Slowly but steadily, we won people over. By the late 60's, we had an emerging GOP majority in national elections. Nixon's Watergate gave us Carter by a hair, but Reagan corrected that with gusto four years later. We continued to win the intellectual battles, as socialism failed in place after place, and the US economy showed that capitalism works best. Clinton was the exception that proved the rule, a minority president who won only by siphoning off the populist voters with Perot and only because he pretended to be a centrist AND only because the new conservative majority was so pissed at Bush because he clearly was not a conservative.
But the pain of a Clinton victory was softened because it helped the American people decide it was finally time to jettison the Dem congress that had prevented Republicans from doing much in office to actually change the leftist/socialist mixed economy that was erected unconstitutionally in the 30s under FDR. Now, we had the Congress, and with W's election in 2000, we might actually be able to accomplish things.
Well, Bush has done very little to advance the conservative agenda. His best efforts in that regard are his Supreme Court picks, which (other than the Miers fiasco) were fantastic. But on government spending, bureaucracy, immigration and a host of other things, Bush is indistinguishable from Clinton. Name one executive order of Clinton's that Bush reversed on his own, from the Utah land grab to the "wall" between justice and the FBI. He left Clinton's people in State, CIA, Justice, the Pentagon.
The war on terror has been listless at best. He should have gone into Iraq one year earlier, as Steyn has written, and as I was saying at the time, not just with hindsight. He should have been more forceful with Syria, instead of letting them attack us from the rear. He should have been actively arming Iranian freedom fighters in the hills of the north since 2002, and fomenting rebellion there, which even if unsuccessful, would tie up those mullahs so they couldn't be causing trouble in Iraq. He should be more active in Waziristan, and if it means venturing into Pakistan once in a while in hot pursuit of AQ, so be it. Stuff it Mushareff. And as a security issue, the border is a joke.
But is is as a cultural and political issue that the border is most threatening to Americans. Suppose that the numbers are right, that there are 12 million illegals in the US right now. If legalized, those people are going to be Democrat voters for at least 3 generations, based on simple demographics. There are enough of them now to sway elections in states that are getting closer, such as Arizona, Nevada, Colorado. They will swell Rat voter rolls in Rat states like California, New Mexico, and as far away as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Louisiana. Even in GOP states, like Texas, they will cause loss of house seats in Districts that are close.
However, what is far worse is that those 12 million will be 30 million within a scant 10 or 20 years, as relatives of legal citizens and the children of legal citizens come pouring across the border. That, my friends, will swamp the GOP and send it to minority status for 70 years, if not forever, because once the Dems are back in control for good, with modern technology and there own personal propaganda mills, they may never let go of the levers of power again. That GOP (I should say conservative, because the two are not synonomous) century will be cut off at its inception, before it ever got a chance to get off the ground and show what it could do for this country.
To maintain the majority that we have worked so hard for, to restore constitutional government, and reduce the size and scope of government, we have to build on the current slim majority, which is approximately 51/49, into a permanent 55/45 or higher majority. Demographic trends, excluding Mexicans, are with us--a wealthier nation, growing suburbs, more educated populace. The FDR socialists are dying off, and the battle is now between the hippie/baby boom/marxist radicals and the free marketeers who revere Reagan. The radicals are not able to sustain the intellectual argument--among Americans. But they can convince 90 percent of the Mexicans to vote with them. And that will change the equation completely.
Bush thinks that he can coopt their votes by being nice to them. But he can't, no more than the fact that the GOP supported civil rights more than the Dems in the 60s led to black support of the GOP. Dems pushed welfare, and blacks voted for Dems, and that is what poor uneducated laborers from Central America will do.
Maybe Bush thinks he needs to be nice to keep the support of current hispanic citizens, but it's not true. About 47 percent of hispanics voted for Prop 187 in California. They are threatened by a new wave of immigration from even poorer hispanics, and so long as our policies are anti-immigrant, not anti-hispanic, the hispanic citizens will not decrease their support substantially from the 40 percent or so that currently vote GOP. Most of those are Cuban anyway.
I get so angry about this because Bush is pissing away the efforts of millions of conservatives over many years, including Jim Robinson right here, to convince Americans that conservatism is the best philosophy of government, if he lets this happen. We can't let him do it--it will take another Harriet Miers times 10.
Crossroads for the Republic, if we want to keep it.
Apparently those in D.C. don't.
The question you must ask yourself is this:
Did We the People give the federal government and the industrialists the authority to strike the borders, transform the rule of law into the rule of men (amnesty), and surender our Constitution to a foreign power (North American Union and Vicente Fox)?
That is what is happening right before our very eyes this very minute.
And I'd like to thank the U.S. Senate for their clear answer to that question yesterday. Now if we can only get the House to agree with the senate we can all go back to sleep again and stop all this gut-wrenching confusion over such a simple matter as whose country it is to give away.
/whatever