NEW FEATURE!

What Are They Smoking?      By J. Woodruff

Dropping the Ball
America's conservative forces are so deracinated they no longer recognize dangerous threats when they appear. In National Review's January 31st issue, an unidentified editorialist remarks that "freedom of speech" is colliding with religious sentiment in Britain, and notes that the results "cast an interesting light on current sensibilities." The editorial tells the story of two entertainment performances that had offended different religious groups. One performance was a stage play that depicted rape and murder at a Sikh temple. The play caused a mob of predictably offended Asian immigrants to storm the theater and assault the actors and the audience. The play was quickly closed down, ending future performances. But a publicly-financed musical entitled "Jerry Springer: The Opera," which deeply offended native-born Christians by depicting Jesus Christ as a homosexual, was allowed to be broadcast on BBC without incident. National Review is right to take note of the differing results of the offending performances, but is wrong about the import of them. Far from merely casting what NR called an "interesting light," the results actually signal an event of world-historical proportions. For the two incidents do not simply reflect a clash of religion and free speech - they are, in fact, the symptoms of a cultural catastrophe. What the differences of the two performances reveal, and what NR's editors appear incapable of perceiving, is simply this: In the UK today, immigrant Sikhs are a culturally privileged and protected group, while white Christians are not. Sikhs are able to impose their cultural values through violence and the threat of more of it, while the Christians are not. That represents a dramatic reversal of the status and power of the once-great British people on whose empire the sun once-upon-a-time never set. Today the British sun - and the sun of the white West in general - is steadily sinking. And the West's conservatives don't even know it.

Chutzpah, Deception, or Both?
In a February issue of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Tamar Jacoby argues with remarkable chutzpah that President George W. Bush's "guest worker" amnesty plan for illegal aliens "meets every conceivable conservative criterion - with flying colors." Her essay, "Law and Borders: The conservative case for Bush's immigration plan" even goes so far as to call the amnesty proposal "Bush's plan to retake control of our southern border."

Chutzpah, indeed. President Bush just weeks ago declined to fund the 2,000 additional Border Patrol agents that really are sorely needed to "retake control of our southern border." Jacoby admits controlling the border through the president's "more generous and welcoming approach" is a "paradox" that is "a little hard to explain to voters." Yeah, well, it's a little hard to explain to anyone when you use conservative rhetoric to disguise radical policies.

Just what parts of "every conceivable conservative criterion" does the amnesty plan really meet? None. It rewards lawbreaking; it insults law-abiding immigrants; it betrays the owners of border properties that are violated, trashed, and vandalized; it helps ruin neighborhoods where alien gangs loiter; it enhances the on-going colonization of America's cities by foreign populations and the displacement of native-born citizens as they flee to safer, more culturally-friendly environments; it encourages bilingualism by allowing in too many immigrants too fast; it forces taxpayers to pay for housing, medical care and education for people with no rightful claim on our resources, etc., etc., etc.

On second thought, Jacoby's arguments look less like chutzpah and more like old fashioned deception.

Like other neocons, Jacoby is billed as a conservative, but is she really? Judging from her resume, posted on the website of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research where she is a senior fellow, her career path looks more like that of a speech writer for a Ted Kennedy or a John Kerry. Between 1981 and 1987, she was deputy editor of the The New York Times' op-ed page, and before that, she was assistant to the editor of the The New York Review of Books. From 1987 to to 1989 she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek. Have The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Newsweek suddenly become clandestine cultivators of conservative writers? As recently as 2002 she was writing for Blueprint Magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council headed up by folks like Sen. Evan Bayh, D-IN, an organization that promoted Bill Clinton and is linked to the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute.

So is Tamar Jacoby really a conservative? If you believe that, you probably believe President Bush's guest-worker amnesty plan will "retake control of our southern border."