Self-deportation

NYTimes liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, writing about Mitt Romney, alluded to his "inane suggestion that illegal aliens engage in 'self-deportation'.”

And here, in one phrase, is the essence of how the Democratic Party has thrust so many American working stiffs into the eager embrace of the Republicans.

"Self deport" just means "going home" if your home is in another country. Why would anyone do that? Dowd, by calling the idea "inane" is saying nobody would.

Well, they would if they couldn't get work or social services. They couldn't get those things if we adopted India's cheap, highly workable national biometric ID system, using iris patterns instead of counterfitable cards. We can use it as a virtual border fence to prevent trespassers from cashing in.

This idea is only "inane" if it's impossible. So a 3rd world country can do it but we can't? I find that assumption to be the inane one. Every single illegal doesn't have to self-deport for it to work. If a quarter of 12 million people went home, that would still be a huge improvement. And the knowledge that it was so difficult to get by here without being here legally would help dissuade others from coming, while amnesty has had the opposite effect every time we've tried it.

And the idea that America is preferable to, say, Mexico, is soft jingoism. Mexicans love many things about Mexico--it's their culture, their people, their language, their village. Very few say they came here because they reject any of those things. Many say, actually, that they don't like American culture, people, or language. They only come because they have trouble getting ahead back home (mainly due to Mexico's extreme overpopulation crisis overwhelming the Mexican economy's ability to provide jobs for all those people).

And Dowd is summarily dismissing one of the very few ideas Romney advances that aren't bogus, when he presents so there are so many fat targets presented by him every time he opens his mouth--why? Dowd doesn't realize how out of touch this makes her look, not him.

Here in the Southwest we're drowning in illegals who don't even have a high school education. Dowd's job is safe. So's her neighborhood. Her wages aren't being driven down. Her union isn't being busted. And she wonders why blue collar Americans are voting Republican?

I'm voting for Obama because the GOP is even more delusional than the Dems. But it's not because of illegal immigration, where Romney's right and Obama's wrong. It's because of the GOP being so destructive to our economy and our civilization in nearly every other regard--and it won't really act on illegal immigration anyway, as the Bush era proved. They just talk about it when they're out of office--because the GOP's billionaire patrons love illegal immigration.

See what the New York Times considers inappropriate

Today's Maureen Dowd column chronicles her trip to Saudi Arabia. She was unhappy that she was forbidden to enter a mosque--not to mention Mecca in toto. See it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10dowd.html

The NYT ran 140 comments on this article, and I'm unhappy that I was forbidden to run mine. Once again, I can't for the life of me figure out what made them censor it out--especially considering the comments they did run.

When you submit a comment, the NYT comment robot says: "Thank you for your submission. Submissions are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive."

Here's my comment:

You should have gone with us on our last trip to Bali (October 2009). Bali is 94% Hindu--all by itself in a sea of mostly Islamic Indonesia. Indonesia generally practices about as moderate a form of Islam as you'll find. But tell that to Bali's Hindus. We visited one of their holier temples, on the shore of a mountain lake in the middle of the island, visited by numerous locals.

Muslims had recently built a big blue mosque on a hillock above and behind this temple. From this new mosque, religious harangues issues from a stadium rock-class sound system every hour through all of the day and most of the night. If a Hindu ceremony was going on at the temple...tough. Listen to the true religion, you scum, was the message.

This was no fluke. Muslims are building big mosques all over Bali, every one of them equipped with a humongous sound system, used fervently, despite Hindus being the majority population all around them.

We had the same experience elsewhere in Indonesia, such as Sulawesi, which has a substantial Christian minority. But no matter.

Maureen, one travel tip: never book a hotel near a mosque. You won't get a lot of sleep.

Now our personal interactions with Muslims throughout Indonesia over six trips there in the last decade have been invariably pleasant. And we look very, very American. The problem is the mosques and the hardliners there, richly supplied with oil money flowing from the West to Saudi Arabia, thence to the rest of the Muslim world.

And what flows from the mosques is total contempt for all other religions, coupled with relentless cultural imperialism. If only they matched the Muslims on the street that we dealt with. But they didn't.

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Abusive? Off-topic? What?

The comments they did run included many by Muslims admonishing Ms. Dowd for her ignorant criticisms (from their viewpoint at least), others excoriating the entire Muslim world, others just slamming Ms. Dowd, and plenty slamming the Saudi's extra-toxic brand of Islam.

So I still don't understand what let all that through but made my comment unacceptable.