The Bosque Boys

That is an amazingly fine piece of writing in a short period of time. Well done.

In re McCain: if he is a political opportunist, he is the most tone-deaf political opportunist in the history of human affairs.

I cannot see McCain as an opportunist. I think he operates by his own principles which sometimes place him among conservatives and sometimes do not. btw, I think McCain's support may be understated: personal anecdote, my Dad, who is a good judge of character, is a McCain fan. He was a conservative Democrat, but has not liked much about the party since Scoop Jackson and Sam Nonn were eclipsed. Put another way, he voted for JFK but would never vote for brother Teddy. There are a lot like him in my home state of Missouri.

Toqueville, that was dead solid perfect. I am in 100% agreement with you. And I'm glad to know I am not the only person who sees John McCain as someone who traded in his nobleness in exchange for political opportunism.

Okie, I have felt that McCain was an opportunist for some time. I think he relishes it when he is called a "maverick", but that in truth he has separated himself from the majority in order to make himself look good. What he has had a major hand in (McCain-Feingold, this heinous immigration policy, etc) has been simply awful. He may not be as great an opportunist as Hillary, but I believe him to be. And as for Democrats liking him, there are Republicans who love Joe Lieberman now because he bucked his party, ala McCain (though McCain didn't leave it). Lieberman is also an opportunist in my opinion.

Get in Line, Einstein
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Beware legislative behemoths. Beware "comprehensive immigration reform." Any bill that is 380 pages long is bound to have nooks and crannies reflecting private deals, quiet paybacks and ad hoc arrangements that you often don't learn about until it's too late.

The main provisions of the immigration reform monster are well known. But how many knew, before reading last Saturday's Washington Post, that if Einstein were trying to get a green card, he would have to get in line with Argentine plumbers and Taiwanese accountants to qualify under the new "point system" that gives credit for such things as English proficiency and reliable work history? Good thing Albert was a patent office clerk, and that grooming isn't part of the new point system.

Until now we've had a special category for highly skilled, world-renowned and indispensable talent. Great musicians, athletes and high-tech managers come in today under the EB-1 visa. This apparently is going to be abolished in the name of an idiotic egalitarianism.

I suspect this provision is a kind of apology for one of the few very good ideas in the bill -- taking skill, education and English proficiency into account rather just family ties, and thus cutting back on a chain migration system in which the Yemeni laborer can bring over an entire clan while the engineers and teachers desperate to get here languish in the old country.

The price for this lurch into rationality appears to be the abolition of the VIP fast track, which constitutes less than 2 percent of total immigration and, from the point of view of the national interest, is the most valuable. This staggeringly stupid idea is reason alone to vote against the immigration bill.

Beyond stupidity, the bill offers farce. My favorite episode is the back-taxes caper. John McCain has been going around telling everyone that in order to be legalized, illegal immigrants will, among other things, have to pay back taxes. Such are the stern requirements on the "path to citizenship."

Problem is, McCain then discovered that back taxes were not in the bill. The Homeland Security Department had argued that collecting on money paid under the table -- usually in cash, often with no receipts -- is pretty much impossible. Indeed, the cost of calculating and collecting the money would probably exceed the proceeds.

Now, nonpayment is not the kind of thing you want to defend when trying to sell immigration reform to citizens who do pay their taxes -- back and otherwise. So last week, John McCain proposed an amendment to restore the back-taxes provision. A somewhat sheepish Senate approved this sop -- unanimously.

But the campaign for legalization does not stop at stupidity and farce. It adds mendacity as well. Such as the front-page story in last Friday's New York Times claiming that "a large majority of Americans want to change the immigration laws to allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status."

Sounds unbelievable. And it is. A Rasmussen poll had shown that 72 percent of Americans thought border enforcement and reducing illegal immigration to be very important. Only 29 percent thought legalization to be very important. Indeed, when a different question in the Times poll -- one that did not make the front page -- asked respondents if they wanted to see illegal immigrants prosecuted and deported, 69 percent said yes.

I looked for the poll question that justified the pro-legalization claim. It was question 61. Just as I suspected, it was perfectly tendentious. It gave the respondent two options: (a) allow illegal immigrants to apply for legalization (itself a misleading characterization because the current bill grants instant legal status to all non-criminals), or (b) deport them.

Surprise. Sixty-two percent said (a). That's like asking about abortion: Do you favor (a) legalization or (b) capital punishment for doctor and mother? There is of course a third alternative: what we've been living with for the last 20 years -- a certain tolerance of illegal immigrants that allows 12 million to stay and work but denies them most of the privileges and government payouts reserved for legal citizens, and thus acts as at least a mild disincentive to even more massive illegal immigration.

Indeed, unless the immigration bill is fixed, that alternative is what the country will in essence choose when the bill fails. My view is that the current bill could be fixed with a very strong border control provision. But even then, let's make sure we know what's really in the bill and not distort what the American people are really demanding, which is border control first. And for god sakes, keep Einstein on the fast track.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.

bt Peggy Noonan
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

. . . .

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

. . . .