Like all good neocons, Podhoretz attempts to point the finger anywhere but at his own crew:
As for dealing with the illegals already here, there’s a sense in which this debate has been radicalized to such an extent that the Right won’t be satisfied with a policy that does not explicitly advocate expulsion — all other policies being dubbed “amnesty” and therefore illegitimate — while the Left refuses to consider any policy other than special-treatment affirmative-action line-jumping legalization. In other words, there is nothing our politicians can do, absolutely nothing, to satisfy the activists — because neither extreme will be reflected in any kind of law or policy that emerges even from a Washington energized to deal with them.
If a more sober reckoning of political reality does not intrude here, the Right will hurtle headlong toward schism, division, a third party and all sorts of other “pox on all your houses” actions. The cost of this is what I detail in the direst parts of my book Can She Be Stopped? — the easy transfer of power on Capitol Hill and the White House to the Democrats, and particularly to Hillary Clinton.
It’s doubtful the policies she will follow as president on immigration will please anyone on the Right. It’s certain that the policies she will follow on courts, on social issues, on foreign policy, on taxes, on regulation and on almost everything else you can think of will be deeply displeasing to people on the Right. And then, as a result of the pursuit of an impossible policy of purity on immigration, the country and the world will suffer the consequences.
The potential for self-destruction is terrifying. The potential for grave national harm is worse. Please, you guys, pull back from the edge.
Mr. Podhoretz’s first problem here is that granting anything except expulsion is an amnesty for an illegal alien. If a thief steals a car, it would be considered outrageous to let him keep it as long as he agreed to take care of it for two years, in fact, it would be considered outrageous to let him keep it even if he served a short jail sentence.
Even more outrageous, however, is Podhoretz’s attempt to shift the blame from those who created and exacerbated the situation to those who are angered by it and are motivated to bring it to an end. Pro-immigration Republicans have no one but themselves to blame if the Lizard Queen outmanuevers them and steals a very popular position from them, and they will be among those Republicans most responsible for her victory, not those who rightly refuse to support a majority party that has repeatedly refused to respect their political positions.
It was clear in Mr. Podhoretz’s email to me several days ago – it was not a public discussion and so has not been posted here – he subscribes to the ownership view of voting. His interpretation is that Republicans have an inherent right to the votes of everyone who identifies themselves as being left of center, so therefore one must vote Republican no matter what Republicans do or say. Failure to do so is voting for the Democrat because this is a two-party system, all those other names on the ballot notwithstanding.
I assert that this is absurd, that the vote count starts from zero in every election and every vote must be earned every time. The Republicans have richly earned their right to return to the political wilderness, due to their repugnant behavior regarding immigration and many other matters. They will not have my support in either 2006 or 2008 and I hope the lesson will be bitter enough to prove salutary to those shallow “pragmatists” in the party who stupidly continue to insist that moving left and expanding the big tent is an election-winning strategy.
They are mere tacticians, not strategists, which is why they consistently fail to see the big picture.
Considering that the most successful Republican politician of all rejected that strategy in favor of forthright conservativism, it is amazing that so many “conservative” commentators and Republican strategists continue to cling to it even in the face of what may be an epochal defeat.
By the way, notice what I wrote back in 2003, when all the talk was of the Lizard Queen running for president in 2004:
While I have much respect for the raw animal cunning and devious creativity of America’s most famous foot-fetishist, I honestly think that Dick Morris is forgetting something about his former client. The Lizard Queen is cold-blooded. She is not a risk-taker, at heart, and she is far more prone to finishing off the sick and wounded than taking on an alpha male in a full-frontal attack…. So, the Lizard Queen will continue to lurk quietly in the gaseous morass of the Senate, biding her time, waiting for the right moment to strike an unsuspecting America and drag it beneath the dark waters of her totalitarian vision.
I suspect that moment is fast approaching. Her 2008 campaign shifts into a higher gear as soon as the polls close and all the votes are counted this November.