The Tide Comes Back In

From the Wire Services:

Former President George W. Bush wants Republicans to consider immigration on its own merits, not just as a party saving piece of legislation, he said during an interview on ABC's This Week. "Sometimes, it takes time for some of these complex issues to evolve. And it looks like immigration, you know, has a chance to pass," Bush said. "The reason to pass immigration reform is not to bolster a Republican Party -- it's to fix a system that's broken. Good policy yields good politics as far as I'm concerned." The bill's uncertain future in the House after the Senate passed it last week is causing some concern. But Bush argues the bill is too important not to pass. "It's very important to fix a broken system, to treat people with respect and have confidence in our capacity to assimilate people," Bush said. "It's a very difficult bill to pass because there's a lotta moving parts. And the legislative process is-- can be ugly. But it looks like they're making some progress."

Jeb Bush came out in favor of this amnesty + new immigration wave not long ago.
And I'm sure Bush Sr. supports the notion as well--he certainly did not oppose Reagan's amnesty in 86'. That amnesty produced the largest immigration wave in American history, and a baby-boom among the immigrants.
This is seen by "La Raza" (the race), as Mexicans prefer to call themselves, as an invitation to the Reconquista--the reconquering of the territory lost in the Mexican-America War. Here is the progress they've made so far in the states that we formed out of our conquest of Northern Mexico in 1848:

Pop % Hispanic
CA: 38M 39%
AZ: 6.5M 31%
NM: 2.1M 47%
TX: 26.1M 38%
NV: 2.8M 27%
UT: 2.8M 13%
CO: 5.2M 21%

Total: 83.5M 36%

Whether they try to make a clean break with the Union or not (and I do hope they provide the Western World with a lesson sorely needed), they will have at least de facto political control over most of the old Mexican Cession within 10 years. Considering how Mexicans run Mexico, optimism here would be a lie so large that only our elite could get away with it. And, remember, La Raza recovers its lands with or without the pending amnesty. As usual in America, it's merely a question of whether leftist results are achieved quickly or slowly. The direction is always Left. We live in a one party state that showers the blessings, and only the blessings, the rewards without the risks, of capitalism upon the elite and inflicts socialism upon the vast remainder. The only decent political position that remains to us is dissidence, outright opposition to the sick alliance of egalitarian moral fanatics and crony capitalists who now run the country untrammeled.

Another Bush Legacy of Incompetence

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?ref=world 20 different, incompatible police training programs operate in Afghanistan. Bush had the responsibility to rationalize this system and he did not. This incompetence costs lives (including American lives) and money. The former Moron in Chief is culpable. Obama has now required standardization to fix another of the Bush disasters.

The Left and Reality: An Untenable Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwIQmWSh6ds

Apparently Obama believes that because he possesses rhetorical skills superior to Bush's he can juke the public and convince them that his plan is a move toward a constitutional detention regime. Renaming the process does not constitutionalize it. Maddow does a fine job breaking down into digestible pieces Obama's inconsistencies.

 

This is a good explication of the dilemma Obama has inherited (watch from 2:55 on):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsT1vw_EGOg&feature=related

This is the actual qoute from Justice Brandeis that the professor attempted to paraphrase:

 

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

 

I think this warning applies to Bush and to Obama. Of course, the latter, as a former "professor" of constitutional law, ought really to know better. And maybe he would, if he had actually been a professor instead of the beneficiary of a sinecure with the title of "professor." What Obama does not mention is the reality of a trade-off here. Do you want to play nice and adhere to the constitution or do you want to risk some blowback from deporting and potentially releasing some of these guys? Like Bush, Obama wants to have it both ways. But the contours of the constitution will not succumb to inventive euphemisms.

The Scorched Earth Strategy

Bush and the republican sheep who followed him have put the party into such a hole that nationalized health care may be unstoppable this time. Bush and Greenspan also managed to severely damage the reputation of capitalism. From the beginning, even before he was elected, I wondered who was behind Bush, who the real power and brains could possibly be--I could never conceive of Bush being anything other than a puppet. But, I still wonder, who are the puppetmasters? Cui bono? It's too depressing to believe the straight story, that the entire Bush era was a succession of stupidities and accidents.

Safeguards against Tyranny

The recent Boumedienne opinion from the Supreme Court corrects another folly of the Bush regime: holding captive men who were suspected of being terrorists or combatants with no proof that they were such. This means that some dangerous individuals are likely to be released due to insufficient evidence against them, which is a price we can and must pay. Sometimes there is evidence that they had planned to become combatants (letters or email messages saying so, for example). Practically, it is difficult to find sufficient evidence in many cases; and a further difficulty arises in the form of evidence that may be decisive, but threatens national security if provided to the court.

However, the Bush administration's solution of arbitrarily imprisoning anyone who in their unsupervised and unaccountable opinion might pose a risk to America is not a defensible proposition--as the Supreme Court finally indicated. Without this judicial check upon executive authority we give the President the option to exercise tyrannical power. In fact, this is the very definition of tyranny: unchecked executive authority. Contra Bush, we must exchange this exacerbated risk of tyranny for the certain contingency of facing some of the released prisoners on the battlefield. Of course, a further benefit to doing justice is that a competent public relations machine will ensure that we are also seen to be doing it.

I would define my position as intelligence reinforced by skepticism, spiced with some misanthropy. I do not trust our government; nor do I trust the people running it. I never have and I never will. Consequently, I favor the imposition of transparency and accountability upon government actions and agents whenever this is practical.

Some might reject the Court's decision as too charitable to our enemies. But, in terms of altruistic sacrifice for our principles--is it simply altruism? By flaunting its brutality and injustices, the Bush administration encourages anti-American sentiment around the world, and even at home. This costs lives, and not only money and power. Apparently, the critics adopt a more cynical perspective on this issue and assume that our actions and our image in the world have no impact upon this anti-American sentiment. I am not so pessimistic as to believe that we have no control over international perceptions of America. And such perceptions, among our allies and our enemies, absolutely matter. They matter economically, militarily, politically, culturally--and their importance increases apace as the world becomes ever more interconnected and interdependent.

A Republican in Name

I think in the end those who should be most pleased with the Bush administration and its consequences are the Democrats. Bush (and the congressional peons who enabled him) has inflicted more damage to the Republican party than anyone since Nixon--though Nixon was more competent in certain respects, he was probably still worse than Bush in a total accounting. It must be recalled that Nixon got a lot of people unnecessarily killed in Vietnam, that he was an extremely aggressive regulator, a most enthusiastic socialist, an architect of race-based selection in America, an inept manager of the economy, a totally cynical politician, and, of course, Mr. Watergate. And his timing was wonderful too, continuing the disastrous momentum built up by LBJ. Bush was simply never energetic enough to do as much long term damage as these catastrophists. All that now remains for Republicans is to wait, and hope that the Democrats blow their chance at once again building up the kind of political dominance that FDR created for them after Hoover's failed regime. In any case, it looks like the Republicans are in for a long period of reflection on the mistakes of the last 8 years.

Discovered: The Source of Bush's Self-Confidence

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
-Albert Einstein

The Politics of Collapse

When it comes to the federal housing agencies and the housing policies that they facilitated, Bush mainly followed the example Clinton set with a bit more vigor. However intensively the republicans spin this, it will be seen as another failure for Bush and the party he has done so much to discredit.

If Obama can't win under these circumstances (unpopular wars, stagnant economy, worst financial crisis since Great Depression, housing collapse, unpopular republican president, superannuated opponent matched with neophyte assistant opponent), McCain will still find himself confronted with a Congress heavily stacked against him on most policies.

Bush and Obama

Apparently Bush recently adopted a new strategy that involves attacking targets in the Tribal Areas without Pakistani permission. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11policy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin Didn't Obama get hammered by the right a few months ago for saying that he would do just this? I believe he said that he would attack a known Al Qaeda meeting in Pakistan even if the Pakistanis declined to approve the attack. Am I missing something here? These Tribal Areas seem analogous to N. Vietnam, with Pakistani military and intel leaders acting as China did in the Vietnam war. Both would be difficult to conquer by invasion, due to guerrilla activity and a landscape that supports such activity. Of course, the fact that the Tribal Areas are a part of Pakistan makes them even more problematic than N. Vietnam was. An invasion would surely provoke further support for the guerrillas by their state backers or even a direct confrontation with that state. But, without an invasion the cross-border attacks continue indefinitely and threaten the stability of their target. Unfortunately, American operations in the Tribal Areas will probably turn the Pakistani people against us and could destabilize Pakistan.

Republican Prospects

This is an analysis by an author at a conservative think tank. Basically, he explains how the Bush cabal has succeeded in shrinking and perverting the Republican party--also how his malign influence can be reversed in future. A cogent analysis I think, though he skips a few important issues and seems to underestimate the difficulty of bringing medical costs under control by any means short of draconian nationalization.     http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07Inequality-t.html?em

Interesting Social Proposal

http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.24092/pub_detail.asp This may not be an ideal solution, but the principles from which he derives his proposals are sound and it's far better than persisting with the status quo. This is what the Republicans should have been doing during the Bush administration on the domestic front--instead of inventing a new Medicare handout and letting a bunch of feminists pursue a Title IX inquisition into our best university science and engineering programs.

A Good Bush Policy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/13/AR2008071301723.html I proposed this policy in my law school thesis as an important way of getting the developing world on board to achieve climate change mitigation. It should capture a lot of low-hanging fruit (ie, cheap ways to reduce emissions) and encourage a more conscious environmental ethos among third-world governments and businesses. Though modest in size and impact, it would at least make a good start in this area of mitigation. But, more important is the potential for it to create positive momentum on a number of levels: the sense of international equity, economic structure, technological dispersion, efficient allocation of emissions reductions.

Opening Bid

http://www.energyxxi.org/xxi/open_letter.html This is an open letter sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, which was slightly pro-business in its leanings the last time I checked. This is a crushing indictment of most of the Bush administration energy policies, signed by some of his former cabinet and other executive officials. I take this to be a blueprint for what an intelligent republican administration (perhaps McCain's) would pursue as its energy policy--though, with a democratic Congress, compromise would be inescapable. I consider it an interesting update on what the "business/security first" types are willing to concede to the environmentalist elements and what they demand in return. Mostly they seem clever enough to at least go for "dual-use" policies: those environmentally friendly policies that are also good for business or security. That's something, and quite a bit more than the genius in the Oval Office is prepared to sign on for.

How Many Times Has Bush Shot America?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html?em&ex=1216267200&en=68581e548380028b&ei=5087%0A

Is it really possible that the Republican Congress in 2006, during a Republican administration, could set these wheels in motion? From the Democrats one might expect this sort of myopic infantile pandering, but from the Republicans? Aside from the Iraq invasion and the climate change issue, what most disappoints me about the Bush administration and his Congress (2000-2006) is that they adopted so many of the worst habits of the Democrats--this is merely one of many examples. I suppose the most notorious instance remains Bush's vast new Medicare entitlement program (the costs of which his people criminally and, I believe, intentionally underestimated when trying to push it through Congress). But this, working toward a new quota system in our university science departments, this is as much as to stab a vital organ necessary to the life of American competitiveness in economic and military spheres.

The Torture Obsession

On the torture question we have not, as we ought to have, held to the moral high ground in the struggle to prevent terrorism. We can afford still to hold this ground and ought to hold it, even at the inescapable risk of paying a tangible price. Instead, we have begun the descent toward the moral level of the enemy. And the further we proceed on this path the closer we come to aiding and abetting the enemy in our defeat. I define defeat as the destruction of our culture and value system, and, thus, by definition whatever is necessary to sustain their existence. Survival of our government and national borders and military, at the cost of the destruction of this essential core is not an end for which I would fight or sacrifice. The Bush people apparently believe that the Anti-Terror struggle can be won without resort to the public relations campaign that was a major element in our victory in the Cold War. In this they are dunces. P.R. is even more important in this struggle than it was in the Cold War, because information is much more easily disseminated now than it was then. And virtually all the terrorists seem to be ideologically-motivated volunteers--as few Soviet soldiers were. Torture, rendition, detention without trial, heavy-handed encroachments upon the rights of American citizens--all of these tactics function as the most effective P.R. for the terrorists and Islamo-fascists.