Immigration: A Modest Proposal
If it walks like a Democrat, duck

I was thrilled to hear that illegal immigrants will now be welcomed into the U.S. by our newly converted Democratic President, George W. Bush. After all, what party has tirelessly championed the rights of the underclasses and underprivileged all these years? And this on top of his massive Medicare give-away. Why it’s a grab bag of policies that must warm the heart of every respectable Democrat.

The Great Society is alive and well thanks to that great populist, George W. Bush. How else to explain his policies of his first term, except to call him what he is, a middle-of-the-road Johnson Democrat?

Back channel buzz for months from the White House, according to pundits, has them all crowing about how they’ve stolen all these Democratic issues, Medicare, Big Government Entitlements, foreign adventures and nation building, free trade. And I’m even happier to see such a reaching out to the rest of the world in other ways, like allowing them to determine the environmental and workplace rules governing production of a huge portion of all goods and services consumed by the U.S. market.

At the rate offshoring of our jobs is going, pretty soon the entire workforce of the U.S. will actually be working abroad…except, or course, the illegal immigrants we need here to take jobs “no U.S. citizen wants.” Like working in a chicken slaughterhouse with the emergency exits padlocked. Or being held prisoner on a tomato farm in Florida.

Right, who wants a job like that when you can be an entrepreneur with an empty coffee can and a sign asking for money at the off ramp of a highway somewhere? But hey, it’s all good. I’ve even got my own letterhead template on my bargain computer at home and a website: www.exit35beggar.com.

Even working at Wal-Mart is not an option. After all, they use illegals, too. Obviously because any self-respecting U.S. citizen would rather beg than make minimum wage working at Wal-Mart. Must be because he'd rather make less and be his own boss.

What, precisely, is conservative about any of Bush’s policies? Big spending, big government, big nation-building? Cutting deals with Big Business cronies, like those over-charging Halliburton rascals? I don’t think so.

Land o’ Goshen, it does seem that the New Society juggernaut is in full swing again…and don’t that beat all. The conservatives are so happy they’ve finally taken charge. Now, at last, they have been to the mountaintop…and I mean the bureaucratic Big Government mountaintop. And guess what? They’ve decided they like the view fine from up there.

So much, in fact, they’re gonna add a few more stories to it. Using illegal labor, of course. That way they can keep wages down and encourage citizens to go into one of the few job categories still exclusively open to them: the military.

That’s handy, indeed, as they’ve had to put a “stop loss” order (ain’t it funny how Wall Street lingo has entered mil-speak?) to keep our highly trained forces from quitting the services. That's the 90 day waiting period they’ve decided to force on all those getting rotated out of Iraq and who want out of the new “cops of the world” order created by our adventures abroad.

It gives new meaning to the phrase “90-day wonder.” (That was what a newly minted Lieutenant was called in WWII.) Now it means that these brave soldiers get to wonder what the hell they and their buddies were doing wandering bad neighborhoods in Iraq trying to get religious fanatics and anarchists to attack so they could catch them. Especially as it's starting to look like the U.S. will get most, if not all, its boots off the ground by the next Presidential election. The one Bush will win in a landslide for having achieved “peace with honor” in Iraq. And having learned that Johnson should have cleared out of Vietnam earlier, if he wanted to stay President.

It’s not fair to just criticize, so I will offer up a solution here on just how Bush should do it. (The same way he could have done ten minutes after the fall of Baghdad.) Divide the country along ethnic lines, now being touted by some as Federalism. Give the Kurds the north, the Sunnis the middle and the Shiites the south. Harden the old “no fly” lines, which roughly separate the three "states," from the air (you cross them we blast you). Get all U.S. troops out. Then let the Iraqis keep the peace with their own boots…and sort out their future themselves.
¶ 9:40 AM