Borderline Personality: Bush Gets Right With His Racist Base
Excerpts: On the eve of nationwide hearings that could determine the fate of his immigration bill, President Bush is signaling a new willingness to negotiate with House Republicans in an effort to revise the stalled legislation before Election Day.
Republicans both inside and outside the White House say Mr. Bush, who has long insisted on comprehensive reform, is now open to a so-called enforcement-first approach that would put new border security programs in place before creating a guest worker program or path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally….
In a sign of that willingness, the White House last week invited a leading conservative proponent of an enforcement-first bill, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, to present his ideas to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office. Ms. Wolff said the president found the Pence plan "pretty intriguing."…. But one Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship.
Republicans both inside and outside the White House say Mr. Bush, who has long insisted on comprehensive reform, is now open to a so-called enforcement-first approach that would put new border security programs in place before creating a guest worker program or path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally….
In a sign of that willingness, the White House last week invited a leading conservative proponent of an enforcement-first bill, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, to present his ideas to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office. Ms. Wolff said the president found the Pence plan "pretty intriguing."…. But one Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship.
This ploy is so transparent you can see its skull and bones working behind the PR skin. It's obvious what's going to happen: in order to rouse the hard-core, hard-right base that the Republicans need in this year's elections, Bush is going to make a showy move to embrace the rabid race-baiters in the House, who want to build a Berlin Wall from Texas to California and do a forced population transfer (the way Stalin used to do) of 12 million illegal immigrants and their families – no matter how many decades they've been in the United States.
There was never any way that the Bush Faction was going to fail to take advantage of the harsh and ugly racial heat generated by the "immigration issue;" they've never yet been outflanked on the Right, and there was never a chance they would take the high road this time. Certainly not when there are gobs of angry-white-folk votes to be had.
Of course, a harder line on immigration will also bring out Hispanic voters against Republicans, but that's OK; because most of those votes will come from precincts where for some mysterious reason there won't be enough voting machines to go around, and the ones they do have
will continuously break down, and the polling places themselves will be few and far between, their locations shifted again and again before Election Day, and where millions will be spent on vaguely official-looking flyers warning poor people they will be arrested if they try to vote without first paying off their back rent and parking tickets, and where the deliberately induced confusion about polling places and the highly sophisticated "caging list" operations that falsely "prove" that voters' addresses don't match their registration will force vast numbers of people to use "provisional ballots" that will later be rejected and simply thrown away, and where unknown candidates from miniscule fringe parties will somehow receive a huge percentage of the vote at the expense of the Democratic candidate, and where armies of well-coordinated partisan lawyers will swarm polling places to intimidate voters and browbeat election officials with endless "challenges" to anyone who looks weak or confused enough to be cowed by their bullying, in the classic style of the late, great William Rehnquist, who got his start up the greasy pole this way.Meanwhile, of course, the riled-up white folk will be voting in ease and comfort, unchallenged in their well-established, fully-loaded polling places. Once again, in the now-traditional fashion, the result will be an ungodly mess of razor-thin margins and "surprising" upsets of favored Democrats and yet another completely inexplicable, statistically impossible discrepancy between exit polls and the final tally, and, in the end, a "significant win for President George W. Bush, who despite his record low popularity numbers managed to hold off what seemed to be an unstoppable Democratic tide and help the Republicans maintain narrow but solid majorities in the House and Senate."
After the electoral farce, of course, Bush will move back to the "citizenship track" option, because that is much more amenable to the elite business interests that he embodies a
nd serves. They would love to regularize their dirt-cheap but unstable illegal labor force into the formal indentured servititude of a "guest worker program." But it's doubtful that even after the election we'll ever see a final solution to the "immigrant question" (not even the one so fervently wished for by the hideous Malkinites and their ilk: mass arrests, concentration camps, shoot-on-sight border patrols, ethnic cleansing, etc.). There's just too much political hay to be made from playing on prejudice and the worst instincts of human nature. It provokes precisely the kind of rancorous division and social chaos that the Bushists need to retain their authoritarian power. They could never hope to dominate a strong, healthy democracy; that's why they keep injecting the body politic with the poison of lies, fear, distrust, greed, war and corruption.We died in your hills and we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys, we died on your plains
We died neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river, we died just the same
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios, mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees...
-- Woody Guthrie/Martin Hoffman ***