A Revolution By Another Name

By Wes Pruden
A revised DREAM act, which could have dealt in an orderly way with the children of illegal aliens in our midst, is dead. Barack Obama couldn’t wait to get the corpse out of the parlor.

The president’s remarkable amnesty by fiat – an amnesty that dare not speak its name – has the immediate effect of giving a permanent temporary pass to 800,000 of these children of illegals. But there’s more to this mercy than the casual eye sees.

This amnesty defers until after the election, and probably for good, comprehensive immigration reform of the sort envisioned by Sen. Marco Rubio. He had offered a revision of the DREAM Act that would have enabled some children of aliens who enroll in college or join one of the military services.

Mr. Rubio has all but given up. “People are going to say to me, ‘why are we going to need to do anything on this now?’ It has been dealt with. We can wait until after the election. And it is going to be hard to argue with that.”

This is exactly the result that President Obama and the open-borders Democrats envisioned. The president prefers not to consult with Congress, which is messy, like democracy itself, and congressmen occasionally ask questions that interrupt the messianic oratory. Careful comprehensive reform would have meant sharing the credit and the gratitude; this way Mr. Obama gets all the credit and by making it seem “temporary” he can keep the kids and their parents uneasy about their future. Keeping the peasants uneasy about the future, extending suffering and rationing the aspirin, is the oldest trick in the politician’s playbook.

But there was even more method in the president’s madness. By springing this remarkable expansion of presidential prerogative now, he can test congressional concern for the Constitution and courage to do anything about it, however revolutionary the damage inflicted. An earlier president attempting to bypass Congress and enforce only the laws he likes would have provoked Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to stand up on its hind legs and roar defiance and retribution. Alas, those hind legs of Congress have withered, replaced by little lady-like nubbins.

Mr. Obama knows better, and said so only two years ago in answer to Democratic pressure for a presidential decree of amnesty: “I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce. And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true.”

Only now he has proved that he can in fact “go and do,” and he can continue to raid the law books in ways the men who wrote the Constitution never imagined a president could “go and do.” Two years ago the Department of Homeland Security – which seems to imagine itself the Department of das Fatherland Security – set out in several memoranda, entitled “Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” just how the president should go about stiffing Congress. This was the roadmap the president used to do what he said he couldn’t do.

There’s more coming, as Mitt Romney breathes closer down his neck and pressure from the left tightens. He can decree asylum, which is not temporary, to ever expanding categories of asylum seekers. Asylum is granted now to those persecuted, or in “fear” of persecution, “on account of race, religion, nationality [or] membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” This could include just everybody, as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, observes in National Review Online. Asylum already includes women seeking refuge from brutal societies, homosexuals and the handicapped, and it requires little imagination to expand these categories to include residents of Mexico and Central America who fear gunmen of the drug cartels.

Only the heartless want to see the innocents, like the children brought here by their law-breaking parents, sent back to a primitive society and culture they never knew. But allowing a president to make policy based on what he needs to win an election, without consultation with anyone but his campaign handlers, is a heartless disregard of the rule of law we have always held high as the standard that makes America special.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.


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Running A Champaign Based On Lies

Barack Hussein Obama cannot run on his record. To do so would guarantee his defeat. Obama is desperate to keep the political discussion away from his performance as president, his abuse of power, and his flagrant trashing of the U.S. Constitution.

In an effort to hide his own record Obama has decided to attack Mitt Romney for being an evil, vicious, unscrupulous “CAPITALIST’. Mr. Romney is without a doubt a capitalist, but everything else is an absolute lie. This should not come as a surprise as everyone knows that Obama lies often and with more conviction than he tells the truth. Furthermore, Obama’s political bible, “Rules for Radicals” tells him to attack his ‘enemies’. That the attack need not be based on any truth; repeating the lie frequently will “make it the truth”.

Obama would have you believe that investment companies like Bain Capital, which Mr. Romney once headed, make their living buying companies, firing the employees and selling off the assets.

Companies like Bain Capital make profits by risking their own money in failing companies. It is very much like playing poker. A hand is dealt (a troubled company); the investor exams that hand (why is it in trouble & can I we fix it?); if he likes what he sees he plays the hand (buys the troubled company). The investors then infuse more money and make whatever changes are needed to restore the troubled company to good market value so that the once troubled company can be sold at a profit.

There are times when the investors loose the bet and cannot save the company. On those occasions the investors close the company and sell whatever assets they can to prevent additional loses. They never make “massive profits”, as Obama claims.

If there was money to be made by the sell assets, you can bet the original owners would have done so.

In most venture capital deals people do loose their jobs.

You cannot save a company as long expenses exceed income. In almost every business employees are the largest expense.

Some years back one the world’s major corporations found themselves losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

They hired a tough, no nonsense CEO with a track record of saving failing businesses. One of his first actions was to fire 20,000 employees. The newspapers and television attack him as heartless. However, a few short years latter the company had returned, better than before and had added many times over the number that had been fired.

Obama has focused on a single company wherer Bain Capital gambled and lost.  He attempts to hang that failure around Romney’s neck to prove how evil and heartless he is.

If Obama ever told the truth on this issue, you would know that Romney had left Bain Capital more than 2 years prior to this lone failure on the part of Bain Capital.

The facts are that if it were not for lies, Obama would have nothing to say. --WD


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