Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.opinion
Bret L Bret L is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,145
Default The Bush Administration And The Middle Parts Of History

The Bush Administration And The Middle Parts Of History


By Steve Sailer

"Journalists always like to say they write "the first draft of history," but, really, there are three drafts. And it’s the middle one, in between Breaking News and History, where the worst distortions creep in.


The term "uncanny valley" describes how digitally animated characters
in live action movies before Avatar looked too real to be cute
cartoons and too unreal to be human beings. (Robert Zemeckis’s motion-
capture films such as The Polar Express and Beowulf were particularly
prone to weirding out audiences with their heroes who looked like
soulless zombies.)

Something similarly unpalatable gets handed out in the years between
real time news coverage and the final drafts of historians’ carefully
considered books.

When events are actually happening, journalists have less opportunity
to manipulate interpretations, so audiences at least get flooded with
information, giving them some freedom to make up their own minds.

Decades later, historians have the leisure to try to make sense of
what truly transpired.

In between the raw feed and the history books, however, journalists
quickly simplify the immense complexity of events into stock clichés
that can go unchallenged for decades. For example, by 1992 the press
had rewritten the 1988 election around Willie Horton.

Likewise, it will probably take one to two generations before
historians can cut through the rewrites to understand the fundamental
dynamics of the last decade. Why did the Bush Administration waste
eight years on Immigration, Invasion, and Indebtedness? Why did it
encourage Mexicans to illegally immigrate to America by calling for
amnesty? What was Karl Rove thinking when he tried and failed in four
different years (2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007) to shove through amnesty
and guest worker legislation?

For Rove’s boss, George W. Bush, the subject is less puzzling. I
suspect that minimizing the border between Mexico and America was
Bush’s personal passion, while Rove just thought they were being
clever.

Striking a deal with Mexico was traditional Bush family business,
going back at least to 1960 when George H. W. Bush’s Zapata Off-Shore
oil company formed a partnership with Jorge Diaz Serrano to sneak
around Mexico’s ban on foreign involvement in its oil industry. (Diaz
Serrano later became head of Pemex, the Mexican oil monopoly, and then
went to prison for corruption.)

Further integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies was naturally
attractive for the Bushes. The senior Bush negotiated NAFTA and
encouraged Mexican president Carlos Salinas to turn public monopolies
such as the phone system into private monopolies (a policy which has
made Carlos Slim the richest man in the world). Yet, in NAFTA, Mexico
withheld from privatization its crown jewel monopoly, Pemex.

Business and immigration all blended together for the younger Bush,
which is why his 2001 plan was to have his Secretary of State
negotiate an immigration deal with Vicente Fox’s Foreign Minister. In
his 1995 New York Times op-ed, No Cheap Shots at Mexico, Please, then-
Governor Bush warned Republicans off from the immigration issue by
holding forth on the profits to be made from further integration with
Latin America:

"Mexico is proving to be a strong economic friend. Our economic bond
with Mexico carries with it some very positive long-term results. An
isolated United States will not be able to compete successfully in a
world economy where Europe and Asia are united into common-market
partnerships. The trade agreement wisely affords our country the
opportunity to join forces with Canada and our neighbors to the south—
first Mexico, then Chile, then other emerging capitalist countries in
Latin America."

On the personal side, George and Barbara Bush employed a live-in
Mexican maid, Paula Rendon, of whom W. has said, "I have come to love
her like a second mother." He went on to employ another Mexican
immigrant, Maria Galvan, to raise his two daughters. Younger brother
Jeb married a Mexican girl, Columba Garnica, who had spent some years
as an illegal immigrant in California.

Jeb and Columba’s son, George P. Bush, was such a natural politician
and heir to the Bush dynasty that W., who nicknamed his father
"41" (for being the 41st President) and himself "43," called his
nephew "44."

So, from 43’s dynastic perspective, electing a new people in order to
keep electing Bushes to the White House all made a certain grandiose,
demented sense.

Yet, for Rove, who was supposed to be the brains of the operation, the
motivations are murkier, other than sheer submissiveness toward his
willful boss.

Let’s run through the possibilities:

Ineptitude? Never ascribe to rationality that which can be explained
by incompetence.

A Republican Party insider explained to me last week the fate of the
Bush Administrations peculiarly ill-timed 2006 election year push for
the Kennedy-McCain bill:

"The way it was stopped in its tracks until after the [2006] election
was by me pointing out to Karl on a conference call in early June that
all the polling clearly indicated that 25% of our base was opposed to
any form of amnesty, and would revolt against our party. The likely
result would be a suppression of the turnout, a point Karl quickly
grasped from the data. In what was going to be a tough election year,
we needed every vote we could muster. So it goes in politics. "

Rove had been publicly backing more immigration since February 2001.
Why didn’t he comprehend the polls during the previous half decade?

And then he tried it again in 2007!

Drive a wedge between blacks and Hispanics? In his autobiography
Courage and Consequence, Rove casts some of the blame (although I
would call it credit) for failing to pass an amnesty bill in 2007 on
the lack of enthusiasm of the Congressional Black Caucus. He writes on
p. 468 of a 2007 Democratic confab to which he and Bush were invited:

"After the president spoke, Congressman Luis Gutierrez made an
impassioned plea for moving forward on immigration. He received spotty
applause. I was sitting off to the side: between Gutierrez and me was
a table of senior African-American members, including the new
Judiciary chairman, John Conyers, and the new Ways and Means chairman,
Charlie Rangel. Few at this table applauded and some shook their heads
"no" as Gutierrez talked."

Rove acts shocked that the black leaders were concerned about the
effect on their black followers of millions more Hispanics
outcompeting them for jobs. But what if this was all part of Rove’s
Master Plan to break up the heart of the Democratic coalition?

Of course, you know and I know that there’s no evidence in the
Congressional Black Caucus’s voting records that they ever act upon
those immigration worries. Conyers, Rangel, and Co. know that while
immigration might not be good for blacks, it is good for black
Democratic politicians.

Bipartisanship? Rove’s latest spin is that the Bush Administration
should have pushed immigration up to 2005 to build a Spirit of
Bipartisanship. As he writes on p. 409:

"In retrospect, it was a mistake to lead the second term by pressing
for Social Security reform. If we had led with immigration reform—
another issue the president cared about deeply—we would almost
certainly have gotten it passed because Democrats said they would work
with Bush on it. That success might have produced enough bipartisan
confidence to tackle Social Security."

Pretty flat learning curve on this here Boy Genius.

The Kennedy-McCain amnesty bill failed in 2006 because the public felt
the elites were teaming up against them. Rove’s considered view in
2010 is that the elites’ big mistake was in not teaming up against us
earlier.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is now following in this tradition of
bipartisanship, recently visiting President Obama in the company of
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to promote yet another "comprehensive"
immigration bill. It’s the kind of self-promotion that gets Lindsey
declared "Presidential Timber" in the press.

Of course, if most Democratic politicians think amnesty would be good
for them politically, isn’t it possible that amnesty would be good for
them politically? Granted, they aren’t infallible savants like Karl
Rove, so what do they know about their self-interest?

Win praise from the liberal media? Indeed, pushing for more
immigration did get Rove some nice press. Yet, how much good did it
actually do him? The press still tried for years to put him in prison
over the Valerie Plame brouhaha.

Bust the unions? As a GOP election warrior, Rove is, not unreasonably,
strongly anti-union: "If I learned anything from Goldwater, it was not
to trust union bosses," Rove writes on p. 10. Organized labor provides
money, votes, and volunteers for the Democrats. Flooding the country
with more "temporary workers" would make the union business less
lucrative, thus undermining Democrats.

Yet, does this make any sense as 21st Century politics? Private sector
unions are already mostly gone. In 2009, only 7.2 percent of the
private sector’s workforce belonged to a union. A majority of union
members now have government jobs. Unions for civil servants, such as
the National Education Association, are a more important asset to the
Democratic Party today. And government jobs tend to have literacy and/
or citizenship requirements. So, it all seems irrelevant. I’m not
saying that this idea didn’t play a role in Rove’s thinking, just that
it was a pretty stupid one.

Hispanic consultantitis? Rove, who mostly grew up in Nevada and Utah
in the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t seem to have much personal experience
with Latinos. Most of the Hispanics whom Rove mentions in his memoir
are political professionals. In other words, they are people whose
careers depend at least in part on being Hispanic. Of course, they
want more Hispanics for themselves to be the putative leaders of.

Impress nice white people? In 1985, Rove sent a memo to a GOP
politician client, former Texas Governor Bill Clements, about how to
soften his hard-nosed image:

"The purpose of saying you gave teachers a record pay increase is to
reassure suburban voters with kids, not to win the votes of teachers.
Similarly, emphasizing your appointments of women and minorities will
not win you the support of feminists and the leaders of the minority
community; but it will bolster your support among Republican primary
voters and urban independents."

There’s always the possibility that the whole "Hispanic realignment"
assertion was just a front. Rove won in 2002 and 2004 by getting out
the vote among the Republican base. But Hispanics gave him a cool-
sounding talking point with which to baffle innumerate reporters.

Out-of-Touchness: In a 2007 NY Times article by Jim Rutenberg, Texas
Town, Now Divided, Forged Bush’s Stand on Immigration, Rove more or
less admitted that he was out of touch with changing sentiments in
Texas:

"… Governor Bush found Texas to be largely receptive to his push to
provide a bilingual education program for the children of Hispanic
immigrants. In the current climate, that seems like a distant memory,
a casualty of what Mr. Bush’s longtime political adviser, Karl Rove, a
Texan, said reflected how "the feelings about immigration have waxed
and waned over the years" in Texas. In the 1990s, Mr. Rove said,
Texans felt as if the immigration problem was relatively under control
…"

The back-story is that Texas’s oil boom of 1973-1981 coincided with an
oil boom in Mexico. Then, both economies crashed in 1982. As illegal
immigration from depressed Mexico ramped up in the 1980s and 1990s, it
flowed more to prosperous California than overbuilt Texas. The result
was that affordable family formation, the foundation of success for
Republican "family values" candidates, remained achievable in Texas
while it was under siege in California.

Thus, Bush and Rove could denounce California governor Pete Wilson for
calling for immigration restriction in his successful 1996 re-election
campaign because they smugly lacked comprehension of the problems
California faced. Indeed, judging from Rove’s memoir, he has almost no
clue about the nation’s largest state.

The sheer gall of special interests? Employers like low wages and many
donate to candidates who try to keep wages down. The trouble, however,
is less cynical sell-outs than that a huge fraction of Washington
insiders have persuaded themselves that low wages are what made
America great. Of course, those who have actually thought hard about
the question, starting with Ben Franklin in 1751, have come to the
opposite conclusion: that the relatively happy lives of Americans rest
upon a foundation of a small supply of labor and a large supply of
land.

Turn Hispanic voters into Republicans? This is the rationalization
that Rove always gave the press. But there was never any evidence that
amnesty was a winner among to Hispanic voters. Hispanic voters are
much more ambivalent about it than are their self-proclaimed leaders.

A recent Zogby immigration poll, which was unusual in providing actual
facts to respondents, elicited overwhelming majorities among Latino
likely voters for immigration restriction by reminding them how
immigration depresses wages. For example, 65 percent of likely
Hispanic voters agreed, "There are plenty of Americans already here to
do these jobs, if employers can’t find workers they should pay more
and treat workers better" versus only 15 percent agreeing with the
Beltway line that "We need to allow more immigrants into the country
to fill these jobs because there aren’t enough Americans willing or
able to do them."

Questions that are phrased differently, however, can get Hispanics to
stop answering as working class Americans and start responding as
aggrieved ethnics.

But how could Republicans out-compete Democrats in a contest to appeal
to Hispanic ethnocentrism? As long as Democrats are officially for
affirmative action for Hispanics while most Republican voters are
against, it’s a no-win proposition for the GOP.

This isn’t rocket science. The effects of immigration are not really
that hard to understand. But Rove never did."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100321_b...nistration.htm
Reply
Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules

Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Bush administration invents new capitalism !!! [email protected] Audio Opinions 5 September 20th 08 06:43 AM
Bush administration looking to delay erection another viewer Pro Audio 18 July 15th 04 09:28 PM
Bush administration looking to delay erection another viewer Pro Audio 0 July 14th 04 04:59 PM
Bush, The WORST President in History ? Bill I Rubin Car Audio 2 May 3rd 04 07:11 PM
Bush Administration does it again Michael McKelvy Audio Opinions 1 December 20th 03 12:37 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 12:57 AM.

Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 AudioBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.
 

About Us

"It's about Audio and hi-fi"