DCDL

Over at the Corner, John Podhoretz is unhappy:

Suddenly, immigration restriction has become one of those issues about which one is not permitted to disagree, because to disagree is to join with the forces of Evil. Those who favor a less restrictive policy are said to be bought and paid for by Big Business, to want to oppress poor American minorities who can’t earn a decent wage, and to seek the cultural destruction of America. Chief among these villains, it appears, is the president of the United States, whose efforts on behalf of conservative causes — from faith-based policies to stem-cell research to a strict-constructionist judiciary to entitlement reform and massive tax cuts — have all fallen down the memory hole. He is not a conservative, my e-mailers tell me. He is Jorge Arbusto, an agent of the Mexican government. And neither, by the way, am I, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and someone who left mainstream journalism to toil in the fields of conservative media when conservative media weren’t cool, to put it mildly.

Intolerance on the right? How shocking! I really feel for JPod. Who could have imagined that people who regularly denounce other Americans as traitors and terrorist lovers would be so nasty to people who disagree with them?

1. Of course the big immigration news today is the rally at the Washington Monument:
   

   Monday, April 10th, A National Day of Action Rally for Immigrant Rights! When: 3pm - March from Malcolm X Park (16th and Euclid Streets, NW) to the Washington Monument, 4pm - Rally at the Washington Monument. With some 75 cities holding marches and rallies, this may be the biggest day of demonstrations in more than a century. Virginia, Maryland, D.C. will rally at the Washington Monument. Order of the day: American flags and white T-shirts (to show the rally is peaceful — wear them over whatever is keeping you warm). Directed against draconian divide-and-conquer legislation passed in the house (HR 4437) and for progressive immigration reform (such as McCain-Kennedy). This is an issue that touches everybody in America, and the sea of faces at the rallies should show a wide range of solidarity. For more info, national and local: www.April10.org or www.cirnow.org. Info - Caroline Stuart, (202) 467-2457 or volunteer@pfaw.org

2. I heard Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-TX) — known on this blog for advocating renaming 16th Street after Reagan — make a couple of wacky statements on Meet the Press yesterday. Fortunately Andrew Heyman at Blackwhite has the transcription to reassure me that I wasn’t imagining things:
   • Yes, Bonilla did say that he doesn’t actually want the Sensenbrenner bill he voted for to be enforced — therefore it’s okay to criminalize the actions of doctors, nurses, churches, and soup kitchens.
   • Yes, Bonilla does believe our neighbor to the south is a totalitarian dictatorship, where Vicente Fox is disappearing people for waving American flags.
3. Since a lot Republicans seem to be against “amnesty” (not to mention Amnesty), Dwight Meredith at Wampum suggests asking people whether they favor amnesty for the president for illegal eavesdropping. It sounds like a good line to take, even if it doesn’t quite capture the idiocy of passing another law to address Bush’s belief that he can ignore laws.