Playing right into their hands
Let me say this upfront; I don’t like illegal immigrants. They are lawbreakers, just as much as anyone robbing a liquor store or jacking a car. And just like a thief robbing a store or stealing a car, economics is no excuse for breaking the law. I certainly sympathize with the conditions with which people are forced to exist in Central America (having spent quite a few years down there, I understand it better than most Americans). The United States is certainly an irresistable beacon to the millions mired in poverty south of our border. But that’s a problem better-solved with local solutions.Â
I don’t like that the current administration is crafting a plan to give what might be considered “amnesty” with the likes of Ted Kennedy. Today in the Washington Times I read that declining donations to the RNC triggered the firing of their solicitors;
    Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.
    “Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue,” said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee.Â
The RNC denies falling revenues, but I believe the people who were fired. I’ve been snubbed by a couple of the Right’s biggest bloggers in the past few weeks and I’m pretty sure it’s because of my wishy-washy position on immigration that I wrote about a week or so ago calling for calm on the Right.
I honestly believe the Right is overreacting – overreacting on the same scale that the anti-war Left is overreacting to the collapse of their Congressional heros. And I think that it’s playing right into the hands of the Democrats.
The Democrats know that unless they come up with a coherent strategy for the war against terror next year, they’ve lost the election. So they pretend there is no war against terror – and they try to divide the Republican party. How do they do it? They know this president is a man of action – unlike his predecessor who just had blue-ribbon commissions and town hall meetings and the press tried to convince us that he had solved whatever problem he was interested in that moment.
They know this president wants to solve the immigration problem. They also know that the reactionary xenophobes on the Far Right will run to the microphones and their PCs and condemn anyone who avocates anything short of shipping 12 million illegals home and they’ll whip the blogs into a frenzy of anti-immigration platitudes. Which is exactly what happened.
Yeah, we all feel betrayed by Republicans, but are we going to let our emotions drive us into a third and fourth Clinton term? On one single issue? I’ll grant that it’s an important issue, but is it so important that we’ll gamble the future of our country?
I guess I’ve set myself up for some more snubbing.
