Conservative Donnybrook

thanks to immigration advocates or libertarians like Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and, sad to say, Ron Paul.

Our country was yet again grievously wounded because of “free trade,” “tolerance,” and interventionism.

Would that the myriad soldiers — in Texas, of all places — had availed themselves of the duty to protect themselves and their comrades and loved ones by carrying concealed weapons, this comatose piece of excrement would have been dead after the first shot was fired.

I weep for the country that used to be the United States of America but which is now the United State of Aetna, indivisible, with tyranny, oppression, and “free” “healthcare” for all.

President Obama and his State Department reacted to the news of the imminent release of convicted Libyan terrorist Abdel Baset al-Megrahi by the Scottish Justice Ministry with peaked annoyance. The terrorist was welcomed to Libya (by cheering hordes waving Scottish flags) after being released on humanitarian grounds due to prostate cancer. President Obama had expressed mild dismay to Scotland, and made clear his studied, brusque invitation to the Libyan government not to allow any hullabaloo or hi-jinks escalate to the point where they would be too tired for school in the morning. State Department officials reiterated the Administration line, stating that “this may affect our future relationship.” It is unclear whether the United States will now rescind its invitation to Libya to attend the upcoming homecoming cotillion. The President indicated that his feelings had been hurt and, although he admired the bouquet and the perfumed card sent by Ghadafi, it may be some time before he texts back. “Only time will tell if he really means it or if these are just sweet-nothings,” said the sullen Obama. A highly-placed source inside the White House (who had recently been visiting to attend to the First Family’s spiritual needs) said that President Obama was overheard taking a page out of Ward Cleaver’s playbook, saying “I mean it, Michelle. They need a consequence, and I think grounding and possibly even a couple-thousand barrel reduction in their annual oil sales to us might just teach them that lesson.” The Scottish Justice Minister, sporting an unexplained black eye and constantly shooting glances over the old shoulder, maintained that theirs was a true love and that Libya was a good provider.

Ordinarily, I would take a good deal of time to point out that many here at the site have repeatedly pointed out the nakedness of the emperor. I would rehash the times Patriot-Act statists in conservative wool have been called on their leftism, secularism, and big-government authoritarianism. I would also bewail the unmitigated gall of such a character having the chutzpah to call his critics allies of Michael Moore, George Soros, and Nancy Pelosi.  I would loudly and often decry the shameless and unguarded honesty of those who reduce their philosophy to “kill” to the exclusion of sound economic policy, the sanctity of life, the sovereignty of our country, and a host of other issues. Normally. Not this time. This time I’ll let the argument you presented dismantle itself and show the readership of this blog how one-note, indefensible, and breathtakingly destructive your side is.

The article to which you linked, when read through the lenses of one conversant with history (which one would expect a self-described historian to do), demonstrated far better than I could of the bankruptcy of your side. Kagan starts out by mentioning the Great Depression. He failed to note any of the actual causes of that depression. He failed to take into consideration the “adventurism,” to borrow one of your words from a recent comment, of the United States leading up to that crisis. The economic decisions in the midst and wake of the Civil War (National banking acts of 1863 and 1864 which consolidated currency to fund the Union’s war; Federal Reserve creation in 1913; Aldrich-Vreeland in 1908, etc.) and the domestic and foreign policy decisions in the wake of the war (Reconstruction; almost immediate attempts at imperialism in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Liberia – all of which came about due to slavery and its end; westward expansion, Indian wars, Alaskan purchase; Roosevelt’s splitting of the Republicans, his appointments to the Supreme Court, etc.; financial, monetary, and fiscal management and mismanagement), not to mention World War I, all contributed directly to the spreading thin of the American military and building resentment throughout the world.

Kagan goes on to insinuate that, because the United States seemed to somehow ignore foreign policy, Japan militarized and Germany fell under Hitler’s sway. This is howlingly funny. What we are required to do if we are to accept Kagan’s hypothesis is to absolutely and unequivocally deny that black is black, that water is wet, or that fire is hot. Aside from the fact that it was American “adventurism” (e.g., with the Great White Fleet, which further fueled a zealous desire to militarize in newly-nationalist Japan) which thrust Japan on its path toward imperialism (read about Perry’s Black Ships and the cracking of isolationist Japan, the Meiji Restoration, the Manchurian, Korean, and Russian campaigns of Japan), we can hardly be faulted for “ignoring” Germany: we had shipped thousands of American boys there to fight, bleed, die, and kill, and had established a new world-political body to deal with the German problem only 20 years before the 1933 Nazification. One could be excused for refusing to read any of the rest of Kagan’s ludicrous bombast after realizing this, but, intrepid soul that I am, I trudged on.

Kagan engaged in your least-favorite pasttime. He had the balls to criticize Ronald Reagan (gasp! the horror!) in practically the same breath as he criticized Jimmy Carter. Calling Reagan’s policy decisions about Lebanon “failed” and asserting that these policies led to the bombing of the Marine barracks is hardly what one would expect to hear you lauding. Implicit in this is the recognition that we should not have been there to get bombed. Reagan quickly and wisely realized this and did exactly the right thing: he got out and left Israel to what it was perfectly, demonstrably capable of doing: defending itself and letting Beirut and the Lebanese tend to their own damned affairs. No more Marines were killed there after that. No Al-Aqsa,  ”Quds Force,” or Hezbollah started trouble by killing Americans there. What a concept.  What were “Reagan’s failed policies” in Lebanon? Assisting a “multinational force” along with French troops and others to “keep the peace” in a sectarian civil war. What spawned the Muslim hatred and subsequent suicide bombings? Perceived American preference for Maronite Catholics and the shelling of Druze areas which inadvertantly killed civilians.

Kagan touches tangentially and seemingly accidentally upon one truth: things now are probably more dangerous for the U.S., but because of our huge overseas presence and constant “spreading of democracy” or “war on terror” or “search for WNDs” (we really do need to find those nasty World Net Dailies) or whatever they’re calling it these days, not because we are letting our guard down.

People are growing weary of the wars, growing weary of the constant misequation of the United States of America with Israel by the radical Zionists, and people are growing weary of the stubborn economic hardships put upon them by constant imperialism. Bring Americans home to defend America. Root out radical Islam here and deport it. If the resistance starts here, put it down swiftly and with no remorse. But there is no way we need to be defending South Korea from a tinpot near-dead in charge of a run-down non-entity. There is no justification for making all those “security guarantees” to states in the Russian sphere of influence. There is no way you could possibly believe that Kagan essay if you know and understand history. There is no way you can continue to call yourself a conservative and defend such Wilsonianism. It is definitionally schizophrenic, or alternatively simply mendacious, to claim to be conservative and yet espouse this baseless, historically-illiterate, radical Ledeenishness while at the same time believing it makes us safer. Your apologists split their time between appealing to how much safer we are and how dangerous it’s getting. Your side constantly purports to support “democracy” and “freedom” while working overtime - often in cahoots with outright radical socialist would-be totalitarians – to quash them through Patriot Acts, occupations of foreign countries, propped-up banking cartels and outdated unionized auto companies (remember which President started those great things?). Your side is trying to cling desperately to relevance, which is understandable. But for whom are you striving?

On President Bush’s last full day in office, he finally addressed the injustice that had been done to Border Patrol agents, Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio Ramos by commuting their sentences. While short of a full pardon, the president commuted the sentences of the agents so that they will be freed on March 20, 2008. The two were convicted of shooting a fleeing drug smuggler who had entered the country illegally to sell marijuana and had been previously convicted of drug smuggling in the past.

It is unfortunate that, since 2005 when they were originally convicted, these men have had to serve prison sentences for defending this country from the scourge of illegals trafficking in drugs. The president should have acted sooner to redress the wrongs done to these two men. Indeed, he should have granted them full pardons. Nonetheless, I give him credit for finally doing the right thing and freeing Compean and Ramos.

President Bush has failed his nation again.  The President issued 14 pardons to day, none of them went to political prisoners Ramos and Compean. The two former Boarder Patrol agents have spent nearly two years in prison for doing their job.  Please, visit this site to urge President Bush to pardon these wrongly convicted men.

A recent advertising circular which was sent to Scottish homes has Muslim knickers in a bunch. Of course, that is nothing new – Muslims appear to be the most easily offended group of people on the planet, rioting over cartoons, for instance. Just wait until Rebel, the recruit-in-training, pokes his nose under some woman’s burka because she’s laden with high explosives – it will be accounted a religious hate crime and the fur will really fly then. If there were ever a reason to take a hard look at immigration policies in the United States, this might give one pause about whom we allow into this country.

I originally thought to call this post the “threat of anti-nationalism” which may be closer to the truth. I have recently read a pair of essays which have launched my thinking in a certain direction. On top of that come two stories out of Europe which only confirm everything written in those two essays.

The first essay was written by Victor Davis Hanson and concerns the value of cultural memory. In that essay, Hanson argues that in ignorance of the events and circumstances which made America great we risk the likelihood that we, as a people, will attribute to ourselves the greatness of America. In reality, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who went before us and provided the heritage which we now enjoy. To some extent this is what I was writing about in my previous post in attributing the great freedoms which we still enjoy to the efforts of our American servicemen and women. To be sure, they are one branch of our freedoms. It may also be attributed to the statesmen who fashioned a constitution under which our freedoms are (theoretically) secured (but which are slowly being eroded under the guise of a living constitution).

The other essay, which also made its way into my latest post, was written by Andrew McCarthy and made the case that our fight is against Islamic jihad. Or rather, the Islamic jihad has targeted America and we fail to respond only at risk to our existence.

Two articles from the Brussels Journal underscore these two essays and bring those themes into stark light. It turns out Europe is already struggling with these issues and perhaps even finds itself attempting to recover. That is, if they have enough self-awareness to struggle at all.

In the first article, a Christian in Algeria has been arrested for carrying Bibles in her handbag. The prosecutor in her case asked for three years imprisonment for such an offense. To the credit of France and the United States, we have voiced concern over the treatment of this woman in her efforts to practice her religion. Nonetheless, the spokeswoman for France locates the authority for any sort of clemency in the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights – a weak appeal if ever there was one. Many of our commentors point to our posts as being beholden to a faith in the deity of the State, but it is stories like these which reveal the sure difference between our stances and that of dyed in the wool Statists. This story is alarming not least of which is because France’s spokeswoman implies that if the population of Christians in Algeria were greater than one percent, they might pose a threat to the dominant religion (Islam) and therefore the offense of carrying Bibles might be rightly punishable. Meanwhile, France itself continues to shed any pretense at Christianity and moves steadily toward a future of sharia rule.

The second article involves our closest ally, which is committing suicide. Apparently, it is an act of racism to display the flag of England in England. Indeed, according to authorities it might offend immigrants. It is clear that England has lost any sense of cultural memory and the forces of multiculturalism are selling the country out. While England itself loses it identity, its colonies – Wales, Ireland and Scotland – are beginning to secure representation in Parliament. It is indeed fortuitous that the American colony parted ways in 1776 as the British Empire is contemplating self-immolation on the pyre of European Union, with its reckless multiculturalism.

On the bright side, America is not so far down the road as our European counterparts and there is hopefully time left to stem the tide. It is incumbent upon Americans to recognize the danger that unlimited immigration poses to this country. As France and England lose its cultural identity (and really, France? which is so fierce about protecting Frenchness?), the United States should learn from their demise and secure against it. We need to understand that there is great risk in importing large numbers of Muslims who seek to be ruled according to Koran. As McCarthy writes, Islam is not a religion of peace and jihad is not an internal struggle. Ibn Warraq, one of Islam’s greatest scholars and expositors states it quite succinctly:

Jihad is jihad…. There is no such thing as commerce, industry and science in jihad. This is calling things . . . other than by [their] own name. If God . . . says, “Do jihad,” it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades and with the missile. This is jihad. Jihad against God’s enemies for God’s cause and his word.

Let us not be duped into thinking otherwise. America would benefit from paying attention to her heritage and finding value in it. Its heritage, its history, and its habits have made America the greatest nation on earth. Those values are now under attack and there are precious few who rise to defend them. Our children no longer have a sense of history from which to respond. It is up to those of us whose education still retained some rudiment of the American tradition to stand up and say, “No more.” We should not tolerate the dismantling of our inheritance. It is to those whose institutional memory still encompasses the great patriots who told King George that his abuses of our liberties would not stand and then acted upon that statement to stand fast in the face of the multicultural hordes who would sell our inheritance for a pittance.

Liberty is a fragile thing, which Europe demonstrates is too easily squandered. Let us take note of Europe’s demise and guard against such an eventuality here.

I was listening to Dennis Miller’s radio show on the way home from work today and one of the callers had a great suggestion, which I will plagiarize now. Build a fence between Mexico and the United States out of solar panels and donate the energy to border households. Dennis and I (although Dennis didn’t know about my approval) thought the idea was brilliant. If you make the immigration issue a cause in the energy crisis and also pledge to lower carbon dioxide emissions (through solar energy) NO ONE can object to building the fence then. We’ll have a fifteen layer impregnable Maginot line on our border with Mexico within weeks! (Granted, it won’t keep Germans out).

Pure brilliance as far as I’m concerned. I would link to that portion of the program, but the capitalist pig who is Dennis Miller requires that you pay him money to get audio of his past shows. (I don’t blame him; I would do the same thing. I don’t want to work forever!)

The man who was shot in the buttocks by border patrol agents Compeon and Ramos has been convicted of drug smuggling – exactly the suspicion upon which the border agents originally stopped Mr. Davila for the first time. Ramos and Compeon are serving prison sentences now for attempting to protect our borders, but it looks like the guy they shot was a scumbag after all.

Conservative Donnybrook was but a twinkling in the eye of its founders when the Ramos/Compeon bruhaha erupted, but I think it is safe to safe that most, if not all, of the contributors to this site support the border agents in their quest to maintain order on our borders (if not, I’m sure they will give me hell for saying so). Ramos and Compeon are, to some extent, vindicated by this latest conviction.

Say what you will about McCain, but he is a man who sticks to his principles, come what may. For example, the principle that 12 million illegals should be given amnesty and allowed to continue working in the United States.

But hasn’t he changed his stripes of late?  Mickey Kaus:

 … it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that McCain hasn’t altered his support for legalization of illegals (once he’s declared the border “secure”). One reason we know this is because he’s said it–he said it again on Meet the Press yesterday, when asked if he’d sign the McCain-Kennedy “comprehensive” immigration bill as president if it came to his desk. Answer: “Yeah.”  …

What about McCain’s statement that: “I will not allow anyone to receive Social Security or any other benefits because they have come here illegally and broken our laws”?–ed Obvious BS. If he offers legalization to the “12 million” who are here they will clearly get benefits from having come here illegally–the benefit of being here legally, for one. Medicaid, Medicare, and public schooling for another. People who came here illegally would also immediately qualify for Social Security benefits as soon as they got the quickie “probationary” Z-visa under McCain’s bill.

You wouldn’t know it judging from the crookedness of all his “straight talk” on immigration.  But for some real straight talk, see McCain’s hispanic outreach guy’s comments on the Mexican-American community (again, h/t Kaus):

Mr. HERNANDEZ: We are betting on that the Mexican-American population in the United States will … think ‘Mexico first,’ and they will invest in Mexico. They’ve already been doing it–in–in–in–to a great extent.

AMOS: But that’s family to family?

Mr. HERNANDEZ: Family to family. But now I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’

Is this guy suggesting that millions of unassimilated foreigners staying largely within their own homogeneous ethnic group might have something less than total loyalty to the United States? What is he, some kind of racist?

The Lakota Indian Tribe in South Dakota has announced that they are no longer citizens of the United States.

I wonder if they’ve fully thought this out. Think about it. The land they claim is in the middle of South Dakota (I’ve been there – South Dakota, not the Lakota Reservation -  and they’re welcome to it as far as I’m concerned), but they will be entirely surrounded by the United States. What happens if the U.S. accepts their withdrawal from the 33 treaties they’ve entered into and then simply denies citizens of Lakota Nation (or whatever they wind up calling themselves) visas to visit the United States? If individuals wanted to emigrate three blocks to the United States, would they then be required to get in line with the rest of the immigrant hordes?

I cannot think that they truly wish to secede. Rather, this is an attempt at making a political statement – and, perhaps, even a valid one. The risk, of course, is the United States takes them at face value and treats them like another nation.

Yesterday, a report was released on the fertility rate in the United States and for the first time since 1972, Americans are reproducing as fast as they are dying. This is significant news for a country that relies so heavily on socialistic programs and income redistribution schemes for the benefit of the elderly, indigent and lazy.

The story had a few interesting items that I will share.

First, the REALLY good news is that “[r]ed states tend to have both more religious people and higher fertility rates.” I take that to mean that if we just keep doing what we’re doing here in fly-over country for the next 18 years or so, we may be able to take back both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Second, “[s]ome of the increase is explained by immigration. Hispanics have the highest fertility rate — about 2.9 — followed by blacks (2.1), Asians (1.9) and whites (1.86). But Hispanics do not represent enough of the population to fully explain the trend, and the fertility rate of U.S. whites is still higher than that of other developed countries.” This is interesting because it reveals that the complexion of America will be slowly changing over time. If these rates continue, even if the borders are completely shut down, America will become more Hispanic, the proportion of black Americans will remain more or less the same (the replacement rate is 2.1), and America will become less white and Asian. Politically, and after all, this is a political blog, what that means is that whoever captures the Hispanic vote will have captured a rising proportion of the population and, presumably, an ever greater proportion of the vote.

Finally, I love the fact that the life-haters are alarmed by this news:

But not everyone sees that as encouraging, given that the United States remains a leading consumer of increasingly scarce natural resources.

“The world is now consuming resources faster than the Earth can sustain over the longer term,” said Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. “Forests are shrinking. Fisheries are collapsing. Water tables are falling. Large parts of the world’s grasslands are deteriorating. The U.S. is already disproportionately responsible for that because of our very high consumption levels.”

It would seem that the folks over at the Earth Policy Institute see human life on this planet as some sort of dire threat. Seems to me that the gradual extinction of human beings itself is a threat, but maybe I’m being dramatic.

Pat Buchanan was interviewed by Diana West about his latest book on C-SPAN’s After Words.

The MP3 is here, the video here.

James Pinkerton has a wonderfully snarky column on the “virtual fence” idea that Giuliani and other “comprehensive immigration reform” backers promote. (HT Kaus.)

Here’s Giuliani, quoted in an Associated Press story from last week, headlined, “Giuliani promotes virtual fence.” Explains the former mayor, “Frankly, the virtual fence is more valuable because it alerts you to people approaching the border, it alerts you to people coming over the border.”

That sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it? After all, you use a virtual lock on your front door, right? That way, when intruders approach your house, you can spot them. And when they walk in, well, a police SWAT team is on the way. The key to this enforcement strategy, to be sure, is to respond after the crime has occurred. So it’s strange, therefore, that Giuliani insists that he wants to build at least some physical wall.

Because virtuality works better, Giuliani assures us.

It’s funny how these erstwhile advocates of amnesty insist that they support strict border enforcement, yet the idea of actually building, you know, a fence cannot be countenanced. It ain’t the Panama Canal, people, I think we’re up to the challenge.

In the little professional legal experience I have in creating a record and preparing for a trial or arbitration I’ve always been told to start from what happened first and then progress all the way through to what’s happened most recently. That way the entire story unfolds before your eyes and you can see how things progressed (or more often than not, regressed) to were they are. Applying this logic to the New York State plan to give licenses to illegal immigrants you learn something about Senator Hillary Clinton’s character or lack thereof.

First this.

Then this.

Way to drop the hammer of decision making with authority there Senator Clinton, especially in the face of adversity.

This story from the LA Times reports that six illegal immigrants were arrested after stealing food from a relief center in San Diego. As bad as it is that they were caught stealing food from people who have lost everything they owned, it is the comments of the Border Patrol agents who responded to the call that has me concerned.

According to the story:

Border Patrol agents are not looking for illegal immigrants at the center but will continue responding to police calls for assistance.

“We are not in any means at Qualcomm for enforcement capacity,” he said. “We are not there to take advantage of a situation.”

Why in the world not? Border Patrol agents take the following oath on their first day:

I, . . . . . . . ., do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foregin and doemstic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Part of that oath is the obligation to enforce the immigration laws that Congress has enacted. 

I spoke to a friend of mine about this story over lunch today and he provided an explanation of why he thought the Border Patrol is right in this instance. According to him, “They probably would rather the illegals showed up at the relief center than to have to round up their dead bodies from their homes later.” Fair enough; and that might even be what they are thinking. But seriously? Would rational people opt to be killed in a fire than to risk deportation?

Imagine that some notorious gangster on the FBI’s Most Wanted List (like, for instance, James “Whitey” Bulger, who incidentally may be in Sicily) sustained a gunshot wound and wandered into the emergency room. Of course we want the doctor to treat the wound, but we also would want and expect that doctor to report the whereabouts of the gangster to the FBI. And then we would expect the FBI to act on the information. We would never set up sanctuary ER’s where criminals could be treated for wounds with no questions asked. Why should illegal immigrants be any different? Breaking the law should get you no preferential treatment. 

It is gratifying that most of the Republican nominees have finally come to see that securing our borders and upholding the law of the land is of paramount importance. Even John McCain has moderated his rhetoric and now says that he will focus on securing the border before pressing for comprehensive immigration “reform” (i.e. amnesty). This leaves Rudy Giuliani as the sole hold-out in the Republican pack.

Marquette Warrior: Elderly Man Killed by Hit-and-Run Driver — Crowd Doesn’t Help, Steals His Groceries.

It astounds me that people could be so callous as to steal a man’s groceries as he lays dying in the street. Stories like this really push home the need for wholesale change in the way we view life in this society.

The comments to the linked story pose the question of whether the driver was legally inside the United States and it does seem a pertinent question since it seems that we hear of one story after another in which an illegal immigrant is involved in a hit-and-run. While there currently does not seem to be any evidence of Mr. Flores-Ocon’s citizenship status, there is plenty of evidence cropping up about his past criminal history (here and here).

h/t Marquette Warrior