Going Down with the Ship

An interesting piece on the immigration bill by Michael Reagan.

The S.S. GOP is sinking fast, and it looks like Skipper Bush is going down with his ship. That’s only fair -- after all, he’s the one who torpedoed his own ship with the immigration-reform-bill warhead. Not fair is the fact that he’s taking his party down with him.

I can understand his stubbornness in sticking with this insane program that doesn’t do a damned thing to plug the leaking borders that are allowing the United States to be flooded with all manner and shapes of illegal aliens, some of them terrorists who want to kill large numbers of Americans -- he really has nothing to lose.

In less than 18 months he’ll be history -- one of those curiosities who at one moment wielded the vast powers of the presidency and the next found themselves with all the other John Q. Citizens.

That’s not true of the senators who stand on the bridge with him as the water rises up toward the quarter deck where they can either jump into the life boats and survive, or go down with the ship.

I’m amazed at how many of them appear to be choosing a watery grave. After all, it should be more than obvious that standing firm behind this monstrosity of a bill carries with it the death penalty -- it’s just plain suicidal.

He might not yet fully realize it, but Sen. John McCain has suddenly gone from being a serious candidate for the presidency to that of being a politician with no political future at all. And I can’t imagine how Senator Lindsay Graham could ever imagine that his strong advocacy of a bill that in the blink of an eye turns lawbreakers, some of the most serious kind, into instant legal immigrants could be helpful to his political future. Ditto John Kyl and the others.

If it weren’t so serious, it would leave us laughing at the spectacle we saw when the president went up to Capitol Hill Tuesday to try to revive the bill.

It wasn’t serious politics, it was a joke.

Did he really, seriously think that Harry Reid was going to be his friend and help patch the sinking GOP hull?

Here you have a president with a dismal 30-something-percent approval rating rubbing elbows with a group -- Congress -- that has a more-dismal 27 percent approval rating being led by a guy with a horrendous 19 percent approval rating. It doesn’t get more comedic than that.

These people are living in a dream world, and one that has not yet been shattered by the incredible backlash from Americans outraged to see their national sovereignty imperiled and determined to keep the bill from ever becoming law. The message is loud and clear: kill the damned thing or get ready to pack your bags and head for home because your political career is all but over.

To continue to push for passage indicates that the backers are either stupid, or arrogant and determined to impose their wills on the nation whether the people like it or not. When this bill emerged from the back room where it was crafted in secret by the likes of Teddy Kennedy, Rush Limbaugh took one look at it and renamed it the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Bill.”

No matter how many Democrat senators back the bill in a Senate they control, Republicans will take the blame for it. Unless the GOP roars back and in one voice makes it clear that their president does not speak for them on this issue, and goes all-out to kill it, 2008 is going to be a sorry time for all Republicans.

The late Sam Francis must be grinning up there in paradise as he watches the GOP prove once again that it is what he called it “the Stupid Party.”

After all, stupid is what stupid does. And when stupid defies the will of the American people, stupid goes under.


---Katie