House of Eratosthenes

Sen. John McCain praised a tough Arizona anti-immigration bill that will let police arrest people who aren’t carrying identification, the latest move in McCain’s rightward shift in advance of a tough Republican Senate primary this summer.

“I think it’s a very important step forward,” McCain said Monday. “I can fully understand why the legislature would want to act.”

It’s a dramatic switch for a senator who supported comprehensive immigration reform with Democratic lion Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) just four years ago. McCain is facing a primary challenge from the right in former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

His office later said his comments did not represent an endorsement, though a spokeswoman would not condemn the bill, either.

It’s not an enormous issue now, but I remember a few years back the news was thick with mention of some “needle exchange program” whereby city governments would spend good money providing free, clean needles to druggies who were shooting up illegal drugs. I see it as pretty much the same issue. When “illegal” is right there in the name of what is being done…it just seems like government shouldn’t be helping with it.

Because if government is going to help with it, even only passively, by looking-the-other-way, then what we have is a situation in which some crimes are super-duper-illegal and other “crimes” are kinda-sorta-illegal. Where it is implicitly understood that you’re “gonna do it anyway” so we’ll just work that whole thing, under the surface, if you will.

You know, we have the equal-protection clause for a reason. Shenanigans like this, by which I mean the status quo, without the new Arizona bill, violate the ever lovin’ snot out of it, IMO. I break a traffic law and I really-really did break it, it’s okay to entrap me by means of road signs that aren’t even legal. And this other guy over here, is breaking a different law…so now we have all these anti-laws that make it harder to catch him doing it. Can’t pull him over, can’t ask for papers, can’t refer him to the feds, can’t do this, can’t do that.

“Toad Tunnel” laws. That’s what they are. Bypass routes specifically constructed to penetrate a barrier, so that creepy-crawly and slithery-slimy things can get from one side to the other. Yeah, maybe that seems harsh when we’re talking about the folks down on their luck who just want to send money back home to their families. Well, you might be thinking of that; I’m thinking of kiddy-diddlers. That’s not true, you say? None of the twelve or twenty million are up to such shenanigans? Prove it. You can’t. They’re illegal.

And they’re gonna use your toad-tunnel laws. You know what happened to the real Toad Tunnel? Aside from the fact that it cost a goddamn fortune and became a laughing stock, snakes started using the toad tunnel to ensconce themselves in the fenced in “protected wetland” on the far side, and engorge themselves on the “endangered and protected” frogs. Yet another reason for the parallel to the immigration “laws.” Your intentions don’t really matter. You move up the food chain, and the predators up there are more capable of making use of such devices, than the relatively harmless specimens further down.

So hell yes this is overdue. Now back to Mac:

Immigration reform advocates were bewildered.

“He risked his political career for immigration reform, and now he is compromising his principles to fight for his political life,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice and a longtime immigration reform advocate.

Under the Arizona law, which passed the state Senate today and sent to Gov. Jan Brewer (R), police can arrest anyone on “reasonable suspicion” that they are an illegal immigrant. If they’re not carrying a valid driver’s license or identity papers, police can arrest them.

Hayworth called McCain’s Monday comments “political gamesmanship…born of political convenience – driven by his need for personal political gain.”

Why do they keep shoving microphones into the faces of jerks like this? McCain is compromising his “principles” now? What principles would those be?

I thought the whole point of this “reform” was to provide a “pathway to citizenship” so that if you can’t find a way to immigrate to the states legally, down the road such a way would be provided to you. Does Mr. Sharry have some kind of plan that, in the meantime, these illegal aliens should just keep on tootling around in their unregistered, uninsured cars without driver’s licenses? And we should all just look at other things more fun to watch, while the “snakes” among them slither through the tunnel to molest our women, kidnap our children, robbing, looting, murdering whenever it suits them?

Here’s what people are missing: If you make it alright to break this one “little” law that says “don’t cross this border unless you have the right papers” — you have to excuse everything else. All other laws are meaningless. You can’t enforce a law against someone if you don’t even know who it is. And so yes, it becomes a lawless underclass, a lawless culture. The fact that some of the people who dwell within, do follow the law…now that they’re here, now that they broke that first one…really doesn’t have anything to do with it. What’s relevant is the enforceability of the laws you have left, and that fell off the map when you said it was alright to scale the fence. From that point forward, the other laws only have a constraining effect upon those who choose to live by them voluntarily.

Good on McCain. This doesn’t make him a “good conservative” all by itself, but it is an educational moment. “Reform” people, if they’re honest, shouldn’t have reservations about what’s being done now and if they do, they shouldn’t be prattling on about “principles” being violated. It’s the enforcement of laws that are on the books already. Nothing unprincipled about that.

Not the right time to form conclusions about who’s a good conservative or who’s a bad conservative. We don’t know enough…or we’re not finding that out here, anyway. But it is a good thing to watch, to learn things we need to learn. About who’s motivated by what.

McCain does this before every election.
Fool me once, shame on McCain. Fool me four times, well, we don’t know enough, we need to watch and learn more, it’s not the right time to form a conclusion.
If we can’t put this nasty little rooster out of business in a Republican primary there is no time and there is no point.
- jamzw | 04/20/2010 @ 09:33
Amen. This latest McCain maneuver smacks of opportunism, and I think the Hayworth campaign is correct to call him on it. Where was this “tough” stance back when he was signing his name on to bills which advanced amnesty?

A lot of politicians suddenly discover their “principles” when they’re in a tough re-election fight, as McCain is right now. Personally, I’m not even going to throw the usual shout-out to McCain’s time in the Hanoi Hilton…I’m going to go ahead and say it – I think Arizona (and by extension, the other 49 states) would be better served if McCain were replaced by an authentic conservative. If it turns out that Hayworth is that conservative, then so much the better.

Among other renewed national security measures, it’s long-past time for some federal resources to be finding their way south and used to seal off that border, once and for all. Turn the thing into the Berlin Wall – better still, the Korean DMZ. Oh, it’s too expensive? Well, how much is Crap N Trade and Obama Care going to cost us? Spend the money and get it done. Put patrol roads on either side of the wall and sentries on the top, and sensors which can detect burrowing underneath. Build a barrier out of concrete that can’t simply be cut through – a simple chain link fence isn’t going to do the job. Even if it costs $100 billion to build 2,000 miles of border wall, it’s worth every cent. We can deal later with the ones who are already here.
- cylarz | 04/20/2010 @ 13:41

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McCain Says Yes to the Arizona Immigration BillTuesday, April 20th, 2010

McCain Says Yes to the Arizona Immigration Bill
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010