Friday, January 30, 2009

Law and Ordure

[Attorney-General Janet Napolitano]
Napolitano's measure to summarily deport immigrant criminals may be fully justified but it IS anti-immigrant. Immigrants have just as much right to commit crimes in America as Americans do.

But starting a campaign against immigrant criminals instead of against criminals in general is politically impeccable. Even the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who made San Francisco a 'Sanctuary City', would be hard pressed to say a word in favor of immigrant criminals. It just demonstrates that Napolitano is no idiot and has chosen a good wedge issue.

There is an echo of the career of Nicholas Sarkozy here. During the riots in Paris in 2005, the official heir-apparent to Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique Villepin, was saying mealy-mouthed sympathetic things about the poor rioters and their plight that would have driven them to burn cars and attack the police all over the suburban periphery of the city. The violence went on for almost two weeks.

The upstart Minister of the Interior at the time, Sarkozy, announced that firehoses would be used by the police, and was decried as a fascist by the press. so it didn't happen. Finally he announced that any immigrant conivicted of a crime would be deported to his home country
whether he was legally in France or not. The rioting stopped that very day.

One smart aleck blogster (me) noted that the mainly Muslim rioters hated France enough to burn it down, but not enough to leave it.

In the subsequent election not even all Chirac's power and influence over his own party was enough to get the nomination for the weasel Villepin. Meanwhile the Socialists, typically of them, had a series of debates and party conferences and convoluted compromise resolutions about whether it was OK for the rioters to burn down parts of Paris.

Sarkozy won handily and is the most pro-American and pro-Israel President of France since the Fourth Republic. Which is to say, whatever the press' sympathy for the downtrodden immigrants, they have no traction and risk their own credibility to defend immigrant criminals.

Believe me, if a yahoo like me can figure this out, Janet Napolitano was born knowing it.

No comments:

Post a Comment