Here’s Tuesday’s Washington Times column from Wesley Pruden. A good way to start your day as we assess how long it will take us to remind the Washington Elite that we’re the boss.
What’s an amnesty among these friends?
…Rarely has an issue so naturally brought together the cynically greedy of so many political persuasions. Nothing tells the story like the photographs, seen nearly everywhere over the weekend (including the pages of this newspaper), of Teddy Kennedy, Saxby Chambliss, Mel Martinez and Lindsey Graham yukking it up after the announcement of an amnesty designed by Rube Goldberg to guarantee permanent hell on the border.
Laughter, however, has begun to die in sorrow. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, for a telling example, went home to Georgia to address the state Republican convention and heard hisses, boos, catcalls and curses when they attempted to bask in the honor and glory of it all…
The more the senators talked, the angrier their constituents balked. A scam to shut up the yokels once and for all had seemed so clever when they were back in Washington yukking it up with Teddy Kennedy. Now it seems maybe not even possible.
Yokelhood is not what it once was. Cable-TV and the Internet have changed all that. Yokels wear shoes now, read newspapers and even sometimes go to Harvard. This is the lesson Republicans learn over and over, always to their sorrow. Conservatives can smell a sellout even when there isn’t one, and this time there’s stink enough to overwhelm even the olfactorily challenged (and if that’s not actually an adverb it should be). Karl Rove is sincerely seduced by the idea that he can make Christians of Muslims (in a manner of speaking) and Republicans of poor Mexicans, but he must have been smoking something stronger than Lucky Strikes to imagine he can inspire the yokels with immigration legislation with Teddy Kennedy’s name on it.
The Wash Times also has a good piece featuring the impact of calls and letters from us rubes to congress about the amnesty bill. Tammy Radio regular guest over the past week, Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, is nicely featured.
They are legends in their own minds. The People, like M. Defarge, are knitting their “legend” into a different tapestry. And they are arrogant fools indeed, if they think it will be they, and not the People, who will write the history books.