a New York Times pro-amnesty editorial, annotated

Today the NYTimes published yet another pro-illegal alien editorial
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22mon1.html?_r
=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print)

[My comments in brackets, italicized.][Emphases mine.]

October 22, 2007

Editorial

Ain’t That America

Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.

[in Propaganda 101 you're taught to start with a Mom & apple pie statement everyone must agree with--then you juxtapose it with your propaganda point--as if just putting it next to something true makes it true too. Even if you advocate on behalf of illegal aliens you shouldn't accept such dishonesty. It degrades your cause.]

We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities

[Um, the "economic reality" is that corporatists here and elsewhere use illegal immigrants to bust unions and drive down wages of native-born unskilled workers. I love the delicate way ideologues have of alluding to these dirty facts--and of "forgetting" the demonstrable decline in prevailing wages for unskilled labor in direct correlation with the availability of illegal alien labor.]

and is based on good sense and fairness.

["good sense" = only my side has any kind of reasonableness. If you don't agree you don't have good sense--you're stupid or bigoted or both. This is an example of loading the dice instead of giving the other side any credence, while at the same time pretending to argue fairly by using fair-sounding terms like "good sense." This is the kind of condescending rhetoric ideologues love, and they probably couldn't sum up the real arguments of the other side if you paid 'em.]

But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide

["tide" --ideologues use adjectives to discount the other side's points and magnify their own, whereas factual statements pin one down. In this case "tide" doesn't seem like a discounting, except that the numbers of illegals coming over the border would be more accurately described as a tsunami here in the southwest, where--to cite some check-up-on-able facts, these days the most-watched TV station in the nation's third-largest city only broadcasts in Spanish, and across America the proportion of Latinos has gone from under 2% in 1940 to 14% today.],

and a national mood of frustration and anxiety

[i.e., anybody who disagrees with me about immigration has mental problems--it couldn't be that those who oppose immigration have actual reasons to do so--they must be almost mentally ill. Otherwise they'd agree with me, since I am inerrant

that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear

[We are a society in which honest disagreement has been medicalized. "You who disagree with me aren't just wrong--you're sick in the head." This may have gotten started by the Soviet Union's Communists, who put numerous dissidents into insane asylums. And of course when you hurl so many insults at the people you're presumably trying to persuade, it shows that you aren't trying to persuade at all--just to rally your base. Here it's being done by self-described liberals. But Bush has been doing this for over six years straight. ].

Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately

["disproportionately"="Why aren't you equally upset about the five Estonians who are here illegally? You must be a racist! Racistracistracist!" Well duh--the vast majority of illegals are Mexicans. Add their Spanish-speaking Mesoamerican compatriots and you get perhaps 85% of illegals being Spanish-speaking, Latino peasants, mostly with the education level of a typical American high school dropout minus being able to speak English. I'm not seeing American TV and radio stations being replaced by ones that speak in Estonian rather than in America's common tongue. I'm not seeing America's vibrant multicultural society being replaced by monolithic Estonian ghettos. I'm not seeing Estonian gangbanger writing on walls and bridges etc. I'm not reading about Estonians ethnically "cleansing" neighborhoods of blacks. I'm not reading about Americans being killed by Estonian drunk drivers. And I'm not seeing Estonians flooding our emergency wards and schools on my dime. So yeah, I am more concerned with Latino illegal immigration than I am with Estonian, because I took statistics in college.

shorthand for on an entire population of people, documented or not

["undocumented" is goodspeak for "trespasser"],

who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor

[i.e., "You're racist! racist! racist! because you reeeely hate all those Mexicans. You're lying when you say you just oppose illegal immigrants. You oppose all Mexicans, illegal or not." Well, there's an element of truth in this. In 1940 Latinos comprised under 2% of the American population. Now they're 14%. And the bulk of that comes from several previous amnesties granted--each time for the last time--to earlier waves of illegal immigration, each promised to be the very last time, and from their children, who have established the educational record you'd expect from the children of uneducated peasants--an amazing level of high school dropouts and teen pregnancies, producing a multigenerational underclass, three quarters of whom demonstrate in their voting patterns more allegiance to Mexico than to their country of citizenship. I have never met or heard an immigration opposer who didn't welcome hardworking legal immigrants with enough education to actually contribute to our society, regardless of nation of origin. I'd welcome the Mercedes Benz Mexicans I knew when I lived in Mexico City. But of course they've got too sweet a deal to move here, since they've appropriated so much of Mexico's wealth to themselves and ruined Mexico's village society nationwide.].

By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.

The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions.

["moderate= me; extremists=you...by definition." Nobody who opposes illegal immigration thinks the NYTimes editorial board is moderate on this issue. And over 3/4 of Americans oppose the positions taken by the NYTimes editorial board on this issue. So 3/4 of America is "extremist?" Oh really?]

And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.

[I watch Dobbs regularly, and on every single show he takes pains to point out his opposition to illegal immigration--and his enthusiasm for legal immigration. But this verifiable fact is an inconvenient truth for the NYTimes edit board. Nativist means you oppose any but your own ancestral culture. But Dobbs and most who oppose illegal immigration are fine with America's multicultural society--with its Anglo foundation, and with its rich evolving admixture of so many cultures and races. What we oppose is violations to the rule of law and the replacement of that rich multicultural society with huge monocultural Mexighettos across the Southwest.]

In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones.

[Sure. We can practically eliminate crime--just legalize it. Bingo. Crime rate plummets! This line of reasoning rests on the unspoken premise that illegals should be legalized and we should simply accept 10-20 million illegals. And that "good and practical" is only good and practical if you accept that premise. So debate the premise--if you dare.]

In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat”

[They're only puerile epithets if they're false, and you haven't proven that; and if you oppose name calling, why are you name-calling yourselves?]

and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers.

[This is puerile (to use the NYTime's own namecall) hypberbole. Dobbs never said anything of the sort--or even close.]

Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.

[This editorial is nothing but histrionics and outrage. Physician, heal thyself.]

Let’s concede an indisputable point: people should not be in the country illegally. But forget about the border for a moment — let’s talk about the 12 million

[possibly true, but could be many millions more; nobody's actually counted them]

who are already here. What should be done about them?

A. Deport them all.

B. Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe — not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.

C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

Forget A. Congress tried a version of B, but it was flattened by outrage.

And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.

[This is a classic example of false choice, also known as the straw man argument. I haven't heard of a single illegal immigration restrictionist advocating any of the above. What nearly all of us advocate is vigorously pursuing employers of illegals; requiring the Social Security Administration and the IRS to cooperate fully with ICE to make it impossible for illegals to work here on the books with fake IDs, as most of them do. We want is to turn off the magnet, actively hunt down felons (and if we come across other illegals while hunting felons or hitting companies that hire large numbers of illegals, so much the better), provide a free national biometric ID for everyone within our borders, deny illegals access to all social services except for emergency medical care, and overall make it harder for them to stay here than to self-deport themselves back to their homelands, from Mexico to Estonia or wherever. I've heard that after 9/11 the government made a concerted effort to deport illegal Moslem aliens, and when it did, 100s of times the numbers of those we caught deported themselves.]

The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers.

[See my previous comment, This is another attempt to simplify the stance of those who oppose illegal immigration. Of course the felons top our list of don't-want-heres. Also from Propanda 101--demonize your opposition; call them mentally ill, vicious, racistracistracist. This from America's leading newspaper: gutter politics with lofty pretentions. This is even worse than the honest racialism of the Latino activists leading the reconquista of the Southwest.]

They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions.

["airtight border?" How about just having one that drug runners can't drive across with impunity? This hyperbole conceals yet another unspoken assertion: the rejection of national soverignity. A country that can't control who is and isn't there has failed one of its prime obligations to its citizens. Note that Israel's much-maligned fence has reduced Islamofascist murder incursions radically. Sometimes, Robert Frost notwithstanding, good fences do make good neighbors.]

And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.

[Talk about unmitigated goodspeak. Vulnerable? How about the hundreds of thousands of criminal alien felons within our borders? The drug traffickers, the human traffickers, the gangbangers, the drunk drivers, the identity thieves, the con artists, the elder abusers, the muggers--the New York Times' language includes them among that "hidden group of vulnerable people." Talk about oversimplifying the issues. As for "to be hated and vanguished"...the NYTimes can't seem to distinguish between historic racist demagogues like Father Coughlin and the leaders of the American Bund--and today's illegal immigration opposers. This is 2007, not 1937, but the NYTimes can't seem to tell that. Neither Lou Dobbs nor I "hate" Mexicans. In my case, I speak Spanish, have lived in Mexico, vacation in Mexico, scuba dive in Mexico, and have no problems with the Latinos in my life. I often have chats with our mailman in Spanish, for example, and I'd be happy to have him and his family as neighbors. What I have a problem with is 10-20 million illegal immigrants who have radically altered the society of the Southwest, and the amnestyites who appear to be unconscious of what countries and cultures are and the value they have for their citizens. The see indiduals suffer and want to help them--but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Kind acts often have cruel consequences--and vice versa.

The Republicans won the last election

Yes, the Republican Party--more specifically, its patrons--won the last election, despite the Democratic Party gaining a majority in the House and Senate, and being likely to win the presidency in 2008.

The bottom line: Bonnie and Clyde didn't need to take possession of the banks they robbed permanently. They just needed a few minutes of possession.

Similarly, the Republicans only needed control of all three branches of government for six years. In this time they were able to enact laws, appoint Suprem Court justices, and set policies in place that, taken collectively, serve to enrichen America's wealthiest 1% enormously--mainly extracted from America's hollowed-out middle class. And, given the relative youth and hard-right tilt of the Supreme Court majority and the unlikelihood of the Democrats getting 60 votes in the Senate, the GOP will be able to keep the economic playing field tipped strongly in favor of that 1% for decades. Supporting player in this charade: the electoral college system, which gives rural Republican voters more than one vote per man and gives urban Democratic voters less than one vote per man.

The issues dear to the hearts of the social conservatives who prop up Republican power mean nothing to most of that 1%. What matters to the 1% is money and the power to guarantee future revenue streams for themselves and their families. Abortion, homosexual marriage, patriotism, evolution, stem cell research, church and state...these things are meaningful to the ruling 1% in the same way that a matador's red cape matters to the matador: the cape distracts the bull while the matador readies the sword.

The GOP's patrons could have made the theft more subtle and perhaps stayed in power longer. But if you grant that money and power are all that matter, they made the right decision. So to speak.

Meanwhile those patrons have already succeeded in co-opting the Democratic Congress, as practically every new law enacted attests. And if the reformers do gain power within the Democrats, it will take them decades to undo what the GOP wrought in six short years--and by then the public will have forgotten why they voted the rascals out in the first place, and the endless war on government regulation, taxation of the rich and suchlike will give the patrons' puppets another term or two to pull off the next big heist.

People who are divisive figures in politics

Some politicians are routinely described as "divisive" or "polarizing." Meaning they appeal to hard-core right-wingers or left-wingers and make no effort to build a centrist coalition. However, the term is now routinely applied to centrists as well by members of the press.

The reason is simple. Political strategists know that the average American is a centrist who's averse to extremists. Then what to do it your guy is one of those extremists? You paint your opponent as being an extremist too, whether he is or isn't. The easiest way to do this is sheer repetition, fueled by plenty of money to finance your smear campaign. Success won't be measured by attracting voters to your side, but more by discouraging voters from the other. You win just as much by getting the other side not to vote as you do from getting your side to go out and vote. The win is exactly the same--your guy in office, doing what you want.

Today, President Bush and Senator Clinton are both described as divisive figures. The problem is that Bush is and Clinton isn't. I don't say this because I support Clinton's candidacy. I don't , due to her enthusiasm for illegal aliens and disinterest in how corporate interests encourage illegal immigration in order to bust unions and drive down wages for unskilled workers. Nevertheless she has proven to be a centrist during her tenure as a New York State senator, and has won the support of many New York Republicans. Moreover, if you follow the diatribes against her in the left wing blogosphere you'll see that the left-wingers Republicans portray her as being their champion in fact regard her as a DiNO--Democrat in Name Only. And her husband was and is a conservative Democrat and a leader of the relatively conservative wing of the Democratic party. This matches her arguments and policy proposals in the various Democratic contender forums, and is reflected in her relative popularity with centrists who aren't as concerned with illegal immigration as I am.

Painting her as "divisive" is patent nonsense. Yet many in the mainstream media describe her as such when they're talking about the campaign for the presidency. This isn't because they're a bunch of Republicans--the majority are Democrats. Nor is it because their corporate bosses--mostly Republicans--have told them to smear her. They do it because they work in divisions of large corporations with no sense of journalistic mission, but only of constantly increasing profit. Even being steadily profitable isn't enough for Wall Street. In that environment, news=entertainment. Journalistic staffs are shrinking massively. It's not that the remaining journalists are lazy--they're just too frazzled to do much more than reflect the buzz du jour, whether it's factual or the result of well-financed propaganda campaigns--as is the case with making Senator Clinton out to be divisive.

As for President Bush--he has treated the 49% of the country that didn't vote for him as totally irrelevant to the governing of this country from the day he took office. His stated positions and executive behavior and Supreme Court appointments exclusively reflect the outlook of the 20% of the country that is farthest to the right. No president has been as far to one side as him in the last century. Even his supporters must concede this. And if they're honest they'll also concede that he lied to the American people in his first presidential race when he claimed time after time that he would govern from the center.

As far as in-your-face divisiveness goes, Bush wins this contest hands down. I can't name a more divisive president than him since the Reconstruction era over a century ago.

Some interesting discussion topics

* Universal ID --I don't see how we can get a grip on who's in this country without this. We also need it to prevent ID theft. There are many technical issues, but new technologies offer hope. I notice that the far left and the far right are unanimous in loathing this idea. That's a recommendation in my book.

* Finding neutral debate terms. Every emotionally charged debate going on in this country is flooded with emotionally charged language in which one side or another--or both--try to tilt the playing field in their direction. I'd like to see a discussion in which people tried to find neutral terms for the debates. I find the media to be almost criminally negligent in this area. They just use whatever term has the most vigorous promotion behind it.

Terms that should be replaced:
>"Pro life," "pro choice," "unborn baby"
>"people of color," "African American"
>"atheist," "people of faith"
>"undocumented worker," "illegal alien."
--I think "illegal alien" is actually denotatively accurate, but I'm open to another term. "undocumented worker" implies that the person has no documents, but they may well have documents from their home country; "worker" doesn't imply that all illegals are worker--it states it; likewise "immigrant." But a person isn't a worker if they're a criminal or a dependent or plan to live off welfare/food stamps/begging etc. A person is only an immigrant if they plan to stay permanently. Some do, some don't. Many plan to return after earning some money. Those aren't immigrants.
>"war on terror" --it's not a war in the conventional sense of country-on-country armed conflict; it's not terror--that's a tactic, and we're not pursuing the Tamil Tigers, ETA in Spain, or any other terrorist group except for the Islamofascists who are trying to kill us. It's a multidimensional conflict with the Islamofascist movement and certain elements in certain countries that support this movement. Now--how about a pithy term from that that isn't actively misleading, as "war on terror" is?

Neutral terms might make dialog actually possible instead of the shouting matches we normally see in forums and on the air.
-----------------------------------

* underlying assumptions. Conservative people focus on the individual's responsibilities towards the group; liberal people focus on the group's responsibilities towards the individual. So when either makes a point he thinks is quite telling and the other dismisses it, the point-maker sees the other as a traitor to all that's good & holy. They talk past each other. I'd like to see a discussion about this fundamental issue, using actual conflict issues to tie it to reality--illegal immigration, universal ID, the draft, the conflict with Islamofascists, abortion--all provide numerous examples of this talking past-ing.

For example, in the abortion debate, anti-abortion people invariable say at some point that "life beings at the moment of conception," and this is rarely challenged. But that's not a definition of "life" any biologist worth his salt would accept--unless you agreed that your nose is also alive but your hair is dead (outside the follicle).

I think the anti-abortion people are actually proposing that we're ensouled at the moment of conception, but they've learned not to make this explicit. Biologists start raising uncomfortable points otherwise, such as the fact that identical twins and chimeras are not formed at the moment of conception. And real theologists will add that there's nothing biblical in the assertion either.

Anti-evolutionists are anti-God

I continue to be impressed by the hostility of science rejectionists to God.

You can see how useless it is to argue with them about science. Side note: of course they claim they aren't hostile to science--just to evolution. At the same time, these are the sort of people who claim that you can't accept religion on an a la carte basis. Yet they fail to realize that it's even more true of science, which all rests on the same rigorous empirical foundations. You can't reject empiricism here and accept it there. You're either empirical...or not.

It's not that they're ignorant of science. It's that they're ignorant of their ignorance. You can't enlighten those who are both certain and incurious--kind of like The Decider, as even supporters of him like David Frum concede.

So I think it would be more interesting to probe such folk about their hostility to God. This is more paradoxical on the surface, since they all claim to be godly folk--indeed, the only godly folk, and definitely godlier than mainstream protestants and Catholics, who generally accept science, including of course evolution.

They're hostile to God because, from a religious viewpoint this is God's universe--right? And the way it works is How God Did It. And the way it works is the purview of science, which only turns guesses (i.e. hypotheses) into facts (i.e. the stuff that's proven, called theories, not to be confused with the lay meaning of the term) when those guesses are confirmed mathematically and experimentally/observationally--largely through predictive models that prove out.

Evolution is How God Did us and all our biological kinfolk, from bacteria to belugas. You can't reject evolution without rejecting the actual God of the actual universe. Those who do so worship themselves onanistically through a fake God they invented--a caricature of the real deal, carefully designed to justify their prejudices and cramped world view.

And this perversion of God and of religion has come to dominate the thinking of roughly half this country--and the teaching of biology in a majority of classrooms outside urban areas and college towns.