By The Time I Get To Arizona

Last week, Arizona’s governor signed an illegal immigration enforcement bill into law that has put the issue of illegal immigration and the movement to grant illegal aliens amnesty front and center. Congressional leaders even spoke of putting the immigration bill before Congress ahead of an important energy bill.

It’s a sign of how desperate things have become for states along the Mexican border that state governments are trying to do what the federal government has refused to do. The job of enforcing and protecting the country’s borders is rightfully that of the federal government.

With the President promising “immigration reform” in the form of an amnesty program, the government has cut back on enforcement measures, leaving individual states to deal with overcrowded schools, bankrupt public services, and the families of its murdered citizens.

The states have tried to do whatever they can do deal with crowds of illegal aliens coming their way, and this bill in Arizona is the most stringent so far, though far from the Nuremberg-style law that its critics accuse it of being. It will be litigated to death and may never see the light of day, but it’s a law that prods Arizona police to do what the federal government refuses to do with any consistency or competence: get some kind of handle on our out-of-control illegal immigration situation.

Kowtowing to both Hispanic ethnic tribalism and corporate wage-busting greed, President Obama promised to pursue an amnesty bill that would legalize millions of illegal aliens at a time when real unemployment is still well into double-digits. He hinted at a threat of using civil rights legislation to thwart the Arizona bill. Arizona’s governor signed it anyway.

Critics call the Arizona law racist, fascist, and everything except what it is: a desperate act by a state pushed to the brink by decades of border negligence and a federal government in the thrall of its own windy rhetoric and at the service of its corporate donors.

Socialists and Racists and Militias, Oh My…

The passing of the recent healthcare legislation and the arrest of nutcase Christian militia members have served as striking examples of how we are a divided country. No doubt we are at a very divisive point in our country’s history, but we are not on the brink of a civil war. To hear commentators in the supposedly mainstream media tell it, we are either under siege from communist infiltrators or a fifth column of right wing lunatics is plotting to murder everyone who voted Democratic in 2008.

Calling Obama a socialist is making his opponents look like buffoons. A socialist wouldn’t raise more than $750 million from corporate donors and forgo public campaign financing. A socialist would not have made attempts to attract Republican support or sign what is at its core a moderate bill. A socialist would have insisted on a government-run healthcare system as exists in most Western democracies. I hate to break this to my conservative friends, but Canada, England, Norway and Spain are not communist countries. There are no “death panels” ordering elderly people to be euthanized in Sweden or France.

The recent health care plan may be a fiscally irresponsible boondoggle full of accounting tricks and underfunded mandates, but it is not a communist blueprint. Calling Obama a socialist is idiotic (double idiot points for denouncing Obama’s so-called socialist policies while quoting George Orwell, who actually was a socialist).

It’s the same brand of idiocy to claim that the opposition to the Obama administration is born out of latent racism or that conservatives are calling for wholesale murder of Democrats.

Obama supporters know that the stigma of racism (a word so overused and abused it ought to be in quotes in most cases) can condemn a political opponent to the humiliating and irrelevant margins of society. The easiest way to deflect blame and anger from the first black president is to somehow portray criticism of his administration as racist. Therefore, people angry at the healthcare bill aren’t really upset over cuts to their or their parents’ Medicare coverage or taxes on their healthcare benefits, they must be closet racists angry that ‘Hail to the Chief’ is played for a black man. Look for more accusations of “racism” when Democrats move to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

Likewise, Sarah Palin is not endorsing murder when she uses firearms metaphors in her messages to her supporters. She’s the same kind of corporate water-carrier the Republicans have been pushing our way for decades. She may be an idiot, but she’s not trying to inspire a right wing coup. The same goes for other Republican Party blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck etc.

Republicans and Democrats are painting one another as extremists in an attempt to stigmatize their opponents and stifle debate. They’re both wrong.