On Sanctuary Cities and Senseless Murders

When an innocent young woman is randomly murdered by an illegal immigrant with multiple felony convictions, who despite was living in San Francisco despite multiple deportations because it is sanctimoniously a “sanctuary” city that will not cooperate with any attempt at enforcing immigration law, it is hard for those of who advocate the strictest possible enforcement of immigration law to avoid the tempting political implications of such a tragedy. We had resolved to keep a respectful silence on the matter, in deference to the apparently fine and lovely young woman who was killed, and being ever mindful that the complicated issues involved require more dispassionate consideration that such tragedies allow, but we cannot let it go unremarked that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest could not resist the temptation to blame the murder on those of us who advocated the strictest possible enforcement of immigration law.

Such an obviously counter-intuitive slur takes some doing, the administration’s spokesman made either a joshing or earnest attempt. He explained that the president’s y’all come immigration policies, which have been enacted through executive authority that the president spent the first five years of his presidency insisting he did not have the power enact, were mainly intended to ensure “we were focusing our law enforcement efforts on those individuals who pose a genuine threat. Alas, Earnest explained, due to factors apparently still beyond the president’s control, “Too often we see those limited law enforcement resources to be focused on breaking up families.” This situation is inconsistent with the president’s values, Earnest earnestly asserts, and if you’re still wondering why the president hasn’t been able to fix this awful situation it’s because “these efforts would be significantly augmented had Republicans not blocked comprehensive immigration reform.” He also had the gall to say “I recognize people will want to play politics on this,” and then the even greater and more irony-infused gall to go on to say “But the fact is that the president has done everything within his power to make sure we are focusing our law enforcement resources on criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety and it’s because of Republicans that we have not been able to make the kind of investment that we’d like to make in securing our border and making our communities safe.”

So far as we can gather from the news reports and YouTube videos, Earnest didn’t have any similar criticisms of the City of San Francisco, whose stated municipal policy is to not cooperate and actively interfere with any efforts to enforce immigration law, no matter of many felony convictions might have at long last aroused the attention of the federal authorities, or Rep. Nancy Pelosi or any other of the hippie-dippie but reliably Democratic leaders of that sanctimoniously tolerant town. The blame of course entirely lies with that pesky opposition party and its racist knee-jerk reaction to the president’s principled proposal to unilaterally re-write immigration law and allow in many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, including trainloads of unaccompanied minors from the worst slums of Central America, most of whom didn’t bother to show up at their deportation hearings, but also give him a few more billions of dollars to make sure they’re all good and hard-working and law-abiding types who will fill the tax coffers and keep your pool clean and never commit a horrible crime. If only those darned Republicans and the enforce-the-law-dammit crowd hadn’t slowed the administration’s progress, and if only all the arguments about the cultural and economic and political consequences of an historically unprecedented wave of immigration hadn’t been made, we all surely would have had filled tax coffers and clean pools and no crime.

We won’t lower ourselves to Josh Earnest’s level by suggesting that the policies those Republicans fought for would have prevented this tragedy, or get into the arguments about immigration that are best considered dispassionately, but we will assert that those of us who advocate the strictest possible enforcement of immigration law are not responsible, and that we grieve for this outcome.

— Bud Norman

The Politics of Procrastination

So it turns out that President Barack Obama won’t be signing any executive orders granting amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants until after the mid-term elections, apparently on the assumption that uniformed voters won’t punish his party for an unpopular policy that he promises but hasn’t quite yet enacted. How very frustrating to realize that he might well be right.

The ploy has worked well enough before, after all. Various unpopular aspects of the Obamacare law were delayed until after the past presidential election and some are still being delayed for the benefit of Democratic congressional incumbents, and the many millions of Americans who like their health care plans and have been promised that they can keep their health care plans thus far don’t seem to mind that sooner or later they are going to lose their health care plans. During the past campaign the president was overheard promising the Russian leadership that after the election he could be “more flexible” regarding that country’s avaricious geo-political ambitions, and it wasn’t until after the president was re-elected that the public noticed an unfortunately flexible the post-war world order has suddenly become. A reported plan to stick the country with economy-crippling carbon emissions by means of an unratified “climate change” treaty that not even the most die-hard Democratic Senator from the most deep-blue state would vote will probably wait until after the elections and go largely unnoticed until the pink slips start showing up during some other Democratic schmuck’s election cycle, at which point the press will helpfully provide explanations about how it’s all the Republican’s fault.

The president doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by the brazenly political motive for his ploy. In an otherwise hilariously disingenuous interview on “Meet the Press,” the president frankly acknowledged that after a widely-publicized invasion of the southern border by unaccompanied illegal minors who had heard of his executive order to delay deportations of unaccompanied illegal minors “the politics did shift mid-summer because of that problem.” He further explained that delaying another equally ill-advised executive order that would surely lure a few million more unskilled and non-English-speaking and ultimately dependent people to our cash-strapped and largely unemployed nation would thus be more “sustainable” if he inflicted it on the country after the voting was completed. He has to make the case for his policy, the president explained, and an election just isn’t the right time.

Some Republicans are already screaming about the coming amnesty, cand those who are inclined to listen to them will likely take heed. Some Latino activists are also screaming about the delay, and a few Hispanic voters might be disinclined to get out and vote. Blacks and low-wage workers and trade union members and other loyal Democratic constituencies harmed by the policy will gladly delay their outrage until the deal actually goes down, however, and a large number of people who dislike the president’s plan simply won’t hear about it.

The Democrats’ policies on illegal immigration will be a problem for them in the upcoming elections, as will Obamacare and the Russians and everything else they’ve put off, but the president has probably mitigated the damage by delaying his plans. How very frustrating.

— Bud Norman

A Short Cut to the Invasion

Let us suppose, quite hypothetically, that your country has lately been invaded by many tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who have hopped a train through Mexico from Central America. Further suppose, hypothetically again, that your country is $17 trillion in debt and another $100 trillion or so short of what it has promised the citizens that are already here, that your social service agencies are already straining under the burden of a moribund economy, and that the country’s inability to cope with the influx of adorable youngsters with adorable gang tattoos that has piled up in makeshift detention centers or been transported through angry protest barricades to a town near you has resulted in what everyone agrees is a humanitarian crisis. What would you do in such in an unlikely scenario?

If some vestige of common sense inclines to you to suggest sending the youngsters back home to their families as quickly as possible, and making it clear to any potential future invaders that no matter what nonsense they’ve heard about imminent amnesty and the welcoming arms of a generous welfare state they are not going to get in, then you are clearly unfit for public service. The more enlightened savants of the federal government have suggested that we allow the youngsters to skip the unpleasant train-hopping through Mexico and come directly and at our expense to the imminent amnesty and the welcoming arms of a generous welfare state.

Our source is The New York Times, and we hope that all the “Dr. Strangelove” aficionados will recognize the allusion to a line from that absurdist masterpiece about the “doomsday machine.” “Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the southwest border,” the plucky Timesmen hopefully report, “the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico…” How such generosity would stem the recent surge of migrants at the southwest border is never explained, no doubt an oversight due to deadline pressures, but we are assured of its good intentions. The children are fleeing gang violence in their native lands, we are told by the Times’ administration and activist group sources, and thus are entitled to refugee status.

Some 70,000 or so gang members are believed by the always-reliable United Nations to be active in the Central American countries that have lately been shipping their children northward to the United States, the Times helpfully adds, but that seems a dangerously low standard of peril to be granting refugee status to their compatriots. The world is ringed by slums from Calcutta to Johannesburg to Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Belgrade that are menaced by similar numbers of gangsters, and such communities as the one on the south side of Chicago that our current president once organized have similarly dangerous streets, so housing and feeding and educating all of them and imprisoning the predictable portion of them will likely prove more costly than America can afford. The same people who scoff at the notion of American exceptionalism are apparently convinced that America is exceptional enough to care for all of the world’s needy people, but they are willing to share the costs of the attempt.

Public opinion and its cussed common sense might yet scuttle the plan, which is so far just another one of the proposals that the savants of the federal government routinely come up with, but the Times warns that “the plan would be similar to a recent bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who proposed increasing the number of refugee visas to the three Central American countries by 5,000 each,” so there’s still the chance of a bipartisan nonsensical solution. Some Republican opposition is already rearing itself, and could effectively prevent the proposal from becoming policy, but hat option of sending the youngsters back home to their families as soon as possible and issuing a meaningful warning to the rest to stay home also seems unlikely. Whatever compromise is eventually adopted, America might as well get ready to start housing and educating and feeding a few billion new arrivals.

— Bud Norman

Don’t Mess With Texas

Unaccustomed as we are to rooting for Texas, we’re obliged to raise a toast to the Lone Star State’s Gov. Rick Perry for his decision to send a thousand state militia troops to secure his portion of the nation’s southern border. The troops have no legal authority to arrest or deport anyone and are therefore unlikely to do anything meaningful about the recent invasion of unaccompanied illegal minors into the country, but we like the gesture nonetheless.

At the very least Perry’s gesture keeps the border crisis in the news, and at a time when the implosion of America’s recent foreign recent policy in Gaza and Ukraine and other usually overlooked lands is dominating the headlines. A few hundred thousand invaders are easily ignored by the media, even when they’re underaged and stacked up in makeshift detention centers or being expensively unloaded on a school district and law enforcement community near you, so anything that forces the necessary public attention is welcome.

Those who peruse past the headline about the story will also note that Gov. Perry is taking a more steadfast stand against the the invasion than the current presidential administration, and that should also have a salutary effect on American public opinion. The current presidential administration has been talking tough about sending the invaders back home, just as it has been talking tough about Russia’s misdeeds in the Ukraine and Israel’s right to be doing damage in Gaza, but in each case the insincerity is by now apparent. Gov. Perry is on tenuous legal ground with even his purely symbolic gesture, given the Supreme Court’s inexplicable decision that states have no right to enforce any immigration laws that the federal government declines to enforce, but perhaps the casual reader of the obligatory news stories will wonder how this bizarre situation came to be.

If the gesture is intended only to bolster Gov. Perry’s standing in the ’16 presidential race that is also fine by us. All the pundits like to believe that his aspirations in ’12 were derailed by a brief brain freeze following major surgery during one of those interminable Republican primary debates, but the bigger problem was his past support for in-state tuition for the “dreamers” who had been snuck into the country by their invading parents, and to whatever extent the gesture is intended as penance we accept it gratefully. Aside from those few seconds of stammering during that long-forgotten primary debate Gov. Perry has done a pretty good job of not screwing up his state’s remarkable record of economic expansion while the rest of the non-fracking country has been stuck in neutral, and he warrants consideration as a replacement to the current presidential administration.

— Bud Norman

The Fissure at the Border

The president and his supporters in the press are trying their best to portray the Republicans as the villains in the ongoing border crisis, but it’s looking like more of a problem for the Democrats. All those unaccompanied minors who have illegally entered the country in the past months have unified the Republican opposition, annoyed the politically unaffiliated, and at long last exposed some dangerous fault lines in the Democratic coalition.

After so many years of successfully vilifying the Republicans as a bunch of stingy racist xenophobes eager to harass any brown-skinned people who innocently if illegally wander across the border it is now hard for the Democrats to argue that it was the GOP who lured all those unaccompanied minors across the border with promises of amnesty and ample social services. There have been some Republicans from the big business wing who were tolerant of an insecure border and willing to tolerate those who crossed it, but House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor lost to an under-funded unknown because of his welcoming attitude toward illegal immigrant even before the current mess started to dominate the headlines, and it’s a certainty that the next Republican majority in Congress will be almost entirely rid of such heretics. The smart people have long warned the Republicans that this stance will forever doom them to a demographic disaster, but it now seems likely to win the support of a lot of otherwise apolitical people who are suddenly being asked to pick up the tab for the education and health care and eventual imprisonment of tens of thousands of unskilled and non-English-speaking youngsters who hopped the freight trains across Mexico.

Worse yet for the Democrats, those demanding the immediate repatriation of the invaders include many voters they’ve come to depend on. “Every economist agrees” that importing a few million more unskilled and non-English-speaking people into a country already suffering high unemployment and declining wages is just the thing to get the economy booming, according to a president who is fond of spouting such obvious nonsense, but a lot of high school drop-outs and a Harvard economist have already noticed the damage being done by unfettered immigration to financial prospects of those at the bottom rung. The law of supply and demand are more ruthlessly enforced than immigration, after all, and is hard for the most unsophisticated worker not to notice when the fines show up in a paycheck. A perpetually unkept promise to redistribute some wealth their way has kept the lower working class in the Democratic column for more decades than anyone alive could remember, but the immigration issue offers Republicans a rare opportunity to peel off a few votes with their own naked appeal to economic self-interest.

A disproportionate share of those low-wage workers are minorities, too, and their displeasure with the invasion is making hard to pretend that the opposition is comprised solely of  Gadsen-flag-waving and tricornered hat-wearing white folks. Some videos that have “gone viral” over at the much-watched YouTube site belie the press accounts that protestors who blocked the entrance of a convoy of Homeland Security buses full of the recent illegal arrivals in the California town of Murrieta were a lily-white mob, and feature African-Americans offering full-throated rants against admitting the youngsters. Our favorite of the videos show a couple of impassioned black men, one of them in Rastafarian garb, arguing with the pro-illegal immigration counter-protestors who had flocked the barricades. The counter-protestors are waving signs about how America stole the land from the Indians and Mexicans, but even the Native American in the “Vietnam Veteran” ball cap seems unable to articulate and argument about how the arrival of tens of thousands of unskilled and non-English-speaking youths is going to benefit his people. Illegal immigration not only gives black Americans competition for jobs, but also the political racial spoils that suffice in lieu of a job, and it will be difficult to keep the black political leadership on board with the Democrats’ agenda. It will be interesting to see if they’ll be able to keep Rep. Charles Rangel, who has been re-elected in Harlem since Reconstruction, but barely survived a primary challenge earlier this year in a district that is now majority Hispanic.

Sooner or later the homosexual community might consider if it is in their interest to welcome a massive immigration from a more macho part of the world that still taunts its soccer opponents with the Spanish equivalent of “faggot,” and then another loyal Democratic constituency could be in revolt. Those limo-driven one per centers who needn’t worry that their children will be seated next to any of the recent arrivals at their swank boarding schools will still be loyal to the cause, as will those idealists who believe that America should be caring for all of the world’s many billion needy, but the rest of the Democratic coalition will be vulnerable to doubts.

The overwhelming ublic sentiment for secure borders is so apparent that even the president is talking tough about sending the invaders back home, and he’s attempting to blame the Republicans for his failure to do so because they won’t authorize his request for $3.7 billion to deal with the situation. The request is tough enough to offend such open borders advocates as La Raza, the radical and revanchist and explicitly racialist organization from whence the president’s top policy advisor on immigration came, but it’s pork-laden and mostly spent on caring for rather than repatriating the aliens and will likely continue a policy of setting the invaders free with a pointless of promise of show up at a far-off deportation hearing. It’s calculatedly too soft to win the vote of any self-respecting Republican, and the president is already griping that the Republicans are too interested in playing politics to vote for it. We suspect the president would be more comfortable vilifying the Republicans as stingy racist xenophobes, and is eager to get back to that as soon the headlines fade and the negotiations on “comprehensive immigration reform” begin with whatever wobbly Republicans are left in the Congress, but the border crisis is causing all sorts of trouble for the Democrats.

— Bud Norman

Resisting the Invasion in a Small Town

The tiny southern California town of Murrieta had entirely escaped our notice until Wednesday, when a large group of Murrietans blocked at the city limits a convoy of Homeland Security Agency buses that were attempting to bring in some of the tens of thousands of illegal aliens detained during the recent invasion of unaccompanied minors, but we now admire its spunk.

Such a bold act of civil disobedience is especially remarkable in California, a one party state where the one party is enthusiastic about illegal immigration and intolerant of any dissent, and the media reaction has been predictably disapproving. The Los Angeles Times devoted most of its coverage to the views of a local resident who had hoped to welcome the illegal immigrants into the warm embrace and financial support of the community, and was appalled by the alleged lack of compassion shown by her townsfolk, while other outlets seemed distressed by the American flags that were waved at the blockade. Perhaps the heroine of that Times story is correct about the self and xenophobic motives of her neighbors, and there is no doubting that her own intentions are altruistic, but even if we assume the worst about the the town it is still right to resist.

Impoverished youngsters seeking the freedom and prosperity of America are ordinarily sympathetic subjects for a sob story, but not when they’re mostly precociously tough teenagers from some of the Third World’s most notorious slums and are coming in overwhelming numbers that include a sizable share of gang members and disease-carriers and future wards of the welfare state. The concerned young woman in the Times story could surely muster some compassion for the legal residents of her town who are reluctant to assume the considerable cost of dealing with a sudden infusion of unskilled and unemployable and very much uninvited youths, or at least for the victims of the crimes and social disruptions that are sure to follow. If Murrieta is indeed the hotbed of unkind bigotry that the times would have us believe it only seems all the more unlikely that infusion of a few hundred foreigners will work out well for anyone.

If Murrieta were to offer its warm embrace and financial support and unthinking compassion to the unaccompanied alien minors it would have the even more unfortunate result of inviting a few more tens of thousands of them to join the invasion. Already the invaders are overwhelming the ability of the federal government to care for them, with social service agencies as far away and well-funded as New York City pleading for relief, so it seems inevitable that tiny towns such as Murrieta will soon exhaust both their resources and compassion. The president’s oh-so-compassionate executive order to defer deportation of unaccompanied minor aliens for two years started the invasion, and even he is now trying to stave it off with threats of sending the invaders home.

We don’t take those threats seriously, and we doubt that anyone in the slums of Central America does, so it is likely the invasion will continue and the blockades will pop up at the city limits of other tiny towns. The blockaders are advised to avoid anything so offensive to media sensibilities as an American flag, and to add the words “Sorry” and “We’d really like to help” to their placards, but we hope that one way or another they’ll hold the line.

— Bud Norman

For the Children’s Sake

May God bless Nancy Pelosi’s bleeding heart. The former Speaker of the House and current Democratic minority leader recently traveled where the recent invasion of unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors is being stacked up in hellish makeshift detention centers, and with admirable empathy declared that she would like to take them all home with her.

Even the fabulously wealthy Pelosi’s multiple mansions apparently aren’t quite big enough to accommodate the tens of thousands of illegal youngsters who have crossed the border in the month, alas, but we’ll graciously assume that it was only out of a sense of fairness that Pelosi returned to her swank San Francisco digs without even the few hundred or so of the youngsters that she could have housed and fed. Still, she described the humanitarian crisis on the border as a “humanitarian opportunity” for those politically powerless communities that will be welcoming the invasion and those ungenerous taxpayers she expects to pick up the tab. The poor souls who traveled across Mexico from Central America are mostly “children,” as Pelosi pointed out, and she simply couldn’t bear the thought of anything so cruel as sending them home to their families.

The vast majority of these children are over the age of 16, an advanced enough age in the slums of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador that they managed the long trek across Mexico atop freight trains and drug-smuggling routes and are now causing problems in those makeshift detention camps with their rampant sexual activity, but such an exquisitely sensitive soul as Pelosi’s regards them as children nonetheless. That in many cases they carry disease, gang loyalties, no skills that might contribute to the American economy, and considerable costs for their care is of matter once the word “children” has been invoked.

That the invasion began after the president signed an executive order deferring deportation of minor illegal immigrants and this “humanitarian opportunity” is a direct result of that oh-so-compassionate policy is also to be overlooked, lest one be indifferent to the plight of mere children cast upon our land by cruel fate. The sight of illegal immigrants stacked up in makeshift camps and being flown around the country to cash-strapped communities unable to afford their care should even make Americans all the more amenable to a comprehensive immigration reform law that would bring millions more similarly burdensome immigrants to a land that already has a record number of people out of work.

If this doesn’t strike as a caring policy, then you just don’t care as much about the children as Pelosi’s bleeding heart.

— Bud Norman

When Winter Lingers into Summer

You might not have noticed, what with all the political scandals and foreign crises and invasions of unaccompanied minors and soccer games vying for your attention, but the American economy remains very, very lousy. According to the ultimately official numbers that were released with little fanfare this week, the American economy is lousier than it’s been since the bad old days of the ’08 meltdown.

The first and most ballyhooed estimate of the first quarter’s Gross Domestic Product was for 0.1 percent growth, which was horrible enough but at least kept alive a streak of anemic growth and could plausibly be blamed on the miserably cold winter that had afflicted much of the nation. That was more quietly followed by a revised estimate of a 1.1 percent decline, and the administration’s apologists arguing that the winter was even worse than they’d realized and it would have been more dire if not for the miracle of Obamacare causing an uptick in health care spending. Only the most nervous sorts of investors and the hard-core news junkies would have heard about the final report of a 2.9 percent decrease in GDP, which is even harsher than the past winter and includes the unsettling news that Americans actually spent less money on their health. Upon closer examination the numbers become even more dismal, with declines in private inventory investment, exports, state and local government spending, and residential and non-residential fixed investment that cannot be explained by snowy roads and falling temperatures.

Still, those ever-bullish proponents of Obamanomics in the popular press are reassuring their readers that the lazy, hazy days of summer will correct the situation. Presumably this is the time of year when a young executive’s fancy turns to thoughts of private inventory investment, and everyone will be herding the kids into the car and hitting the road to a relaxing yet economically stimulative vacation despite the gas prices rising from all those foreign crises that have nudged the economy off the front pages. Those of us less enamored of the high-tax, high-regulation, high-minded anti-caplitalist scheme that has been imposed on the American economy the past six or so years remain bearish.

The smart fellows over at zerohedge.com note that after the miserable winter even if spring and summer and fall bring the rosy 3 percent growth rates that the government has been promising it will average out to a meager 1.5 percent growth for the year. They don’t seem at all confident of that, either, noting that the past 50 years of economic history have never found two years with growth of less than 2.6 percent that weren’t followed by a recession. After a long stretch below that economic Mendoza line another quarter of contraction would force the headline writers to use that dreaded “R word,” and the economy would be once again jostling with the latest scandals at home and catastrophes abroad for news space.

Such dire news should make the stock markets happy, as it will likely force the Federal Reserve Board to keep printing up money and pushing down interest rates at least through the mid-term elections next fall, but it will have an unsettling effect on those portions of economy that make their money honestly. All those scandals and crises don’t inspire much confidence in the nation’s leadership, either, nor do they bode well for the price of energy. Perhaps that invasion of unaccompanied minors from will rescue the economy, but even in the midst of a wet and warm summer we’re still feeling those wintertime blues.

— Bud Norman

An Inconvenient Invasion

Lately the Russian army has invaded Ukraine, an Islamist terrorist group has invaded Iraq, and there’s been an invasion of unaccompanied minors into the United States. The first of these has largely been forgotten by America media too busy downplaying all the domestic scandals they’re hoping you’ll forget, the second is a popular topic in the press becomes it allows them recall the good old days of Bush-bashing, and the third is being treated with a suspicious restraint.

Perhaps it’s because an invasion of unaccompanied minors sounds relatively harmless, as if they’re unlikely to do any more than the rest of the unsupervised kiddos running around everywhere, but it has already proved a noteworthy problem. The self-proclaimed Most Transparent Administration in History has been characteristically opaque about the number of youthful invaders and what exactly has become of them, but by all accounts there are already tens of thousands of them with more on the way and they’ve either been released into the country or housed in makeshift detention camps at military bases or state facilities where diseases are flourishing and such basic necessities as underwear are lacking. Such dire circumstances for so many unaccompanied minors would ordinarily warrant hours of outraged air time and pages full of sob stories, with plenty of heartbreaking pictures of sad-eyed waifs huddled in the corner of an Army gymnasium, so the relatively restrained nature of the coverage is striking.

Too many years of toiling in the newspaper business lead us to several cynical theories.

One is that the pictures aren’t quite right. Most of the sad-eyed waifs being stuffed into those Army gymnasiums are 16 or older, which is a rather ripe old age when you’re coming out of the crime-ravaged slums of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador by way of hopped freight trains through Mexico, and thus far the most memorable photographs show some very fearsome young men decorated with gang tattoos brandishing obscene hand gestures and striking crotch-crabbing poses. Most people confronted with such a picture would be more inclined to send the young hoodlums back home rather than write a check to ensure their care, which is not at all what the press would prefer.

Much of the press has long been devoted to the cause of unrestricted immigration to the United States, and the recent invasion of unaccompanied minors is not proving helpful. A more manageable and photogenic number might have appealed to America’s generous nature, but the current invasion is so large that even The New York Times has been forced to report that the social service agencies are being overwhelmed in such a far-flung location as The Big Apple, and a nation already overwhelmed by $17 trillion of debt and a government that cannot provide promised medical care for its veterans might well decide it can only be so generous. All those gang-sign flashing minors in the current invasion were lured here by rampant rumors throughout Central America that any minors who could somehow get into the United States would not only be welcomed but treated to government largesse, and if that were to become an actual policy as so many wish it could entice the entire Third World.

The story is also unhelpful to the Obama administration, which is another cause to which the much of the press is devoted. Those rampant rumors about kids getting in free began when the president signed one of his frequent executive orders to defer deportation of minor illegal immigrants for two years, were likely further fueled by the president’s promise to deliver even more concessions, and somehow went unnoticed by the administration-appointed ambassadors of those Central American countries as well as the intelligence agencies that were apparently too busy keeping track of your internet browsing. After another executive order adding another two years of deferred deportation, as well as a promise to provide all the invaders with legal representation, the administration is now advertising a get-tough policy in Central America and threatening to eventually send the invaders home, but it remains to be seen if this is another of the administration’s meaningless “red line” threats. The president will have a hard enough time selling his “comprehensive immigration reform” bill with the more rock-ribbed Republicans that are coming out of the primaries, and making his tear-jerking speeches about those noble folks who only want to come here to make a living for their sad-eyed waifs will be especially difficult while shipping off planeloads of young Central Americans.

The story will continue to be reported, and in most cases accurately and with less than the usual amount of spin, but don’t expect it for the generate the same sort of breathless excitement that the press once had for George W. Bush’s decades-old Air National Guard records or what’s in Sarah Palin’s garbage cans. Some stories just aren’t as much fun, and sometimes the pictures just don’t work.

— Bud Norman