A Moebius-strip election.
How can anyone be a political junkie in an election year anymore? It's all so vicious and personally slanderous, so largely irrelevant to real issues or principles that anyone of normal sensitivity has to gag. On top of that, if you're a conservative of even a somewhat traditionalist or paleo stripe, you have to feel that this year the deck is stacked against you and you are in the position of the convicted man given a choice between a firing squad and hanging.
Regardless of what the mainstream media claim, there are only three issues that matter in the 2006 election: The debacle in Iraq. The country's vulnerability to unlimited immigration. George W. Bush. Or if you look at it a different way, there is really only one, the last.
Bush deserves a complete thrashing, but he's not running for office. No one that I know of in the opposition party has any well articulated view about how to sort out the mess we've made in Iraq, and as bad as things are, they could actually be worse and probably would be if the Democrats take the gong tomorrow. As for the immigration catastrophe, it's beyond bizarre: the Dems would love to help a Republican president realize his dream of some kind of North American Union and a hispanicized Disunited States. So if you vote against the president's party, you're voting for him.
Why not just vote Republican, then? Well, for one thing, a Republican-majority Senate passed the hideous open-borders, guest-lawbreaker bill sponsored by El Presidente Jorge "El Tigre" Bush and his ruling junta. And while the Republican-dominated House heroically resisted it, El Tigre will have another go in the next session, and keep at it as long as he holds power and draws breath; and a president has plenty of incentives he can grant or withhold from members of his own party. So an unlikely Republican victory may still be feeding the monster.
What's a body to do about this weird, one-sided Moebius strip of an election?
Some bloggers I respect have argued for sitting this one out and others, in effect, for voting Republican because it can't hurt and might help. No matter how cynical we are, voting is a privilege not lightly to be dismissed, but I understand how some people feel that it can amount to giving your stamp of approval to a candidate or party you despise (just a little less than the other), or colluding with a system that offers no real choice (because neither party as a whole is serious about immigration reform, and the Republicans treat their own candidates who say that The Invasion must be stopped as plague carriers).
But the House stood tall this year, and although even another Republican majority will include a lot of new members, it deserves the chance to hold the line again. If it does, then the real work will begin: taking back the country from the international corporations, transnational utopians, social work establishment, and president who, for various reasons financial, ideological, and pathological, are determined to make us a Third World nation. The odds of overcoming their combined power aren't very good, but stranger things have happened. The history of the future is still to be written, starting now. We have chosen to govern ourselves as a republic and democracy. It may not work very well in Iraq. Here, sometimes it does.
2 comments:
I think you sum it all up very well. I agree with just about everything you wrote.
Have you heard that supposedly Tony Snow made comments about the president's 'new opportunity' to pass the amnesty bill, with a Democrat majority? I can't find the quote online, but I don't doubt it. I have been wondering whether the amnesty, if passed, would be any worse than the status quo, wherein we have de facto open borders and amnesty. In fact, maybe the passage of an actual amnesty bill would rile even more people, who are not paying attention now.
I'm just trying to find some silver lining here, however far-fetched.
VA,
We shouldn't kid ourselves. We took a beating. Yesterday's election almost guarantees two more years of open borders and makes amnesty far more likely.
If there's any comfort, it's knowing that opposition to out-of-control immigration won't go away, regardless of what laws Congress passes. The worse The Invasion gets, the more widespread and committed will be the Resistance. It is not far-fetched to expect that local jurisdictions, and even some states, will openly flout federal laws and court rulings that favor unrestricted immigration.
Post a Comment