Monday, November 17, 2014

Ross meets Moe and Curly; hillariy ensues







                                                                                       
Ross, Moe, and Curly
who doesn't belong here?



Here's a clip from Ross Douthat's "The Great Immigration Betrayal" from Sunday's New York Times:
IN the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.

First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.

This is where the administration has entered extraordinarily brazen territory, since part of its original case for taking these steps was that they supposedly serve the public will, which only yahoos and congressional Republicans oppose.

This argument was specious before; now it looks ridiculous .... there is no public will at work here. There is only the will to power of this White House.
Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed.
The legal issues first. The White House’s case is straightforward: It has “prosecutorial discretion” in which illegal immigrants it deports, it has precedent-grounded power to protect particular groups from deportation, and it has statutory authority to grant work permits to those protected. Therefore, there can be no legal bar to applying discretion, granting protections and issuing work permits to roughly half the illegal-immigrant population.

This argument’s logic, at once consistent and deliberately obtuse, raises one obvious question: Why stop at half? (Activists are already asking.) After all, under this theory of what counts as faithfully executing the law, all that matters is that somebody, somewhere, is being deported; anyone and everyone else can be allowed to work and stay. So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.

The reality is there is no agreed-upon limit to the scope of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law because no president has attempted anything remotely like what Obama is contemplating. In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home. None of those moves even approached this plan’s scale, none attempted to transform a major public policy debate, and none were deployed as blackmail against a Congress unwilling to work the president’s will. (continued)


Here's the lede from Thomas "Moe" Friedman's "Who Are We?"

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — THE 9/11 suicide attack, spearheaded by 19, mostly Saudi, young men in the name of Islam, ignited a debate in the Sunni Arab world about religion and how their societies could have produced such suicidal fanatics. But it was quickly choked off by denial, and by America’s failed invasion of Iraq. (Huh?)


Here's the lede from Nicholas "Curly" Kristof's When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 3

SOME white Americans may be surprised to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu describe Bryan Stevenson, an African-American lawyer fighting for racial justice, as “America’s young Nelson Mandela.”

Huh? Why do we need a Mandela over here? We’ve made so much progress on race over 50 years! And who is this guy Stevenson, anyway?

Yet Archbishop Tutu is right. Even after remarkable gains in civil rights, including the election of a black president, the United States remains a profoundly unequal society — and nowhere is justice more elusive than in our justice system.

Must I explain anything?  I didn't think so. You're wel ... Whats that? Yes, Ross Douthat is the lone conservative. Is that it...  Jack from Anchorage, what's your question? ...  Okay; I can't begin  to explain Friedman's "America’s failed invasion of Iraq." Nobody can.  Anyone else? Yes, you, in the back.  Explain Kristof's blanket charge of white racism?  Who let you in?  Read this; then  write a 500 word synopsis.  And ditch the CHE tee-shirt.  Sheesh.

3 comments:

Rodger the Real King of France said...

I was 98% finished with this when the power blipped off. Bloggers can appreciate the horror. It's like when your bride dozed off from too much champagne in the middle of the honeymoon consummation ritual, and then woke and asked "do it again." The original was flawless. Sigh.

Kim du Toit said...

Unless Bryan Stephenson has founded a terrorist organization intent on overthrowing the government by means of a violent revolution, he ain't no Nelson Mandela.

Chadd said...

You're right, Kim, the Democrat Party was around long before Bryan Stephenson.

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