Reconquistadors Become Madators

I do so love a good dose of hyperbole. And a few days ago Tony Blankley provided just that on the illegal immigration imbroglio:

But why stop with 85 million Mexicans? For the open border crowd - which apparently includes virtually the entire American political, media, academic and business establishment - there is no reason to try to keep out anyone who wants to come in.

There are still about 700 million Chinese peasants waiting impatiently for a decent job; probably about an equal number of Indians. And most of the African continent could surely live better in Phoenix than they do being butchered in genocidal wars or starving in man-induced famines.

What is the moral basis for discriminating against that part of suffering humanity unlucky enough to find itself not sharing a border with the good old U.S. of A.? Perhaps the Dubai Ports World company could start chartering ships to bring the rest of suffering humanity to our shores.

Perhaps we have a moral obligation to tax ourselves to pay to transport to America all 4 billion or so humans who would prefer to live here, rather than where cruel fate has placed them. Surely there must be a Clinton-appointed federal judge somewhere who can provide the constitutional argument for such a mandated tax.

Hard to blame TB for his illegal immigration rant when the entire American political establishment remains so insanely and irrationally and stubbornly arrayed against the overwhelming sentiments of the American electorate. It's difficult not to wonder just what it's going to take to get through to these people.

How fortunate we are that the other side continues to come to the rescue.

The public backlash that was easily predicted here and many other places was not long in coming:

While a series of marches focused much of the nation's attention on the plight of illegal immigrants, scores of other Americans quietly seethed. Now, with the same full-throated cry expressed by those in the country illegally, they are shouting back.

Congressional leaders in Washington have gotten bricks in the mail from a group that advocates building a border fence, states in the West and South have drawn up tough anti-immigrant laws, and ordinary citizens, such as Janis McDonald of Pennsylvania, who considers herself a liberal, are not mincing words in expressing their displeasure.

"Send them back," McDonald said. "Build a damn wall and be done with it."

The anger invoked a word that immigrant organizers who opposed Monday's boycott feared: backlash. McDonald and other Americans were particularly disturbed by Monday's boycott and civil action, attended in large part by people who entered the country illegally and are now demanding rights enjoyed by U.S.-born citizens and immigrants who entered the country legally.

"How dare they," said McDonald, a research specialist for the University of Pittsburgh who said she voted for Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA) in the 2004 presidential election. "If they are so active, why aren't they in Mexico City, why aren't they forcing their leaders there to deal with the quality of life? If you don't like it here, go home." [emphases added]

Sounds like this backlash is more than a little bipartisan. Which makes the definitely bipartisan establishment resistance to it all the more perplexing.

The answer to Ms. McDonald's question is obvious - they DO like it here AND consider it an entitlement AND demand more and more and more, because Uncle Sam's gullibility appears to be a bottomless well of foolishness. Perhaps the backlash will finally establish some sort of limit, but that's only until passions die down again.

More ominiously for libs, one place in which they've been stirred up is in the demographic in which they can least afford it:

In their demonstrations across the country, some Hispanic immigrants have compared the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle to their own, singing We Shall Overcome and declaring a new civil rights movement to win citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

Civil rights stalwarts like the "Revrund" Jesse Jackson; Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia; Julian Bond and the "Revrund" Joseph E. Lowery have hailed the recent protests as the natural progression of their movement in the 1960's.

But despite some sympathy for the nation's illegal immigrants, many black professionals, academics and blue-collar workers feel increasingly uneasy as they watch Hispanics flex their political muscle while assuming the mantle of a seminal black struggle for justice.

Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960's were American citizens and had endured centuries of enslavement, rapes, lynchings and discrimination before they started marching.

Others worry about the plight of low-skilled black workers, who sometimes compete with immigrants for entry-level jobs.

And some fear the unfinished business of the civil rights movement will fall to the wayside as America turns its attention to a newly energized Hispanic minority with growing political and economic clout.

What this illustrates to unprecedented levels is what we on the center-right have been telling "black America" for years: these self-proclaimed "black leaders" are left-wing ideologues first, foremost, and period; and that the Democrat Party takes African-Americans for granted and expects them to sit down, shut up, and vote as they are told. The very notion of the mid-twentieth-century movement to end a century of American apartheid being equated with a passive invasion of militant freeloaders from the south ought to be an obscenity to "black leaders" most of all - if, that is, they still genuinely believed in the former's original ideals. Of course, they sold out to political tokenry and hackery long, long ago. Lewis and Bond and Lowery and the Sinister Minister are the Democrat Party's "house Negroes," dutifully latching onto the hard-left cause de jour no matter how inimical it is to their supposed core principles or the racial demographic they purportedly speak for. The fact that so many African-Americans do recognize what their so-called spokesman do not shows how out of touch the latter and their (white) patrons have become - and in service to what is by definition a foreign cause.

No matter what the issue is, the American Left just can't help overplaying their hand. Perhaps that's why it's becoming more and more apparent that in reality, they really have been bluffing all along.

Ole!