It's Back!

From The Washington Post:

Senate leaders, under pressure from pro-immigration groups and facing a determined push by President Bush, agreed last night to bring a controversial overhaul of the nation's immigration laws back to the Senate floor as early as next week.

The bipartisan negotiators working on the immigration bill whittled hundreds of amendments down to a package of 11 amendments from Republicans and another 11 from Democrats and then presented their compromise to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (Miss.) indicated earlier that he could produce enough GOP votes to clear the 60-vote threshold to get the bill back to the floor and push it to a final vote.

With Reid's demands satisfied, he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a terse statement: "We met this evening with several of the Senators involved in the immigration bill negotiations. Based on that discussion, the immigration bill will return to the Senate floor."

Members of both parties cautioned that passage is still anything but certain.

"I'm sure senators on both sides of the aisle are being pounded by these talk-radio people who don't even know what's in the bill," Lott said. He added that the "leadership will have to be prepared to do what needs to be done."

"leadership will have to be prepared to do what needs to be done."

Is this how the greatest nation in the history of the world dies? Because its "leadership" was prepared to "do what needs to be done"?

What Trent "Judas Iscariot" Lott means is that the people who really control the US government will have to put the final nail in the coffin of the illusion that US government belongs to the American people.

Both Mike Church and Rush Limbaugh had this nailed. Church said that the Senate does not work for the American people. Instead it works for lobbyists and special interest groups and Rush said that the political class was attempting to change bosses. They are tired of working for the American public as it is presently constituted and are attempting to re-engineer the electorate.

Things seemed to be going well for the political class for decades. After WWII more people than ever were entering the left-wing indoctrination centers known as colleges and universities. By the time that the war in Vietnam rolled around it seemed that their victory was nearly complete. The teachers union was working hand in glove with the political class to dumb-down the public schools. The news media was almost 100% on board with the leftist world view and the American public was starting to look like a giant herd of not particularly bright (even by sheep standards) sheep.

Then the left screwed up and let Jimmy Carter get elected president and he was so wretched that he woke the American public up enough to elect Ronald Reagan. Then some money-grubbing capitalist radio entrepreneur went and gave Rush Limbaugh a national platform (which generated a whole bunch of other conservative radio shows because those money-grubbing capitalists are always on the lookout for a chance to make a buck) and then real disaster struck the left.

Somebody at the Pentagon let DARPANet technology get out to the general public and suddenly the sheep started getting informed and an informed sheep has a disturbing tendency to turn into a wolf. The impregnable castle which the left had built for itself with its domination of the academy and the media started to look uncomfortably like a sand castle with the tide rolling in on it.

Clearly something had to be done, but what. Campaign finance reform tried to make it illegal to criticize a politician in any effective way right before an election, when most people are actually paying attention. There is a major push to bring back the fairness doctrine which would effectively shut down broadcast talk radio. Various ideas to cripple the Internet have also been floated. One was to make privately owned blogs (like the one you are reading) subject to campaign finance laws. Others involve various ways of taxing the 'net to make it more expensive to use.

The trouble with all these ideas (from the left's point of view) is that the free market is capable of finding ways around most of them. McCain-Feingold have been circumvented to the point where they are largely meaningless (with the side effect of empowering nutjobs like George Soros). The Fairness Doctrine probably would not withstand a Supreme Court challenge before the present Court and even if it did satellite radio and Internet radio would simply grow to meet the demand for uncensored opinion. And the Internet treats censorship like damage and routs around it (unless Internet providers like Google sell out to totalitarians like the Red Chinese - and even then ways around the censorship can be found).

No, if the left wants to keep its control it must come up with a new strategy. Enter immigration reform. By bringing in millions of Third World peasants without job skills or education or even the ability to speak English they dilute the electorate to the point where informed Americans cannot prevail at the polls.

Mexicans and others from south of the border nations fit the bill perfectly. They are accustomed to living in crushing poverty so even a poor existence in the US seems wonderful to them. Even those who work hard at an honest job quickly see themselves and their families become dependant on various aspects of the American social welfare state so they are unlikely to vote in a way which diminishes the power of the political party which upholds that welfare state. Conservative talk radio, conservative Internet news sites and blogs are almost all in English so there is little chance of the new Latino voter becoming contaminated with the ideals of the American founding.

Bottom line: Ignorant Third World peasants isolated in a linguistic ghetto and dependant upon government subsidies for their housing, medical care, food and their children's education (in Spanish, of course) are easily controlled, infinitely more so than informed and self-reliant Americans.

So that's it my friends. That's how a great nation dies. With neither bang nor whimper but with a call upon "leadership" to "do what needs to be done".


PS, it is still possible to kill this abomination in the Senate and if not there there prospects for killing it in the House are much better, but you're going to have to raise holy hell (I know you've been doing that but what comes next is going to have to make what has come before seem tame). And if we do kill this thing this year it will not come back next year due to the election. However the political class will not take this defeat lightly. If we prove to them that we still run this country, not them, they will be even more determined to bring us to heel. So get used to the idea that the price of liberty is not just eternal vigilance, but eternal combat as well.