The only reason I watched the SOTU tonight is to see what Bush would say on immigration, and to hear Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) give the Democrats’ response. Interestingly, this is the second year in a row when a Virginian has given the Democratic response; last year that duty went to Gov. Tim Kaine, who was then, like Sen. Webb now, in the first month of his term. NBC’s Bio of Webb shows that he and rapper Eminem have something in common: They are both natives of St. Joseph, Missouri.
From Bush on immigration:
Extending hope and opportunity in our country requires an immigration system worthy of America – with laws that are fair and borders that are secure. When laws and borders are routinely violated, this harms the interests of our country. To secure our border, we are doubling the size of the Border Patrol – and funding new infrastructure and technology.
Doubling the size of the U.S.eless Border Patrol? That’s not hard; there just came two openings because your JustUs Department saw them tossed into Federal prison for doing their jobs. You could increase the BP by 100 times, all for naught. The Ramos/Compean case was a shot across the bough — Don’t they dare do their jobs.
I have proven before in this medium that “technology” is a cop-out. And “infrastructure,” Mr. Bush? In light of your opposition to walls or fences, what does infrastructure entail?
Yet even with all these steps, we cannot fully secure the border unless we take pressure off the border – and that requires a temporary worker program.
That won’t take any pressure off the border, that would only explode the flood of potential “arrivals.”
We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis……We will enforce our immigration laws at the worksite, and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers – so there is no excuse left for violating the law.
That’s contradictory, because when “guest worker” status is granted to illegals, then there will be no need for employers to “verify the legal status of their workers.” There wouldn’t be any excuse left for violating the law, because there would be no immigration law to violate.
As a result, they won’t have to try to sneak in – and that will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers, and criminals, and terrorists.
They’re not “sneaking in” as it is now. I have heard reports from people on the scene that Mexicans and OTMs are just walking across the border calmly and reasonably, as if they were crossing a street, all in plain sight of U.S.eless Border Patrol agents, who (are made to) sit there and do nothing. And should one or two actually chase down a drug smuggler, Bush’s JustUs Department will throw them into Federal prison using the testimony of said drug smugglers.
We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals.
The “assimilation” philosophy worked when the “arrivals” were exclusively white. It won’t work now that the immigration system wants anything but white.
And we need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country – without animosity and without amnesty.
There is no need to “resolve the status of illegal immigrants.” They’re already “illegal,” that’s enough “resolution” for me. Deportation would be the final touch on the “resolution.”
I wonder why there is “animosity” over the whole issue. Could it have something to do with the 12 Americans a day that die at the hands of illegal aliens, not to mention the racial replacement and dispossession of whites (and blacks) that occurs where new unwelcome arrivals settle?
Convictions run deep in this Capitol when it comes to immigration.
For good reason. Immigration is ultimately a racial issue, and race is the keystone to who a person is. It’s not amenable to the kinds of compromises that issues like income tax rates are.
Let us have a serious, civil, and conclusive debate – so that you can pass, and I can sign, comprehensive immigration reform into law.
Let us have a serious, civil and conclusive debate – that will mean that “comprehensive immigration reform,” known in the real world as soft amnesty, is dead on arrival.
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Now on to Sen. Webb. There were some good parts and some rotten parts in his eight minutes. The problem is that the good and bad parts contradicted each other philosophically. He tried to invoke themes of human particularism (nationalism) and human universalism (globalism). Honestly, he can’t have it both ways.
The good news:
We are looking for affirmative solutions that will strengthen our nation by freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil, and spurring a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs.
And:
Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world………Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.
And:
In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also.
And:
When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.
And:
With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years.
This sentence suggests that Webb’s problem with the War in Iraq is not that it exists, but the politically correct way it’s being conducted.
However, the bad news:
…addressing such domestic priorities as restoring the vitality of New Orleans.
And:
The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world.
And:
But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy…
What Webb and others must realize is that the same rancid sense of human universalism and internationalism that forces Americans to spill blood for a no-win politically correct cause of turning Arab-Moslems into white republicans (lowercase “r”), imposing a form of government on them that they are incapable of understanding or cultivating, and punishing American troops that actually fight this war like it was a war, the same rancid sense of human universalism that begs racial pandering and integration which has us turn a blind eye to the sorry Negro dump that New Orleans was pre-Katrina, such that we have some sort of mythical obligation to “restore” its so-called “vitality,” is the same rancid sense of human universalism that dissolves the “historic backbone of the middle class.” Globalism is globalism. Nationalism is nationalism.
Other than that, here are some points from Webb’s speech which are worthy for comment apart from these concerns:
I’m Senator Jim Webb, from Virginia, where this year we will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown – an event that marked the first step in the long journey that has made us the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth.
It’s also where we did celebrate Robert E. Lee’s 200th birthday. With all your campaign rhetoric about “Southern Heritage” and “Scots-Irish heritage” therein, and surely this is what earned you many white votes in the sane part of Virginia, the rural parts safely distant from the D.C. suburbs, where is your adulation for Robert E. Lee, Mr. Webb?
When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times.
I agree with this; the Feds should make rules setting a number-of-times maximum that executives of publicly-traded corporations could be paid relative to the average of entry level employees of the same corporation. It wouldn’t be an overall maximum, but it would set the tone that executive pay should be commensurate with the pay of average workers and of overall corporate health, without the capricousness and greed of “golden parachutes,” et al. The better the average workers do, the better the executives can do. But the vectors shouldn’t be headed in opposite directions.
Further, this is the seventh time the President has mentioned energy independence in his state of the union message, but for the first time this exchange is taking place in a Congress led by the Democratic Party. We are looking for affirmative solutions that will strengthen our nation by freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil, and spurring a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs.
If we and the rest of the world can find a way to eliminate the need for Middle Eastern oil, it would do more to win the War on Terror than ten times the world’s aggregate military might. The Arabs would have to revert to rock gathering, impotent to translate their racio-religious fanaticism into actual terrorist violence.
College tuition rates are off the charts.
And your party is in the process of making it worse, by mandating a sharp cut in student loan rates. All that would do is allow colleges and universities to jack up baseline tuition charges.
In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.
That’s contradictory. Economic globalization’s raison d’etre is to dissolve the middle classes of the world, to create a severe two-tier classist system, the small number of elites up on the hill, and the masses of paupers crowded in the filthy, polluted, diseased valley, a la Latin America, Africa, Los Angeles County, and other third world countries. Webb is an idiot if he thinks that there can be negotiations or concessions with the big bad globalization wolf so that middle class Goldilocks can survive. To keep the middle class, globalization must be repudiated, and economic nationalism must be the order of the times for government policy makers. Also, immigration is a big reason why the American middle class is withering a way, but curiously, Mr. Webb says zilch on immigration.
In the early days of our republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American-style democracy – that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street. We must recapture that spirit today.
Andrew Jackson also despised central banking. Does this mean that you’re going to start an effort to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, Mr. Webb? I hope so.
The House just passed a minimum wage increase, the first in ten years, and the Senate will soon follow.
One more time people. The minimum wage is a substantively ineffective way to raise the living standards of lower-paid workers. Either a price floor (which the minimum wage is) is “ineffective,” i.e. minimum wage is below prevailing market wages, meaning minimum wage might as well not be law, or it is “effective,” meaning a surplus of the supply of workers compared to demand, i.e. unemployment.
The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable – and predicted – disarray that has followed.
The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism. And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.
As great of a military tradition you and your family has, and with the possibility that your son, as a Marine serving in Iraq might have to stay a little longer in the spirit of President Bush’s “troop surge,” I would have hoped that you would know implicitly that this kind of rhetoric at this time amounts to sedition, and lending moral energy to the Arab-Muslim enemy. For shame.
The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military.
I agree. They want to dump the PC and win. Demanding the pardon of the Haditha Eight would be a good start.
But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.
Screw that. The only thing Arabs understand in this realm is brute force.
Regarding the economic imbalance in our country, I am reminded of the situation President Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.
Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves “as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.” And he did something about it.
Roosevelt was also a racial realist, a “white supremacist” by today’s standards. Contrast that with Webb’s skullduggery about rebuilding New Orleans.
As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. “When comes the end?” asked the General who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became President, he brought the Korean War to an end.
Korea, Vietnam and Iraq are a lot alike in the half-baked PC globaloney way that we “fought” in those wars in a no-win fashion/intent.
These Presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world.
Once again, you’re concerned about “relations around the world” when it comes to military engagement, but you rightly doff the world when it comes to American economic health. Get it together, man.
Curiously, Sen. Webb said nothing on the immigration issue.
