We’re
well past the time when the form should be resurrected for President
Obama. David Boze took a worthy pass at such a project with The Little
Red Book of Obamunism (2012) but earlier posts in this series
demonstrate the need for something comprehensive and updated.
The White House has now posted the transcript of President Obama’s
remarks on immigration in Chicago this past Tuesday. The speech gives
us some truly quotable quotes to be included in Quotations from
Chairman Barry.
Here is the chairman warming to his subject:
If you
go to — I was just traveling in Asia — you go to Japan, they
don’t have problems with certain folks being discriminated against
because mostly everybody is Japanese. (Laughter.) You know? But here,
part of what’s wonderful about America is also what makes our democracy
hard sometimes, because sometimes we get attached to our particular
tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start
treating other folks differently.
Now this could (and should) lead to a profound meditation on
Americanization and the American idea, but Obama’s promotion of
immigration assaults them as well as the sovereignty of the American
people. Thus Obama continues with this gem for our anthology:
And
that [tribalism], sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think
about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this
country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks
who were already here suddenly say, well, I don’t want those folks.
Even though the only people who have the right to say that are some
Native Americans. (Applause.)
Don’t bottleneck me, bro!
In this reading, the American people have lost the right to control
immigration in their own interests. Bill Voegeli has a timely
discussion of the train of thought implicit in Obama’s remarks in his
essay “Left, Right and Human” in the current issue of the Claremont
Review of Books (currently accessible to subscribers only). Bill writes
in part on this point: “From the liberal premise that differences
between people are merely superficial, it follows that there are no
compelling moral reasons to exclude people from around the world who
would prefer to live here, not elsewhere. Who’s to say, after all, that
that their ways are worse than our ways? By what right must they change
just so we can feel more comfortable? An immigration policy compliant
with liberal sensibilities does as little as possible to exclude people
who want to come here, and then asks as little as possible of people
who want to stay.” To the standard liberal mix described by Voegeli,
Obama adds malice toward the American idea and the American people.
Obama’s Chicago speech also gave us his unscripted confirmation of what
we have been saying about his royal decree regularizing the status of
millions of illegal aliens contrary to the law of the land. Obama had
previously asserted some twenty-plus times that he lacked the
constitutional authority to alter immigration law unilaterally
precisely as he has now done. In response to a heckler chiding him for
not doing enough on behalf of the population of illegal aliens, Obama
asserted:
[W]hat you’re not paying attention to is
the fact that I just took
action to change the law. (Applause.) So that’s point number one.
“That’s point number one,” indeed. Earlier this week David Rivkin and
Elizabeth Foley elaborated on the illegality of Obama’s “action to
change the law” in “Obama’s immigration enablers” (subscribers only,
but accessible via Google here).
Full
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“People
yearn for their elected officials, their leaders, to lead to try to get
things done,” Lott said. “It is harder now, I think. My attitude is,
why would you want to come here if all you want to do is raise money
and get re-elected? Why wouldn’t you want to make a difference?… Just
to do nothing is not a conservative position.”
