immigration fatigue

Je suis tres, tres fatigue... This about hits it on the head. I am totally spent on immigration and have had to avoid the Hugh Hewitt show assiduously for the past week since he can't talk about anything else. Medved's at least addressed it and then moved on, while Prager has now confessed that he's not that jubilant about the bill getting killed and will probably start talking about how we need to fix the situation differently. Me, I'm relieved. Relieved that the bill isn't going through because I'm not too terribly thrilled with rewarding law breaking but also because I've had it. I don't want to hear about immigration for at least for another month. Hope springs eternal. On another note I am also tired of hearing illegal aliens called undocumented immigrants. I'm not anti-immigrant, and they're not immigrants. They're stowaways.

huh?

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Got that? It's a grammatically correct sentence, it is. It means that buffalo from Buffalo (New York) that are bullied by other buffalo from Buffalo bully (buffalo) buffalo from Buffalo themselves. If you work it out slowly, it does make sense. Totally weird, though.

Assassination of character

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Sound familiar? It's the Agincourt speech that Joseph Welch delivered with such histrionic magnificence to Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings. It came after several mocking demands to name Communists were made by Welch to McCarthy's assistant Roy Cohn. McCarthy, tired of Welch's juvenile behavior, interrupted and told him that Welch had no further to look than his own office, where Communist Fred Fisher was working at the time. Cue Welch's tears and noble oration. Funny thing was, everyone in that hearing knew that Fisher was a Communist. At least, everyone who read the New York Times did. For Welch himself had given an interview to that paper a few days earlier, describing how Fred Fisher was indeed a member of the subversive (to use the Attornery General's term) communist National Lawyers Guild. There are a lot of funny things about what actually happened during the McCarthy era. Like the fact that McCarthy was not involved with the blacklisting of Hollywood screen writers and actors. (Not that this blacklisting crimped their style much; but it does make for a good sob story on paper.) Or the fact that McCarthy never mixed his numbers up, never said he had 205 names, only ever 57. Or the fact that he did his level best to not name names, and only did so when the Democratically controlled Congress demanded it. Or the fact that if you look at the rhetoric of the times, McCarthy was among the milder spoken men in Congress. He was not involved as much in outing espionage, he merely was making the very good point that there were a number of security risks working in important government positions, and that given the state of the Soviet Union and its predilection for coups, this really wasn't the best idea. But the truth about McCarthy sounds insane. It sounds uneducated and uniformed, not to mention terribly unsophisticated to say that McCarthy was a great American patriot and hero who made the USSR's sinister work much, much harder for them. He can be credited with the salvation of America. While others were aware in a vague way of the threat from within, only McCarthy was willing to drag the ugly, festering problem in the bright light of day. It makes me sick with fury to realize that not only did liberal demogogues, journalists, and politicians literally hound McCarthy to his death, they have been able to dance wild tarentellas on his grave with complete impunity for half a century afterward. They so completely assassinated his character that no amount of books, lectures, or TV specials will ever be to salvage it. His reputation was mauled, savaged, and irrevocably ruined. Nearly fifty years after his death, the Venona Project confirmed from decrypted Soviet cablegrams that more than 300 payed Soviet agents were working in the American governemnt from the thirties to the fifties. And yet this little fact has remained buried in obscurity because the evil empire is gone and Soviets are no longer interesting. And Tailgunner Joe is still an object of shame and derision despite the truth: he did not unjustly accuse or ruin anyone's life. The only real victim of the dictionary definition of "McCarthyism" was McCarthy himself.

The Ronald Wilson Reagan Presidential Library!!!

It's da bomb.

I got to visit Reagan's library while in old California and I feel like I finally appreciate what a tremendous individual he was. Not that I was ever too much affected by the cynicism of those who mocked his movies or derisively pointed out that Nancy was his second wife. But it's so incredibly moving to go to that building where they have so many mini (lol....many mini???) movies of him giving his inspirational speeches and taking the higher (if harder) road.

He was possibly the best president America has ever had.

I confess that a lot of the displays and speeches had me in tears (especially the Cold War room) but then I have evolved into a very lugubrious person. It takes very little to dissolve me into a helpless puddle of salty misery...but I digress. Did you know that they have George Gipp's sweater there? And John McCain's Vietnam POW bracelet thing? Oh...Reagan on Vietnam was priceless (why am still surprised when he's awesome?) "We must never again send our men to fight a war they are not allowed to win". Tell me about it.

Did you know that Reagan was a life guard in high school and saved 77 people from drowning? Another cool tidbit: At the conference thing in Reykyavik, when relations between us and the USSR kind of broke down, or at least the whole talks ended badly...well, Gorbachev refused to give in to our demands and then had the temerity to demand that we dismantle the SDI. So Reagan basically said "that's it, we're leaving". And the picture there is the one of them leaving (also the only picture there where Reagan looked even annoyed, let alone furious). The guy who took the picture said he heard Gorbachev say "I don't know what else I could have done" and Reagan whirled on him and replied "You could have said 'yes' ", got in the car and slammed the door in his face.

That's my kind of diplomacy! None of this namby pamby wishy washy sort of stuff that goes on at the UN. Reagan said he had made a promise to the American people, and he intended to keept it.

The day we went was the twentieth anniversary of the "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech (June 12). We got to see Reagan's copy of the speech, including his last minute emendations and corrections. Too awesome for words.

They have the Air Force One that he flew in there and we got to wander around in it. Now I want one.

Btw, the picture above is of the conference in Iceland. Reagan looks mightily ticked off and Gorbachev looks depressed.