Immigration Fools

Here's an old PR not-quite truism for you: We in the biz spend half our time trying to get our clients into the paper and the other half trying to keep them out of it.

Fred Thompson, at ABC Radio via RCP, has a political spin on the same:

But there's an old saying in Washington that, in dealing with any tough issue, half the politicians hope that citizens don't understand it while the other half fear that people actually do.

He's speaking of the comprehensive immigration bill, and I think the same can be said of the Senators: Half don't understand it and half are afraid of those who do, including both immigrants and those who want to fix the immigration mess. Thompson's' prognosis is gloomy:

No matter how much lipstick Washington tries to slap onto this legislative pig, it's not going to win any beauty contests. In fact, given Congress's track record, the bill will probably get a lot uglier -- at least from the public's point of view. And agreeing to policies before actually seeing what the policies are is a heck of a way to do business.

But it is, unfortunately, the way American government, from city councils to state legislatures to Congress, does business. City councils may be better than the others -- we cling to the belief that our home town handles things well enough -- but it's clear that most of the millions of pages of legislation passed annually are never read well enough to merit a yea or nay vote.

Some would point around at the great American nation and say, "Who cares? It obviousl is working well enough," but it's not. Look at government waste, welfare fraud, hyper over-regulation of the environment ... look at the mess the last "comprehensive" immigration bill made of things.

NZ Bear pointed out yesterday that the new immigration bill is "bigger than the Bible, and not nearly as enlightened." And the staffers are still writing the immigration bill, so the ratio will only get worse.

Incredible Wife got an email yesterday from some organization hunting up bucks to push for tougher immigration laws. We ignored it because the headline was basically TEOTWAWKI.* The bill is not that.

It's not what we wanted and anyone who thinks the illegals will play be its new rules ought to reference the smaller tome in the accompanying photo, open to Proverbs and read the 47 illuminating verses there about fools.

Maybe they're foolish like a fox. Let me contemporize Proverbs 17:24 for the occasion:

A discerning man keeps wisdom in view, but a fool's eyes wander to the ends of the earth ... like Mexico, where we Dems can get enough votes to crush the elephant in every election.

And the GOP's complicity in this bill? Back up a few verses to 17:16:

Of what use is money in the hand of a fool, since he has no desire to get wisdom? Yea, Chamber of Commerce and Farm Bureau gold is good enough for the GOP fool, so he will calleth it wisdom to give them cheap labor.

I'm not a proponent of shipping the 12 or 15 million illegals back to where they came from because it's too Gulagish, too expensive and too impractical. I am for securing the borders now, recasting ICE and the INS with streamlined regs and processes, and making it increasingly difficult, law by law by law like Chinese water torture, for illegals to stay here.

The "comprehensive" immigration reform bill appears to do none of that. Neither does it open the door for anything worse than more of the same. It is, in short, what we've come to expect from our government: Political horseplay.

Flicka, stomp once if it's a good bill and twice if it's not.

*The end of the world as we know it.