'Country First?' Ask those jailed border agents
Posted by Paul Mulshine November 15, 2008 11:11AM



As I noted in a post during the Republican convention in September, there was something fishy about the Republicans' use of the slogan "Country First" in the recent campaign.

Why not "America First?" We got the answer the other day when the Bush administration continued its attack on the two U.S. Border Patrol agents who were sentenced to long jail terms for shooting and wounding a drug smuggler.


The Bush Justice Department continued to go after the men this week and succeeded in an effort to prevent any significant reduction in the sentences of former agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean.

Ramos was sentenced to 11 years and Compean 12 years for the incident in which they shot a man who was later caught smuggling drugs over the border. The Bush administration's persecution of the pair has outraged right-wingers all over America, but the administration has pushed ahead with the prosecution in an obvious attempt to curry favor with the Mexican government.

Bush of course also supports an immigration amnesty that would have amounted to an open-borders policy with Mexico.


Meanwhile Tom Tancredo, the Colorado congressman who has been ostracized by his fellow Republicans because he really does put America first, is asking President-Elect Barack Obama to pardon the agents.

"These are the kind of men whose government failed and destroyed them - all while they were serving a cause greater than themselves. These men deserve justice," Tancredo said in a letter to Obama.

This may be the ultimate embarrassment for the awful administration of George W. Bush. We've reached the point where it's necessary to appeal to a Democratic president to reverse the anti-American stance of a Republican.

There are still a great many naïve Republicans out there who fail to see how Bush's open-borders policy here at home ties in with the so-called "neo" conservative policy in the Mideast. But it's obvious to us paleoconservatives. In both cases, the Beltway crowd ranks America's interests second to the interests of various foreigners who are going to be liberated to enjoy the benefits of the American welfare state.

Oops, we ran out of money. So much for that idea. Texas Congressman Ron Paul was predicting that debacle in the GOP primary earlier this year, but like Tancredo he was also ostracized by the GOP establishment.


By the way, if you click back to that original entry of mine on the "Country First" slogan, you'll note that I accurately predicted Sarah Palin would go along with the McCain amnesty plan. So much for Gidget's attempt to convince us she's a right-winger.

But you can fool some of the people all of the time, and the Republican establishment seems to have figured out who they are. I suspect Ramos and Compean are not fooled by the GOP's bogus patriotism, however.

If you were to ask them which country George W. Bush puts first, I suspect neither would say the U.S. of A.

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