Illegal, Unlawful, Illicit

HELP HELP!! ****ILLEGAL**** immigrants are coming! Emphasis on the illegal. We have to insist that people obey our precious LAWS, dontcha see? That’s the mantra you hear from pious ‘moderates’ trying to figure out a way to pile onto attacking Latinos without looking like racists.

Funny how the whole idea that laws exist only pops up in the context of immigration while anywhere else it’s a pansy whine from mushy liberals soft on terrorism. No one gets up in arms when telecom companies illegally wiretap us at Bush’s behest, nor when the Democratic Congress enables them to be forgiven—retroactively, no less! Nor when these same servile hangdogs insisted on taking impeachment ‘off the table’ as soon as they gained control of Congress, despite Bush’s trituration of the Geneva Convention, torture authorizations and phony war.

But when it comes to impoverished Guatemalans risking their butts to cross the desert for the chance to work 14-hour days, suddenly it’s The Law, sancrosanct, the Holy of Holies. You hear this refrain endlessly, and its spouters think they’re so original.

The Constitution in Article II says the president ‘shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ But the entire history of the last six years has been the utter lawlessness of the Bush regime and their obscene frat-boy delight in it. Bush’s ‘signing statements’ are a public declaration that laws suck and he wipes his ass with them. When he’s caught out again and again, he simply browbeats the execrable congressional copperheads into changing the laws violated, then grants immunity to the guilty and crows about it. This doesn’t outrage the defenders of statutory rectitude; Mexican gardeners do.