NBC's Brian Williams boldly and knowingly misled the public two nights ago.
He noted that a three judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had declared that President Bush did not have the authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain a civilian who was taken from his home in Peoria, Ill.
He then made a big deal of the fact, and it is a fact that the judges on that circuit normally side with the government in these kinds of cases. What he failed to mention was that the two judges who made up the majority in the 2-1 decision were Clinton appointees who have a different record.
The government has notified the 4th Circuit that it will request a hearing en blanc, where it may see a very different outcome.
When NBC decides that it can report the news in a way that would make the minister of propaganda of any totalitarian state proud, then we Americans need to call them on it.
If you want to be educated on this case, go to SCOTUSblog or to Powerline, though neither addresses the point we made. Powerline has a second comment.
We've wanted to discuss a City Journal article on the impact of integrating illegals into American society for several days. One of our regular readers pointed it out to us. It would make great fodder for a long essay on the subject. We don't have the time for that, so we will try to lay the article up against a template of history.
Without doing any research, we think that a similar article could have been written about the Irish in the 1860s, but they assimilated and many became Republicans. The Chinese were the undesirables 20 years later, but they assimilated. Southern Europeans were several steps below the Irish by the 1920's.
In 1960, there were very few Republicans who thought that people of the Catholic faith who would ever become Republican. Forty years later, that prejudice has been undone, and undone in spades. And who in that period would have guessed that the South would ever be Republican?
While Heather MacDonald throws up a lot of red meat in her article, she puts nothing she writes in a historic context earlier than 1988. Immigration waves wash up on American shores in a historically regular pattern. There is always huge outcry and fear for the American way of life from those whose families arrived a few generations earlier. In the end, the immigrants are assimilated and a fair number become Republicans. Those who don't often don't vote.
One point that Ms. MacDonald fails to address is that while the affiliation of Latinos was always lopsidedly in favor of Democrats in California, they weren't motivated to register and vote until Prop 187 came along.
The vocal part of the Republican party is playing Russian roulette with the immigration issue by being venomously anti-immigrant. If it hasn't done so already, it is on the verge of motivating so many potential alienated voters that it will go into a long period of decline if it loses. The chamber with the bullet will roll around eventually.
And yes, we chose the word "alienated" knowing that it had a double meaning.
Enjoy Ms. MacDonald's article, but try to put it into a historical context.
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