the peace treaty with Great Britain, who
“disregarded the improvident shackles” placed by Congress on their authority,
“had given to their Country an honorable and happy peace” and “had raised to
themselves a monument more durable than brass.” There were far bigger issues at
stake – as there are now.
Can conservatives
please grow up and stop acting like spoiled brats, and stop threatening to burn
down the entire house every time they don’t get every single toy they want
under the Christmas tree? Politics, like life itself, is rarely the attainment
of perfection, especially when the definition of “perfection” is itself a
moving target depending on who’s doing the defining. You do the best you can
with what you’re given. Is any conservative or republican really willing to say
that 4 more years of Bush would be worse
than 4 (or 8) years of Dean or Clark or Kerry or – Hillary Clinton?
Temper tantrums
aside, may we digress a moment to take a look at the
larger picture here? By what constitutional authority does the federal
government take money from U.S.
citizens and transfer it to criminal aliens? Obviously, there is none. And
speaking about illegality, what ever happened to that constitutional mandate
that the president “shall take care that
the Laws be faithfully executed”? Yet this is what happens when we
abandon the restraints contained in the Constitution. Once those limits are
gone there are no limits at all, the floodgates are open, and pandering to
special interests is simply a matter of power – who
has the power to give away the store faster.
Neither party has any great claim
to being defenders of the Constitution (although it took the left to come up
with the novel idea of a “living” Constitution that changes to mean whatever
some judge says it means at any point in time, and which may mean something
entirely different tomorrow), and both parties evade and ignore the
Constitution as it suits them. But the Constitution is not like one of those
old Chinese restaurant menus where you can choose one from Column A and one
from Column B and ignore what you don’t like. You either have a Constitution or
you do not – and for many decades now, the reality has been that we do not. And
now we profess to be shocked – shocked – that Bush would resort to the same
sort of political calculations designed to win votes which democrats have used
for decades! The fault for allowing any
of our politicians to ignore the strictures of the Constitution lies with us,
for re-electing them despite their unconstitutional acts. But does it really
make sense to suddenly “get religion” now, with all that’s at stake?
We face far
larger problems in this country than the latest attempts to pander for votes –
whether the votes of Hispanics through the new illegal immigrant proposal, or of seniors through the prescription drug entitlement.
Or are conservatives so bent on standing on principle that they would do so
even when the fate of the Republic is at stake?
Huge numbers of
people still believe that everything they see on the network news and
everything they read in the New York Times is accurate and true. Huge numbers
believe that anyone who earns a dollar more than they do is “rich” and should
pay more taxes – no matter how disproportionate the tax burden on those “rich”
already is. Huge numbers of people, numbers which are growing ever larger as
constitutional and economic ignorance increases, believe that the role of
government is to provide them with everything they want, and that private
companies are cash-cows to be milked to pay for all those things – and then
they are mystified why those same companies aren’t hiring new employees or
providing new, gold-plated benefits for the people whom they already employ; or
are moving overseas to escape punitive taxation, extortionate demands by trial
lawyers and extremist environmentalists, and vilification by sleazy
politicians.
And significant numbers of people still think that they have a
right to dictate how other people should live their lives (imposed by
government force if necessary), yet who gleefully call anyone who disagrees
with them a Nazi; people who think that George Bush and John Ashcroft are
bigger threats to this country than Saddam Hussein was and Osama
bin Laden is; who think that the Boy Scouts are more dangerous than al Qaeda;
and who believe that the greatest threats to the future of freedom in this
nation are people who talk about religion in public (unless they’re democrats
trying to fool people into voting for them) or display the Ten Commandments.
These are the people and the philosophies conservatives will reward if they give
vent to their temper tantrums against Bush.
Howard Dean,
Wesley Clark, and John Kerry are popular with large segments of the population
only in part because of their hate-Bush rhetoric, but more dangerously they are
popular because far too many people believe that national sovereignty is an
outmoded idea that must be made subservient to the tin-pot tyrants who dominate
the United Nations and the bureaucrats who run the European Union.
Hillary
Clinton isn’t popular with a large segment of the population because – just why
is Hillary so popular, anyway? Perhaps because far too many people like
her government-is-the-answer-to-every question, global-village
totalitarian streak. Dennis Kucinich isn’t popular with a certain segment of the population because
of his alleged boyish charm, but because he espouses a philosophy of socialism
that many people find appealing, despite the evidence of the history of
socialism whenever and wherever it’s been tried (a history of which that same
segment of the population is totally ignorant, thanks to like-minded college
professors). Al Sharpton isn’t popular with a certain
segment of the population because he does a creditable imitation of James
Brown, but because far too many people have accepted the America-is-evil
philosophy espoused by the race-hustlers on the left. Carol Moseley-Braun isn’t
popular because of her record in Congress, but because of the big-government
nanny-state ideology she espouses.
Fortunately, neither Kucinich nor Sharpton (and certainly not Moseley-Braun) are popular
enough with enough people to be dangerous, at least not in this election; but
the ideologies they tout and the philosophies in which they believe are
extraordinarily dangerous to the future of this nation, and those ideologies
remain all too popular. These are the long-term problems that this nation
faces.
We
are still at war, against
an implacable enemy bent on the total destruction of this nation. We
are still the primary target – not the United Nations, not France or Germany
or Russia or
European Union bureaucrats in Brussels.
That enemy, as one cogent analyst (in the New York Times, of all places)
observed, is even more dangerous than the Soviet Union
was during the Cold War, because, “As dangerous as the Soviet Union
was, it was always deterrable with a wall of
containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the
Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed
on certain bedrock rules of civilization. With the Islamist militant groups, we
face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers
of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into
human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life – an airplane, a
car, a garage door opener, a cell phone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe – you create
a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and
inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army…”.
That war will not
be won, that enemy will not be defeated, by subsuming our national defense to
the United Nations (Dean, Clark, and Kerry), or by treating attacks against
this nation as crimes to be prosecuted in American courtrooms (the Dean idea,
which is the same failed approach pursued for eight years by the Clinton
administration) or by pre-emptive surrender and abject apologies (Kucinich), or
by giving in to more blackmail by North Korea (Hillary might revive her
husband’s dangerous foreign policy in that area).
That war will not be won if
petulant conservatives “just sit out this election” and hand victory to Dean,
Clark, Kerry, or Hillary. Sitting out the 1996 election might well have handed
victory to Bill Clinton, who did enough damage to this nation. His refusal to
fully engage in a war that the other side had openly declared and was openly
fighting, despite the World Trade Center bombing and the Mogadishu ambush in
1993, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in
1995, the two U.S. embassies in Africa blown up in 1998, and the attack against
the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, might indeed have encouraged that enemy to think they
could get away with striking us here at home on September 11, 2001 with
few consequences. But we are now, finally, fully engaged in an open war
with that enemy.
Dare we, under these circumstances, give vent to
temper tantrums against Bush, and thereby risk a return to the failed
policies of the last decade? The salvation of the Republic is at stake.
The above article is
the property of Kim Weissman, and is reprinted with his permission.
Contact him prior to reproducing.
|
Terrorism
