ninme

NY Sun - Jumping the Fence. By MARK STEYN

More artfully, the Democrats’ leader Harry Reid, instead of insulting his old base, invented a new one. Among the torrent of calls from racist intimidatory talk-radio listeners who don’t know where Gulfport is, Senator Reid had somehow managed to get through to the one constituent worth staying on the line for, a man who supports the bill. Who is he? Well, according to the Senator Majority Leader, his name is, er, “Tommy.”…

Ah, but Senator Reid explained that he couldn’t identify the Tommy in question in case he was arrested and deported. This Tommy has to stay “living in the shadows”… On the radio, Laura Ingraham suggested that “Tommy” might be entirely fictional and merely Harry Reid’s imaginary friend. I proposed to Laura that “Tommy” might like to start dating John Edwards’ “coatless girl,” whose Dickensian tale of woe figures in every Edwards stump speech: apparently she goes to sleep shivering every night because her daddy was laid off at the mill and she can’t afford a winter coat. If Tommy and the coatless girl married, he could buy her a coat for $9.99 at Wal-Mart and she could fill in a routine Spousal Application form with U.S. Immigration, which only takes ten years to process, as opposed to the cumbersome and time-consuming 24-hour instant amnesty visa for seasonal fruit-pickers and seasonal jihadists contained in the Senate bill.

I loved that paragraph. I really did.

Immigration isn’t going away: Human capital is the great issue facing all advanced societies. But it’s unbecoming for a mature democracy to discuss a critical matter in such a fraudulent way. It’s insulting to tell people that to oppose this bill is to oppose border enforcement. There are immigration laws on the books right now, and they are flouted with impunity by “sanctuary cities,” states and the federal government itself. The political class tells us that a nation on permanent “orange alert” at ports of entry can’t enforce its borders, and a broken immigration bureaucracy that can’t process existing levels of applicants can reliably handle another 20 million people.

If the Senators have any sense of why they lost, they’ll learn their lesson. But initial indications are not encouraging.

That reminded me of something, but what. Hmmm… If anyone knows, lemme know.