The Patriot Post® · Putting the Carrot Ahead of the Stick

The Foundation

“The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.” –James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

“The Senate on Tuesday voted against tough border security measures that it promised to put in place years ago. Tell us again why we should trust them to secure the borders later after granting amnesty first. … In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, requiring 700 miles of double-tiered fencing get built along the Mexican border. … A year later, Congress quietly passed a law that largely neutered the fence requirement, and today, only 36 miles of it have been built. … Since the Senate is desperate to get amnesty done as soon as possible, it can’t let little inconveniences like securing the border or tracking people coming into the country get in the way. As we’ve said many times in this space, border security has to come before any effort is made to grant legal status to today’s 11 million illegals. For good reason: Failure to do so will only encourage more to cross the border, in the justifiable belief that once here they, too, will get citizenship without having to wait in line. We’re already seeing illegal crossings increase even before the law is passed. … History already proves that putting the carrot ahead of the stick doesn’t work. The 1986 immigration law also promised to close gaps in the border in exchange for amnesty. But as soon as soon as Democrats got amnesty on the books, they started putting roadblocks in the way of enforcement. The result was that just three years after the bill’s passage, illegal border crossings had actually increased, and today the number in the country illegally has climbed fourfold. A few days ago, [Senator Marco] Rubio said immigration reform had to ensure ‘that we will never have another wave of illegal immigration again.’ But with the Senate turning down every meaningful border security measure, that’s the only thing we can guarantee will happen again if this bill becomes law.” –Investor’s Business Daily

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Nate Jackson
Managing Editor

Upright

“The same pre-planned chaos that attends the healthcare bill … is built into this [immigration] legislation as well. Consider just one aspect of it, namely family reunification. Does anyone seriously believe that once this bill passes, whatever the current definition of 'family’ is won’t be vastly expanded? Furthermore, an integral part of that reunification is based on the so-called conventional wisdom that America is home to ‘11 million’ illegal aliens. What if it’s 25 million? Or 30 million? How can we be certain it’s not? Yet far more importantly, how is it that not a single attempt has been made to determine exactly how many illegals are in the country before any legislation is passed? The answer is simple. If the 11 million number is a sham, then the family reunification totals that could reach double that number or more, are equally fraudulent, which brings us to another unpleasant reality for the American public: Are you ready to see a level of legalization that would fundamentally and irrevocably alter the character of the nation?” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

“In the context of a war [in Syria] that has killed some 93,000 people so far, it is not clear why the 150 or so casualties the White House attributes to chemical weapons should make a decisive difference, except that the president threatened ‘enormous consequences’ in response to any use of such weapons. … This perceived need to preserve credibility is a key ingredient in any foreign policy quagmire because it discourages second thoughts and dictates stubborn persistence in the face of failure. No matter how misguided in theory or disastrous in practice an intervention is, changing course is always a threat to credibility, a threat that looms larger the farther a president goes down the wrong path. All the more reason to resist what Obama used to call ‘a war of choice.’” –columnist Jacob Sullum

“Arab and Muslim peoples have been at war with other nations and each other for centuries. The two major factions of Islam – Sunni and Shia – are in constant conflict over which one is Prophet Mohammed’s legitimate heir. The ‘infidel’ West can’t help settle any of this and is more likely to unite the warring factions against us, as it has in the past. … The president wants credit for withdrawing American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, but with Syria he is involving the U.S. in another war that can’t be ‘won,’ at least not in a way that will advance American interests.” –columnist Cal Thomas

“President Obama is preparing bilateral negotiations with the Taliban. This the same Taliban that chopped the heads off two young boys, aged 10 and 16, for supposedly accepting food from police in exchange for information. This is the same Taliban that still embraces shariah, and still holds an American soldier, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, captive. … [T]he U.S.‘ decision to get involved by backing the very people who slaughtered thousands of Americans on Sept. 11 is more than shortsighted. It is a ground shift in the American government’s mentality with regard to the war on terror. For a dozen years, American troops fought to remove the Taliban from power and to cripple al-Qaida. They fought to create safe ground for American allies and hostile ground for American enemies. Thanks to the Obama administration’s morally relativistic, ignorant and confused policies with regard to the Middle East, it appears that their blood may have been spilled in vain.” –columnist Ben Shapiro

Insight

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” –American journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

“We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic of undeveloped people, or of a decadent generation.” –President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

Demo-gogues

It’s moving, all right: “Across the board, people are feeling like … America is moving and it’s moving in the right direction. … I’m very proud of the record that we’ve been able to put together over the last four and half years.” –Barack Obama

Government can fix it all! “When people say the whole problem is government, they don’t understand. Government can help … by making smart choices – by investing in American manufacturing so we’re bringing more of our jobs back from overseas; investing in our roads and our bridges and our ports to make sure that we are staying competitive all around the world; educating our children from the earliest years, keeping them safe from gun violence; rethinking our high schools; making college more affordable; making sure we stay at the cutting edge in science and technology; securing our energy future; addressing climate change.” –Barack Obama with a list of leftist dreams

Remedial geography needed: “I’m not going to waste taxpayer money on a dumb fence and that’s what [Sen. John Thune’s] amendment would be. … A smart fence, which is what Senator [John] McCain and I want to build – since he’s from Arizona, I think he knows more about this than the senator from South Dakota, who only has a border with Canada that is quite different.” –Sen. Mary Mary Landrieu (D-LA) (South Dakota does not border Canada, Senator.)

Leftist sacrament: “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about [abortion]. I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics.” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), despicably hiding behind “faith” to defend the murder of innocents

It’s outrageous that babies are sacrificed on the altar of abortion: “Here we go again. Every single year we have to go through the same [abortion debate] nonsense with the same morally presumptuous and morally arrogant attitude that we know better. 'We know better than women and their doctors. We know better about their health care. We know better about their moral choices in very personal decisions.’ It is morally outrageous, frankly.” –Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)

Say what? “I’m of the opinion now … that if you really were to question all [Republicans], that there is a sort of continuity of thought that rape is really not so bad.” –Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)

Dezinformatsia

Mindless gun-grabbing: “[T]he fact that Chicago has quite tough gun control is utterly meaningless, because they all just get in their cars and go outside of the state to neighboring states which don’t have strong gun controls. So until you have a federal gun control that stops that happening, this will keep happening in places like Chicago, until they can enforce it properly.” –CNN’s Piers Morgan

Non Compos Mentis: “Was anyone else bothered by the Father’s Day picture released by the White House yesterday? The one with the President holding a water gun? I agree with the President’s stance on SENSIBLE gun control. But we must also destroy gun culture. President Obama made a mistake this time. Gun culture is promoted through the normalization of violent behavior, language, and imagery. Military style water guns are part of that.” –political commentator Marc Lamont Hill

Defamation: “[Newly elected Iranian president Hassan Rowhani] was seen as the most reform-minded of all the candidates who ran this time. That being said, they were all very conservative. In U.S. terms, it was as if all the candidates for the presidency came from the Tea Party.” –CBS’s Elizabeth Palmer

Civility: “Hey, you remember evil dictator of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? … Ahmadinejad is retiring. He’s going to spend all of his time on his ranch in Crawford, Texas.” –CBS’s David Letterman

Newspulper Headlines:

Longest Books Ever Written: “Bad Idea, Mr. President” –The New York Times

We Blame George W. Bush: “Rick Santorum: Why Mitt Romney Didn’t Win” –Politico.com

We Blame Global Warming: “Men ‘to Blame for the Menopause’” –BBC website

Bottom Story of the Day: “The Booty That Lies Beneath” –The New York Times

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

Village Idiots

It’s called the Second Amendment: “What’s going on is that these organized special interest groups don’t want anything done because it’s a big source of their money to terrify people living out in the country that there’s this big, conspiratorial federal government trying to take their guns away. I think if you could get a clear-headed vote on the issue standing alone, the overwhelming majority of Americans in every state would be for it.” –Bill Clinton

That’s racist! “I think that there’s a kind of moral panic, a fear of the end of whiteness that we’ve been seeing a long time in that I think, you know, Obama’s ascension as president kind of symbolizes to a certain degree. And so I think this is one response to that sense that there’s a decreasing white majority in the country and that women’s bodies and white women’s bodies in particular are obviously a crucial way of reproducing whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege.” –University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor Salamisha Tillet

“Frankly, there will be a great bang for our buck for being in Africa, because when you travel to regions like Africa that don’t get a lot of presidential attention, you can have very long-standing and long-running impact from the visit.” –Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on Obama’s upcoming $100 million trip to Africa

Taking credit: “[ObamaCare is] a term, by the way, that I coined and used proudly long before the administration decided it was a good idea.” –disgraced New York City mayor hopeful Anthony Weiner

Short Cuts

“Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old guy behind this NSA spy scandal, said in an interview that he is not in hiding. Which would have carried a lot more weight if he hadn’t made the announcement from an undisclosed secret location.” –comedian Jay Leno

“Senator Chuck Schumer said if Immigration Reform passes that illegal immigration will be a thing of the past. It’s a contentious bill. Republicans want to put border security first, but they can’t think of a polite way to tell construction workers building a two-thousand-mile-long wall to stand on the south side of the wall while they’re building it.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“President Obama wants to assure you he is not Dick Cheney … if anyone was operating under that assumption. You know, they accuse Cheney of a lot of things – being evil, going to war to increase his profits at Halliburton, being more machine than man, biting the heads off kittens – but what no one accuses Cheney of is being incompetent. So I think Obama has a long way to go until anyone would realistically mistake him for Dick Cheney.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team