Red Scare Herrings

During the protests ealier this week I checked out conservative radio for a few minutes.

The effort underway seemed to amount to de-legitimizing the immigrants and their cause by proving out the pedigree of the riot organizers. Marxists, Communists, and other variations of anti-capitalists from the far left fringe were supposedly involved in getting together turnout. Various anti-American signs and fringe sentiments were on display in the crowd (fastidiously documented by Rightie blogs). And other colorful characters like Ted Kennedy were seen leading the crowd in chanting -- once he got off the conference call that we can expect took place between leading Democrats and labor unions assuring them that every possible effort would be made to funnel new arrivals to their ranks following amnesty.

So this was the clever conclusion made by Limbaugh and others : Look, it has nothing to do with immigration. It's only about Democratic politics!

Of course it's about politics, champ. But the modifier "Democrat" hasn't fully been applied, at least not yet. It's about eight to ten million people who want full citizenship in America. Many of them may be predisposed to Democratic allegiances, but many are not, and to think of them as a unified block is foolhardy. There are also millions more American citizens who may have arrived in recent years from Mexico or South- or Central-America and who are carefully watching this debate to see who cares and what is said about the participants.

Even if the fringe groups played a role along the way -- we are simply not talking about hundreds of thousand of wannabe Marxists in Thursday's crowds. With Internet communications it's possible, even likely, that all kinds of spontaneous organization took place on the street - blogs, IM, email, you name it. And the fact that some moonbat political beliefs were on display among the signage proves absolutely nothing. I grew up in Washington DC and I know how any crowd that gathers en masse for any cause will also cause spinoff protests to form with un- and semi-related causes. The Flat Earth Society shows up at the Postal Workers Rally, just to cheat a few minutes of media time if possible. That's how it works.

So I'll repeat what I said earlier once more, with feeling: There's no way on God's green earth we are sending back eight to ten million immigrants. It's would be a practical impossibility to ship back even 5% of that number, and the politics of it would be played up like a heart-wrenching crime against humanity. The Democrats are several steps ahead in accepting this blazingly obvious reality while opportunistically pandering to the folks who will be given amnesty sooner or later, and many Republicans are stuck on stupid.