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"Security" For Whose "Homeland"?
By Doug Wrenn
Oct 24, 2005, 10:40

I was in the car this past week when I first heard on the radio that President Bush had signed the so-called Homeland Security bill into law (finally). For ha-ha's, the bill also supposedly appropriates (yet more) money to secure our borders. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff promised to track down and deport all illegal immigrants, with "no exceptions". Yeah, right. In switching the radio dial, I heard the usual pundits taking the usual stances. Sean "The Bootlicker" Hannity was already jubilantly declaring a victory by conservative perseverance against Bush's abhorrent immigration policies, now adopted into the 2004 GOP platform almost verbatim. "Independent conservative" Michael Savage, however, was sneering and skeptical. I guess I am in Savage's camp on this issue. I won't make any predictions, but I do have a few gnawing questions.

First, a few facts regarding alleged immigration reform included in this 32 billion with a "b" (and that ain't in pesos!) "Homeland Security" bill:

1,000 new Border Patrol Agents. (1,000 less than originally proposed)
2,000 new beds for detention facilities (My suggestion: Cut to the chase, less beds, more buses! These people should not be here long enough to justify a nap, let alone a full night's sleep!)
250 more criminal investigators
100 more immigration enforcement agents
Three (3) more fugitive operation teams
5 million dollars to train local and state law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws that they are, for the most part, now banned from enforcing
41 million dollars for improved security, and surveillance technology on the border
(To paraphrase the TV commercial) Meaningful immigration reform: "Priceless."

At last count, which is little more than an educated guess, we have roughly 20 million illegal immigrants currently roaming our soil with impunity. In the 1950s, then President Eisenhower, via his immigration czar, General Joseph Swing, had only less than a million illegals to contend with, but still succeeded in rounding up and deporting many of them during "Operation Wetback." Ike and Swing were also not impeded by an additional mammoth bureaucratic agency, whose ridiculous mission was "consolidation," of about 100 other smaller, bumbling agencies to do it. They also had a smaller budget, but better results, and while fighting the Cold War. Bush is no Eisenhower. It is foolish for anyone to believe, let alone to claim, that such a grandiose task can be effectively accomplished while so loving pork spending, and being as complacent about fiscal responsibility as Bush, with his dusty, and still untested appropriations veto pen that has never left the well on his desk. Furthermore, even Ike eventually capitulated on Operation Wetback, due to a subsequent public firestorm of controversy, outrage, political correctness, and allegations of racial discrimination, yes, even back then in the 1950s. I don't see Bush having that kind of chutzpah and tenacity, and sadly, I also see it lacking in many of our fellow countrymen today as well. Our modern day illegals, now 20 fold of Ike's era, are well entrenched like ticks on a sleeping hound, having been unchecked for a long period of time, much like Saddam Hussein's suddenly missing weapons of mass destruction, after several years of ceased UN inspections and us playing pitty-pat with the UN and various other appeasers at home and abroad. I am not a gambling man, but if the illegal immigrants in our country have only the Department of Homeland Security to fear, then my money would be on the illegals, any day of the week, and twice more on Sunday!

Bush quietly signed an agreement with Canada and Mexico via the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) to officially and further obscure the national boundaries in North America, effective in 2010, thus forming an economic and security "community." (Transfer that agreement to another continent opposite our east coast, and substitute the word "community" for the word "union." Any bells ringing?) This not only explains his passion to advance and fast track trade treaties that endanger US sovereignty and jobs, but also explains why this globalist president has remained (or appeared) deaf, dumb and blind to our porous borders. And now, we are to believe that he is getting tough, enforcing immigration laws, and rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants? Afghanistan and Iraq aside, whose combined military could only slightly better a medium sized US Boy Scout Troop on an off day, Bush has shown nothing but timidity, lethargy and more double talking with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and (Dare I say?) the UN. Are we really to believe that his fortitude is superior to that of Eisenhower, and that he won't fold under (real) pressure? This, the same president who called our Minutemen "vigilantes," (ironically while attending a meeting about the CFR agreement) and directed threatening rhetoric to our friend, Taiwan, when the Chinese Premier paid us a visit, and turned Bush's confident Texan swagger into a frightened schoolgirl shuffle? Actions speak louder than words.

I pay little mind to what Chertoff or Labor Secretary Elaine Chao have to say. Talking heads. Puppets on a string, and Bush is at the other end of the string. These appointed secretaries serve (and speak) at his pleasure. Watching Chertoff puffing out what little chest he has and defiantly pontificating about brazenly rounding up and deporting illegals while Chao simultaneously promotes a guest worker plan (veiled amnesty) which waves a magic wand, and says, "Poof!," thus declaring illegal immigrants from Mexico "legal" for a day is such a grotesque farce that it makes absurdity look like stark logic. Of course, Bush and Chao claim that illegals fill jobs unwanted by Americans. The daunting and still unanswered question, however, is that since the massive flow of illegal immigrants into our workforce drives down wages, which came first, the chicken, or the egg?

George W. Bush has his faults, but contrary to what the left keeps naively bellowing out of their blind, partisan, seething vitriol, I do not see stupidity as being one of those faults. Much to the contrary. Behind that good ol' boy, down home, country boy demeanor is a sage, savvy political animal, much more akin to a Beltway fox than a Texas prairie dog. Bush has yet to veto any appropriations bill. In domestic spending alone, he has well surpassed that of Bill Clinton in half as much time. And the irony on top of that sordid fact is that since his first inauguration, Bush keeps blaming the Congress for over spending, while he seeks cover behind tax cuts, warranted, yet much like his feigned immigration reform, a drop in the bucket. The illustrated equivalent of such ludicrous and hypocritical thinking would be to stand on the other side of the breached levee in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina with a bucket in hopes of actually stopping the impending flood. Again, actions speak louder than words. Constitutionally, Bush cannot run for reelection. His currently abysmal popularity ratings will only hurt his legacy (and perhaps the building of a future library) at most, yet history has repeatedly shown us that the American voter has an average memory span only slightly longer than the life of a garden variety Red Sox winning streak. (Sure, laugh if you want to, but that last cutting remark may have just very well cost me a week's worth of sleeping on the couch, if not a divorce!) So, picture this scenario: Bush, now a politically lame duck president, has nothing realistically to lose, already snuck his globalist agenda in with his CFR buddies, and now can afford to kiss and make up with his often ignored red-haired step child, otherwise known as his conservative base, by throwing it this "red meat" immigration reform bone, which is probably nothing more than high priced window dressing, much like his wasteful and ineffective education bill. It's a shell game, and this president's now well established, documented and consistent history shows that he has no reluctance or remorse for throwing large sums of US taxpayer dollars at a created panacea-like mirage to advance his agenda. In football terms, this is called "running interference." Where have you heard this before, "Actions speak louder than words!"?

Between excessive spending, an 800 billion dollar trade deficit (There is nothing "free" about that kind of trade!), the diminishing value of the US dollar abroad, record breaking rising fuel costs, the war on terrorism, an unusually high rate of devastating natural catastrophes this year, etc.., there are muffled mutterings by some, and correctly so, I believe, that we will see some kind of recession before this president leaves office. While I support tax cuts, even I recognize that economy does not prosper by tax cuts alone. For all the 32 billion dollars worth of spending Bush has just approved for homeland security, with immigration reform being an integral part of that legislation, come recession time, once the voters' minds go fuzzy (and especially after the 2006 midterm elections), the real George W. Bush can and may emerge from the shadows and then red line much of this spending as quickly and quietly as he cut federal aid to improve the levees in New Orleans and make our borders less significant by 2010. The President can giveth, and the President can taketh away.

Once again, these are not predictions, just questions, potential scenarios, and "what ifs." I am hopeful, but skeptical. Unlike Sean Hannity, I see no "mission accomplished," and I have yet to hear any fat lady sing, so for now, my champagne will remain at the ready, but corked as well. I can't say it enough, "Actions speak louder than words." I would love nothing more than to have my skepticism be proven ill based, but at least as far as the illegal immigration issue is concerned, this president has never given me any even remote semblance of reason to believe him. Meanwhile, our country continually gets invaded, our liberty encroached, our security compromised, and our sovereignty ridiculed. The bleeding hearts on the left, who view the United States as a bottom shelf relic, if not the nationally collective personification of evil, whine and cry for the plight of illegal Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande, or citizens of questionable, if not adversarial regimes, organizations and countries burrowing in among us. Who cries out for the plight of our fellow Americans, who daily lose their jobs, security of their homes and property, and become increasingly more victims of violent and seemingly unchecked crime, only to be then further degraded, and demoralized, when mandated by THEIR own government top actually subsidize all of this infinite madness in the form of medical care, college tuition, and other taxpayer funded entitlements by the sweat of their brow for these illegal, predatory leeches? Was I not paying attention at the time, or were none of these travesties articulated when President Bush recited his Constitutionally based inaugural oath...not once, but twice? Still not convinced that this president cares more about agenda and less about the good of the country? Chew on these two words for a while: "Harriet Miers." One could easily speculate that Bush made this bizarre choice of the former Texas Lottery Commissioner to be a Supreme Court Justice, only out of process of elimination, when his first probable choice, the Crawford city Dog Warden, did not return his call in time.

OK, so I'm a cynical skeptic, right, wrong or otherwise. Can you blame me? Rather than ridding us of a few bureaucratic agencies, and trimming down and consolidating the few of those essential agencies remaining (an obsolete Republican Party ideal), this president gave us a behemoth of an umbrella to oversee them all, and to what end after all that expense and waste? In a far less than soothing tone, our leaders still keep referring to "when," as opposed to "if", in terms of the next catastrophic terrorist attack on our soil. (Which still boggles my mind considering the kind of precision, high caliber, well oiled, fine tuned expertise we have protecting us at the federal government level, like Michael Brown, the former FEMA Director, and an expert on Arabian horses!) We now have a very pretty color scheme of threat levels to reflect on every day, which anyone has yet ventured to define. And we must now endure our nations' worst abominable trampling of our liberties, ironically called the "Patriot Act," which is nothing more than a compendium of martial law-like mandates, implemented when martial law is not even in effect! And now, to add to that insult and irony, this president has pulled his insidious immigration policy under this behemoth umbrella, now giving it better cover and camouflage to better bend it, twist it, mask it, or delete it, once he feels secure that the US electorate has already forgotten and has shifted its priorities and focus to something significantly more substantive and vital to our nation's interest and well being like reality TV. Was September 11th really that long ago? With all the money that was and is incessantly wasted by this supposedly "fiscally conservative" president, are we any better off now? More secure? Truly sovereign? Economically sound? These astronomical numbers and lofty promises look impressive and enticing, but given this administration's track record thus far, let's see where we are at by about 2008. One very disturbing question that no American should ever have to ask about his or her government is, "Whose side are they on?" (The other very disturbing question is "What is that?," when eating at a buffet.)

I remember when "Homeland Security" was still a newly conceived subject of debate, before it was born as a baby, bouncing, bloated boondoggle of a federal agency. Then Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) quipped something to the effect that the name "Homeland Security" sounded more like a lending institution than a government agency, supposedly created to protect and defend the United States. Now, THAT should have been a prediction!

Doug Wrenn