Cartoon credit: Pixshark.com
We all saw reactions to the President’s Oval Office speech on border security and the rebuttal
by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Some of the “memes” were pretty funny. But
the most thoughtful commentary that I have seen so far comes from Conrad Blackin his article for National Review, “Trump’s Rhetorical Knockout Blow.” Some
highlights:
The president was clear, factually
unchallengeable, and credible, and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer looked
and sounded like a waxworks animated illustration of the embalmer’s
art and her ventriloquist, the bearer of the broadest forehead since Pericles.
The president spoke of a national-security, economic, and humanitarian crisis,
and they spoke of the federal employees who are about to miss a paycheck. After
Tuesday night’s eight-minute speech by the president from the Oval Office, the
satisfactory resolution of the impasse over the government shutdown is fairly
obvious. The president cannot abandon the border-security issue now, and the
Democrats think they have him in a corner. The Democrats entered into this
contest for the public’s support believing that as soon as the first paycheck
is skipped, the lackey national media will be in 24–7 interviews with the sick
wives, children, and relatives of the 800,000 unpaid federal employees. Public
opinion will heave, the Republican senators will collapse, and the president
will be splendidly humiliated.
Everyone with the slightest
familiarity with the issue as it has arisen has seen the Democrats go from
semi-zealots of border security to vapid opportunists laser-focused on the
simplest aspect of unpaid federal employees. The president reminded the country
of the proportions of the illegal-immigration issue — of the humanitarian
tragedy, of the drug crisis, and of the crimes of an appreciable number of the
illegal immigrants. The tactical problem of the Democrats is that they are so
cynical they think no one will notice that they have come down steadily from
$1.3 billion for border security to zero, in their conviction that they can put
the unpaid federal employees’ problems ahead of what is an immense national
crisis. They evidently believe that the endlessly repeated mantra of “the wall”
as immoral, like 19th-century elocution students learning to spell by repeating
such triumphalist expressions of literacy as “W-A-L-L spells wall,” will
distract the country from the real problem. Their proposition to “open the
government” (by Trump’s total capitulation and we will go back to interminable
fruitless negotiation about the real problem) won’t fly. It is indicative of
the serene complacency of the Democrats that they expect their control of the
national political media to remain so airtight that no appreciable share of the
public will dissent from their strategy, which is to give lip service to
“border security” while portraying the president as peddling, as one of their
lesser spokesmen put it last week, “a medieval fifth-century solution for a
21st-century problem.” The fact that he missed the middle ages by several
hundred years is a rounding error for the Democrats, as they point to the Washington
Post’s claim that the president has uttered 7,600 lies since he was
inaugurated.
. . .
This torrent of illegal migrants is
not the sort of immigration that is justly celebrated at Ellis Island or the
Statue of Liberty, of responsible people soberly determining to make their way
to a new country, to enter it legally and become civic-minded contributors to
their new nationality. It more closely resembles the movement of large masses
of people, en bloc, ahead of the barbarians and into the territory of the
Roman Empire in the third to fifth centuries a.d. They had no interest in
Rome, but were terrified by the Asiatic hordes driving them westwards. Of
course, this is not exactly what we have on the southern border of the United
States now, though the effluxion of millions of refugees from the Middle East
and sub-Saharan Africa into Europe in the last decade more closely approximates
that than it does conventional immigration.
And it concludes:
The painful truth is that the
American government has failed to deal with immigration, health care, infrastructure,
and even abortion, though it at least managed to fumble that into the lap of
the courts. It is a shambles, and the Democrats have tried to prevent Trump
from dealing with any of it with this mendacious idiocy about collusion with
Russia, and the nasty fantasy of removal from office by impeachment.
Ultimately, the country will reward this president for getting the country’s
government to function usefully, even as many regret that those elected to rule
in difficult times are not always those that would be selected by typecasting
studios.
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