Unabashedly Unhyphenated: Pitchforks and BS at RS

I'm sure that this President would be mortified to know that George Washington would call what he's trying to pull over on us an "amnesty!" Who would have known that an amnesty can and often DOES include punishment, but exempts lawbreakers from the full consequences of their actions? You do now.

Over at Red State, the neocons have apparently seized power. The only way to characterize it is a bloodless coup by the insipid. My most recent diary entry in response to one of the Red State advocates for permanent American Mediocrity was removed, and I was warned against "coming out swinging." It would not surprise me if my posting here what I wrote there gets me banned from further participation. I see a value in what I do over there, so I do sincerely hope that I'll get beyond this disagreement without being locked out. But on the other hand, what I wrote is too important for me to allow it to be censored by some neocon dreg who just doesn't like my agenda.

The concept of American Exceptionalism is anathema to too many Red Staters for me to take them very seriously; but sadly they do have a certain cache in some confused conservative circles. Lately, I've been outright amazed at the level of ignorance of, or perhaps outright antipathy for the notion that the preservation of our American culture and ethos is vital to who we are both as a people and a sovereign nation. Americans do not deserve the imposition of one hundred million low-skilled, poorly educated, barely educable, low-IQ, and zero-upside new residents whom would be the certain result if anything remotely like the Kennedy/McCain or Martinez/Hagel amnesty plans becomes the law of the land.

I've been knocking heads with some, and in agreement with a few of the folks over at Red State. Just yesterday, I had a particularly nasty encounter with a significantly-unassimilated second-generation Cuban who took great delight in his compadre's success in running all the Americans out of Miami.

This afternoon, I happened to catch a comment by one of those who are apparently genuflecting for the death of the west. I made a diary entry in response to his off the wall comment. I guess we can be insulting at Red State as long as it doesn't cut against the grain of the site's particularly weak-kneed conservative thought. If there were an award show for coming up with asinine ways to "prove" that what Bush wants is not an amnesty, they'd take each and every one that doesn't have a RINO's name already etched permanently upon it.

Let's take a look at the comment that set me off first:

Nonetheless, as I look through the immigration threads of the past couple days, I have to admit to being a little creeped out...I think that a lot of the "solutions" people are proposing are quite frankly unreasonable and dangerous. However, I can't blame people for wanting them. When politicians let a real problem sit for too long, they tend to lose the privilege to deal with people who are willing to talk reasonable solutions. Instead, they get to deal with people who wield torches and pitchforks.

The publishers of Red State don't like hard-liners, and I probably piss them off with my presence. I play a tough role over there because there is so much weakness about the way things are presented, if Red State were crucial to the future of real (vs. neo or RINO) conservatism, we'd be screwed. There is so much misinformation, backed by Political Correctness, being tossed about over immigration reform. I set the record straight. I am frequently blunt, perhaps painfully so. I do it because some people are just flat-out ignorant about history and need to be astounded into understanding what is really going on. I'm sure I turn a lot of people off over there, but I'm equally as sure that I leave them with something to think about and at least one new irrefutable fact about what America has been that they probably did not know.

And there are times in which I put a couple of things together that prove the panderers we've elected to be liars. I finally found the words to put that heinous Bush "this is not an amnesty" lie in its place. Once the synapses fired and I put it all together, I became even more outraged.

Folks, our president and many of our Senate leaders are lying, I've known it for a long time. But I finally put the truth together: that we are being lied to is irrefutable!

Here's what I wrote:

The more I poke around here, the more this place seems infested with neoconservative, American-history-loathing, pro-illegal-alien dregs who spend most of their time, noses in dictionaries, trying to "prove" to us what an "amnesty" is and what it is not. They point to the wrong places, and with what I suspect are questionable motivations. If I wanted to be insulted by someone who doesn't like this nation's culture, its history and its core values, I'd be posting my comments over at the Daily Kos.

But since I've been slammed in a sidebar, let's just take a look at what amnesty really means from an American historical point of view:
"The first amnesty in U.S. history was offered by President George Washington, in 1795, to participants in the Whiskey Rebellion, a series of riots caused by an unpopular excise tax on liquor; a conditional amnesty, it allowed the U.S. government to forget the crimes of those involved, in exchange for their signatures on an oath of loyalty to the United States."

So class, the very first United States AMNESTY was one with CONDITIONS placed upon it. It appears, historically, our leaders have placed conditions upon amnesty and actually had the gall to CALL IT AMNESTY! What a concept! I'm sure that this President would be mortified to know that George Washington would call what he's trying to pull over on us an "amnesty!" Who would have known that an amnesty can and often DOES include punishment, but exempts lawbreakers from the full consequences of their actions? You do now.

Still, I doubt that Washington would approve of charging an absurdly small fine for something as valuable and precious as American citizenship.

Even in the case of an amnesty, our government should in no instance allow for a lawbreaker's punishment to be less than the benefit gained. Saying $1000 or $2000 fines are "punishment," but not "amnesty" while at the same time making those being "forgiven" immediately eligible for the $2400 per-year Earned Income Tax Credit is an incredibly disingenous ploy. To craft legislation that reforms immigration that does not include an amnesty...drumroll...the illegal aliens...all-of- them...need to be compelled by law in some manner to go back to where they came from and get at the end of the line.

If we are to have an "amnesty," then it seems imperative that any legislation that allows alien lawbreakers to stay must affect this nation's balance sheet in a positive way. There are numerous studies on the cost imposed on us by illegal aliens that indicate the net expense to us per migrant is in the tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. The one that seems most reasonable to me says that the net lifetime cost of an illegal alien is $55,000. Either make the illegal aliens pay this kind of fine first, plus the entire per-alien cost of running the verification program, or charge it to their employers. Further, there should be no provision for anyone granted amnesty to ever spur a migration chain by importing his or her extended family. That's the only kind of conditional amnesty that makes even the remotest sense, and it is still too lenient in a cost-benefit analysis. No reasonable person would ever run a business the way this nation has run its immigration policy. This IS our business, and we have the right to demand it be run in a fiscally sound manner.

Enacting what is laughably referred to by this President and his elitist buddies in the Senate as "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" is foolish; we learned from the Simpson-Mazzoli Act that non-enforcement of our immigration laws leads to exponential increases of those who cross our borders illegally. Under no circumstance is it wise for us to accept immigration proposals that attempt to implement amnesty simultaneously with new enforcement measures or border barriers. The only sane way to go about this, given governments' past failures in this arena, is to make our leaders prove to us over a significant time period - five years or more -that we really can control our borders and enforce our laws.

After that, and only after that, we can begin to discuss what makes sense regarding what sort of risk-penalty-reward schemes we can offer to guest workers who haven't violated our sovereignty and the rule of law.

Now that we've cleared that little "amnesty" issue up, I hope we can move forward since all of us agree that there should not be an "amnesty," right? Even the President says so.