The Chris Moeller Archives

Bush's latest front line in the War on Terrorism

Let's hope that if the United States experiences another Katrina-like disaster or 9-11-style attack during the coming months, it happens along our Mexican border. That's where thousands of our National Guard troops and nearly two billion new dollars of tax contributions will be headed in an effort to hunt down unarmed Mexican subsistence farmers and their families headed for minimum wage employment in U.S. hog butcheries and car washes. More than a thousand of roughly eight-thousand Guard members in Iowa have already been shipped off to serve to Iraq and Afghanistan as the U.S. military attempts to cobble together a world-class international fighting force of "weekend warriors," untreated depression cases, and autists. Now, we're slated to lose up to a thousand more to the treacherous front lines of the Rio Grande Valley so that our president can shore up his political base.

Blogger Steve Gilliard writes:

Bush reeks of Oedipal issues like no other president. He is surrounded by nurturing women, because his mother is as warm as Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate and his father a weak philanderer who hired his mistress to work in the White House. Imagine that as your parents? Emotional cripples who either distanced themselves or were cold and withholding, and then to fail badly where your father shone on his own merit. Mediocre student, failed pilot, drunk.

Karl Rove's gift was to create a Bush who was the opposite of the mean, hardheaded momma's boy he was. He took his willfull ignorance and turned it into a homespun folksiness. He took his refusal to get serious treatment for drug and alcohol issues into a religious conversion. Rove took the spoiled scion of one of America's richest families, with a legitimate employment history shorter than a Mob button man, into an entrepeneur.

It was a clever bit of slight of hand, but then, just as Ricky Jay only has 52 cards in a single deck, Bush only has his character to work with, and it isn't much. In the end, his wilfullness, his refusal to admit error will lead to the greatest failure, not only for him, but his family as well. Just as it was predictable that Nixon would turn into a paranoid mess and Carter would overmanage and Clinton would cheat, it is predictable that Bush will fail and run from his failure as he has his entire life. Bush is now in a downward spiral not even Osama could save him from for long. He's got three years of this to go and he doesn't have the character for it. To make his presidency work, he would have to grow up, be a man and fire people.


In his speech to the nation tonight, Bush called for human dignity and value for all human beings, but he also opposed amnesty for many humans on general principle, advocated a Senate compromise on the House of Representatives' racist immigration bill, subverted one of our most fundamental national ideals by threatening recent immigrants to learn a foreign language for true inclusion, and laid the groundwork (you watch!) for a national identity card. Furthermore, his indictment of the true villains of American immigration policy, companies who hire the illegals, suggested only that they were victims of document fraud.

He claimed that policy goals of security and inclusion were not contradictory, but in concurrent breaths uttered these two sentences-- "When people know that they'll be caught and sent home if they enter our country illegally, they will be less likely to sneak in," followed by "The reality is that there are many people on the other side of our border who will do anything to come to America to work and build a better life." Bush unwittingly put his finger on the crux of the problem for the last two decades. This very contradiction is the reason that increased border patrol, or even a security wall, would have no impact other than on our pocketbooks.

Illegal immigrants are already building that better life here, not just for themselves, but for all of us. Bush understated the importance of his meeting with Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean, the Iraq War victim he met recently at Bethesda Naval Hospital who wanted nothing more than to become a United States citizen. If Denogean has already lived here 26 years-- even fighting for his country in this administration's trumped-up war in Iraq, and hasn't yet earned citizenship, Bush shouldn't be merely "honored" to meet him, he should be humbled. Or embarrassed.

posted by CM @ 6:01 PM