Bitter laugh for the day:

says who? President Bill Clinton?:

Again we pinch a neat cartoon from PowerLine:

The Left is intensely immoral, as unabashedly unscrupulous as a wild beast. It will shamelessly blacken the name of anybody it perceives as a danger to it with baseless lies. Example: Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, publicly announced that the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2008, Mitt Romney, had not paid his taxes.

The Left will sacrifice any number of people, destroy their hopes, their health, their lives, if in their calculation doing so might give them an advantage. Example: Far-left President Obama is drawing tens of thousands of children over the Mexican border – to become, he hopes, future voters for his Party – by announcing that children who are in the US as illegal aliens will not be deported. All the children suffer. Many are ill. Some die.

The Left will deprive a law-abiding citizen, with armed force, of everything he has striven for in the name of some new oppressive regulation it has suddenly launched with a dim ideological end in view such as “environmental protection”. Example: A man who made a pond is being fined $75,000 a day by the EPA for doing just that, on the absurd grounds that the little stretch of water on his property is contaminating a river miles away.

These are just three examples, picked at random from the top of our composite editorial head, of present-day Leftist immorality in America. (How to choose from among the misdemeanors of the Clintons? An embarrasment of riches!) ) The theme of the Left’s iniquity is so vast that volumes could be written about it, and have been. In other countries, Leftist powers have committed mass-murder on an unimaginable scale by poison-gas, firing-squad, torture, overwork, and deliberate starvation.

And what compounds the evil and swells the monstrousness of it all is that they do it  in the name of compassion. Their aim, they claim, is to better the lot of the the underdog. They will make the poor richer by taking riches from the rich and giving them to the poor until all are materially and socially equal. They do not want the only form of equality that is just – equality before the law. It offends them, they say (even the richest among them, and most of them are rich) to see inequality between the richest and the poorest.

With them, equality  is not a moral principle but an aesthetic one.

They call the ideal of it “social justice“.

Paul Mirengoff writes at PowerLine, in part commenting on an article by Peter Wehner defending “social justice” (though Wehner is not a Leftist):

Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when we say that justice should be blind, we mean that it should be rendered without regard to a person’s social status and without regard to the demands of this or that social agenda.

If justice is an individual-centric concept, then there is no room for the concept of social justice. The pursuit of social justice may lead to action that is consistent with justice, for example a non-discrimination statute. But the concept of “social justice” isn’t required to justify such a law; nor is it invoked to do so, since arguments for simple justice are always more persuasive (for example, the sponsors of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 took pains to assure the nation, probably disingenuously in some cases, that the law would preclude racial preferences).

The pursuit of social justice may also lead to action that is inconsistent with justice, such as granting racial preferences or expropriating someone’s property for “the greater good”. Such action is not justice, but rather justice’s antithesis. Thus, we should object when it is marketed as “social justice”. 

In sum, the concept of social justice has no value. In the first scenario, it is superfluous; in the second, it is false advertising.

[Peter] Wehner argues that “any society that fails to dispense some measure of sympathy and solicitude to others, particularly those living in the shadows and who are most vulnerable to injustice, cannot really be a good society”.  I agree. But vulnerability to injustice can be countered by the rigorous pursuit of simple justice. And sympathy and solicitude can be dispensed under these labels, rather than as a form of justice.

Wehner recognizes this when he concludes: “Whether this effort travels under the banner of social justice or some other name, to do justice and to love mercy is what is required of us, as individuals and as a society”. But the banner under which the charitable project travels matters.

When it travels under the banner of social justice, it gains extra moral authority that it does not deserve. The genuine tension between our desire to do justice (as commonly understood) and to be merciful is elided because justice is subsumed under mercy.

The result will be confusion and mischief, such as the aforementioned racial preferences and expropriation of property for “the greater good”. If rationalized as “social justice”, such components of the redistributionist project become entitlements, not favors to be granted, if at all, in small doses and under limited circumstances.

As [Friedrich] Hayek, who (as Wehner notes) deplored the concept of social justice, understood, therein lies the road to serfdom.

Besides, we cannot believe that devotees of the Left (once grown out of the ignorant idealism of adolescence) give a fig for “sympathy”, “solicitude”, or “mercy”. If they did they would take pains to find out what economic system really does better the lot of the poor (namely, the free market); and they wouldn’t repeat as they do that “the end justifies the means” – their excuse for sacrificing any number of their fellow human beings.

In fact many of them have dropped even the pretense of sympathizing with human beings. The victims of their “compassion” were first the proletarians. Then, as the proletarians in the Western world became too prosperous (because they had a degree of freedom) to qualify as pretexts for vast destruction, they focused on the lumpenproletariat. That class also became too well-off to care about. So then they moaned about the lot of  “women” – by which they meant feminists – and people of unconventional sexual preferences. Many of them moved on to animals. But their ever-restless avant-garde did not stop there. They are now working to sacrifice more people than ever before on the grounds that it will be good for the wilderness, for rocks and stones, and even the vast, spinning, molten-cored planet – the ultimate victim of “social injustice”. (See our post, Fresh wild raw uninhabited world, January 2, 2012.)

It would be enormously laughable as a theory, if it wasn’t colossally tragic as historical and contemporary reality.

Noemi Álvarez Quillay?

Untold numbers of children are being smuggled across the southern border into the United States with the active encouragement of the Obama-led Democratic government. 

One of them was only three years old.

The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell reports and comments:

There has been a lot of talk from the Obama administration about having more “humane” immigration policies.

But the sad fact is that on President Obama’s watch, one of the most inhumane realities of illegal immigration has skyrocketed.

Children are crossing the border – and they’re doing it without their parents.

The number of minor children crossing or attempting to cross the U.S. southern border unaccompanied by a parent or other adult relative has exploded from 6,560 in 2011 to an estimated 60,000 for fiscal year 2014. Border patrol agents in South Texas reported over 1,000 such children were apprehended by officials earlier this month, including a 3-year-old boy from Honduras.

What explains the dramatic increase?

As a government official from Ecuador told The New York Times, one of the main reasons is a belief held by many in Central America and Mexico that some sort of immigration reform will be passed that allows anyone who can get into the United States illegally to be able to stay.

In other words, the prospect of amnesty is encouraging more illegal immigration – and in this case, the human trafficking of children. Often raised by their grandparents or other relatives because their parents have already come to the U.S. illegally, these children are traveling alone or with human smugglers, called coyotes, who are paid to get them across the border.

And what happens once they’re here? According to the Department of Health and Human Services, by law, the U.S. government must assume custody of “unaccompanied alien children” apprehended by law enforcement who file claims to remain in the United States. The government then contracts with state-licensed facilities to care for the children until it can place them with sponsors.

According to a judge in Texas who has reviewed numerous such cases, the U.S. government is guilty of encouraging this illegal behavior.

He described one case where after taking a child into custody, Homeland Security agents learned that the mother, who herself was in the U.S. illegally, had “instigated this illegal conduct”.  DHS delivered the child to the mother anyway, didn’t prosecute her, and didn’t even initiate deportation proceedings for her.

As the judge said, “instead of enforcing the law of the United States, the Government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it”, conduct for which any “private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted”. 

The judge said:

By fostering an atmosphere whereby illegal aliens are encouraged to pay human smugglers for further services, the Government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.

To get an idea of the danger these children face, one need only read the very sad story of Noemi Álvarez Quillay, a 12-year-old girl from Ecuador. She died in a holding facility in Mexico — authorities there say she committed suicide — after being caught with a smuggler trying to get her across the border near El Paso. Noemi was poor, but had been well taken care of by her grandparents in Ecuador after her parents moved illegally to the U.S.

More information comes from the New York Times:

Noemi was taken to Casa de la Esperanza, a shelter for Mexican minors whose name means “House of Hope”. Over that weekend, she was questioned by a prosecutor. After that, a doctor described Noemi as being “terrified”, according to a report in El Diario of Juarez.

On March 11, when called to eat, Noemi instead went into the bathroom. Another girl could not get in. The doctor, Alicia Soria Espino, and others broke open the door and found Noemi hanging by the cloth shower curtain.

How likely is that? Why would a child suddenly hang herself? And – a twelve-year-old girl hanging herself with a shower curtain – how? – visualize it – try it – we did, and couldn’t, and don’t believe it.*

Notice the insertion of the unnecessary detail, “Another girl could not get in”, as if to imply that there’s a witness that the door was locked from the inside.

The story reeks of cover-up. Was the child murdered? If so, why?

The next day, her parents in the Bronx received a phone call from a woman who told them that Noemi had safely crossed the border. Later that day, they received a second call saying that she had died, according to Ecuadorean consular officials.

Was it even Noemi? Does the child pictured above look like a twelve-year-old?  Doesn’t she look more like an 8 year old? Perhaps it is a picture of Noemi at the age of eight. (Photos were taken of her by her poor grandparents in Ecuador? Unlikely.) Or maybe it is a different child.

The authorities determined that the girl initially thought to be an 8-year-old Mexican was probably the 12-year-old Ecuadorean. In part because her parents, who do not have legal immigration status, decided not to go to Mexico, DNA tests were required to confirm her identity, said Jorge W. Lopez, the Ecuadorean consul general in New York.

The report does not say whether DNA tests were in fact carried out or whether an identity was confirmed.

Autopsies found no sign of a sexual assault, a common crime against migrants.

The man said to have been the smuggler, Mr. Fermas, was arrested but was later freed by a judge, who did not find enough evidence to hold him for prosecution, said Ángel Torres of the federal prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Juárez. …

The police said he had been found in charge of a pickup truck with Noemi inside it. According to Fermas the Smuggler they were lying.

In published interviews, Mr. Fermas has said that the story about the pickup truck was untrue and that the police had entered his house and taken the girl under the guise of rescuing her.

The NYT does not pause to consider why the police lied, why Fermas used these words, why the police might really have taken her away if not to rescue her.

What really happened to Noemi? Who was the dead child? How did she really die? Is it true that “no sign of sexual assault was found”?

Why is the NYT so incurious about the story it is reporting?

It goes on without pause to cold – and chilling – statistics :

In the week after Noemi’s death, 370 foreign child migrants were detained across Mexico, according to the national immigration agency. Nearly half were traveling alone.

The Morning Bell report also looks no further into the disappearance of Noemi and the suspicious death of a little girl. It is more concerned with the political implications of child-smuggling from Latin America:

The Obama administration has implemented multiple policies that encourage illegal immigration.

Its lax and increasingly nonexistent enforcement of our immigration laws has resulted in a 40 percent drop in deportations of illegal immigrants in the U.S. since 2009. Instead, illegal immigrants who have been convicted of further crimes inside the U.S. have been released. Last year, one in three — more than 68,000 criminals – was released.

Interestingly, one of the reasons given for children attempting to cross the border into the U.S. is that they are trying to escape crime and gang violence in their home countries. Yet the Obama administration’s immigration policies are actually releasing criminals back into the very communities where these children are likely to find themselves in America.

This is Obama’s version of “humane” immigration policies.

But what happened to Noemi?

Who was the dead child?

How did she die?

Why?

*  Our shower-rod wouldn’t hold the weight even of a child. A shower-curtain does not lend itself easily to being tied round a neck. Also, it would have to be hung very high for the average twelve-year-old to suspend herself.  She would have to stand on the edge of the tub (if there is one under the shower) and then take her feet off it.  The shower curtain and its rod would have to be so strong that her weight would not then drop her to the bottom of the tub or onto the floor of the bathroom.

We think an eight year old girl was murdered. And so probably was Noemi, in some clumsy cover-up plot with a substitution of identities. The plot has probably succeeded. The unlikely story that Noemi committed suicide will probably never be further investigated. The truth will probably never be known.

For once we have reason to applaud a trade union.

From the Washington Times:

The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 7,000 ICE agents and employees, voted 259-0 for a resolution saying there was “growing dissatisfaction and concern” over the leadership of Assistant Secretary John Morton, who heads ICE, and Phyllis Coven, assistant director for the agency’s office of detention policy and planning.

The resolution said ICE leadership had “abandoned the agency’s core mission of enforcing U.S. immigration laws and providing for public safety,” instead directing its attention “to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty and the creation of a special detention system for foreign nationals that exceeds the care and services provided to most U.S. citizens similarly incarcerated.

“It is the desire of our union … to publicly separate ourselves from the actions of Director Morton and Assistant Director Coven and publicly state that ICE officers and employees do not support Morton or Coven or their misguided and reckless initiatives, which could ultimately put many in America at risk,” the union said.

In a strongly worded statement, the union and its affiliated local councils said the integrity of the agency “as well as the public safety” would be “better provided for in the absence of Director Morton and Assistant Director Coven.”

The statement also noted that:

• The majority of ICE’s enforcement and removal officers are prohibited from making street arrests or enforcing U.S. immigration laws outside of the jail setting.

• Hundreds of ICE officers nationwide perform no law enforcement duties whatsoever because of resource mismanagement within the agency.

• ICE detention reforms have transformed into a detention system aimed at providing resortlike living conditions to criminal aliens based on recommendations not from ICE officers and field managers, but from “special-interest groups.”

• The lack of technical expertise and field experience has resulted in a priority of providing bingo nights, dance lessons and hanging plants to criminals, instead of addressing safe and responsible detention reforms for noncriminal individuals and families. …

The no-confidence vote, taken in June and made public last week in a letter by the union, said the agency’s senior leadership dedicated “more time to campaigning for immigration reforms aimed at large-scale amnesty legislation than advising the American public and federal lawmakers on the severity of the illegal-immigration problems.”

Millions of people are moving from tyrannical, corrupt, and (consequently) poor countries into others that are still relatively prosperous –  because they are still relatively free: the open societies, most of which are welfare states.

The majority of these immigrants do not assimilate. They remain in enclaves where the customs and in some cases the laws of their native societies continue to bind them. They do not learn the language of the host country and are not educated, so they cannot find employment. They depend on welfare handouts provided by the host country.

To meet the additional expense of immigrants’ entitlements, governments of the host countries raise taxes. The combination of rising taxation and increasing welfare-demand weakens the economy. Private enterprise is handicapped, unemployment spreads, freedom is diminished, prosperity declines. Neither the host nation nor the newcomers benefit in the long term.

Finding themselves less contented than they had hoped, immigrant groups go from disobedience to violent insurgency. (Muslim riots in France are an example.) Civil unrest threatens the general order. But for all the augmented power of such governments, they find themselves unable to enforce their laws on the immigrant settlements. It was their policy to invite the immigrants in and sustain them on welfare: it is their policy neither to repress them when they riot, terrorize, and kill, nor to repatriate them; but instead to propitiate them, granting them ever more autonomy.

Such states are under existential threat, first from the “anti-nativist” (or “anti-discriminatory”, “anti-racist”, or “pro-diversity”) ideologues who attained political power and let the immigrants in, and then from the reality on the ground when the immigrants try to establish their own culture or nationalism on the host nation’s territory. Not just their integrity but their status as nation states is slipping away.

This is most clearly seen if the immigrants come in vast numbers from a neighboring country, as do Mexicans into the United States. The borders between the countries can become so porous that they effectively dissolve. Whether as a result or a cause or both,  the very idea of borders is under attack as an ideological anachronism and a “racist”, “imperialist” offense.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has recently published a booklet titled Arizona’s Fight, America’s Fight. It consists of two essays, by Victor Davis  Hanson and Ralph Peters respectively, that discuss the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States.

Victor Hanson Davis, in his essay Why the Arizona Law – And Why Now?, gives examples of active efforts to abolish the southern border of the US:

[Mexican] consulates now advocate the inclusion of  Mexican textbooks in predominantly Hispanic American schools, as part of Mexico City’s vow to recognize that “the Mexican nation extends beyond its borders”. (page 18)

[T]oday a Mexican  national can live in America nearly as if he were in Mexico.  The host has lost confidence in its own values. The old notion of the desirability of the melting pot has long passed. (page 26)

And Ralph Peters, in Arizona’s Neighbor From Narco-insurgency To Narco-state?, observes the same disastrous trend. He writes:

Our southern border is no longer a fixed frontier, but merely a zone of transition. Border violations carry no serious penalties, while left-wing activists and the establishment media prefer indicting our border agents over enforcing our laws.  (page 34)

How will it be to live in a world where there are no frontiers, a world without nation states?

We’re thinking about it.

“This is an administration that could just as well have been put in place by America’s most relentless enemies,” David Solway writes at FrontPageMag. “It is headed by a president with deep roots in a neo-Marxist social movement and associational ties with a host of disreputable characters.”

Yes.

Solway sums up the Obama Devastation of America thus far:

There can be little doubt any longer that the United States is now governed by a rogue administration … We are observing an establishment that is unwilling to defend the nation’s borders from drug cartel violence and illegal immigration, forcing unread bills through Congress in the dark of night, embarking on a socialized medicine program it cannot afford and which has not worked wherever else it has been tried, plunging the nation into bankruptcy with misnamed “stimulus spending,” unsustainable entitlements and exponential debt, refusing to drill safely on land to reduce its dependence on foreign oil supplies, utterly incapable of dealing with cataclysms like the Gulf oil spill, touting an impractical, premature and ruinously exorbitant Green Energy policy, considering cap-and-trade legislation when it has become undeniably clear that Global Warming research is a profoundly unsettled and perhaps even a false science, scrubbing all reference to Islamic terror from its official documents and pursuing a foreign policy that might accurately be described as geopolitically suicidal. Quite a list, but unfortunately an accurate one.

And a damning one, though not even comprehensive.

The rogue president still has two more years to go.

Only by an unforeseeable stroke of luck could it be less.

Only by an unpreventable fit of national lunacy could it be more.

We have poached this letter from Mark Steyn’s website. It was sent to him by Linda Denno, of Sierra Vista, Arizona. We think it raises points that should be taken into account in the arguments raging over illegal immigration, and over the controversial measures Arizona is taking to deal with it.

I live within fifteen miles of the Mexican border, and my back fence runs along a major corridor for illegal immigrants traveling through the desert. We are accustomed to helicopters circling overhead and Border Patrol vehicles constantly patrolling the dirt road behind our house. Our beloved German Shepherd has been poisoned and our property vandalized, although I would not say that we live in fear because we are well armed and take necessary precautions.

But what I really want to mention to you is something I really have not heard in the debate over the consequences of illegal immigration. I believe that any and all measures that truly discourage immigrants from entering this country illegally — as the new Arizona law is supposedly already doing — are salutary because discouraging illegal immigration is the genuinely compassionate approach.

A couple of anecdotes: Last week, Border Patrol agents discovered a large moving truck abandoned in the desert near Douglas, Arizona (the site of the recent rancher’s murder). The truck was padlocked from the outside. When the agents cut off the lock and opened the trailer, they discovered dozens of illegal immigrants inside, abandoned by the coyotes who had obviously been “spooked” and left the people in the back of the truck to whatever fate befell them. It was a warm but not a hot day in the desert, so the illegal immigrants were still alive and in relatively good condition. The situation could have ended very differently, not to say tragically.

Secondly, my family and I were enjoying our breakfast al fresco one morning when two women came to our back fence asking for “agua.” A Border Patrol raid the night before behind our house had picked up 70 or so illegal immigrants. These two young ladies had been abandoned by the coyotes during the raid and had been wandering in the hot desert (wearing all black) for hours. My teenage daughter speaks Spanish and was able to discover that both were from El Salvador, both were the mothers of several young children, and both believed they were almost to Los Angeles (550 miles away). We brought them into our garage, gave them water and food, and called the Border Patrol. My daughter was upset about their situation, and understandably so: They were only a few years older than she was. I explained to her that as long as our government refused to enforce laws against illegal immigration, desperate people from other countries would continue to take great risks for the opportunity to live the American dream. Those people would face incredible dangers, be vulnerable to the worst kinds of thugs, and endure unspeakable hardships —  as long as the United States refused to make illegal immigration a crime for which all involved would be swiftly and severely punished. …

I just would like to add a perspective that should be thrown back in the face of the hypocrites who call us racist and mean-spirited. The anecdotes above are representative of incidents that happen in the Arizona desert constantly …

The answer is not to set up “water stations” to prevent illegals from dying in the desert. The answer is to discourage them from entering illegally in the first place. That is the only truly humanitarian, compassionate approach to the plight of illegal aliens.

We heartily agree.

Q: The Obama administration constantly insists that Mexico must help stop illegal migration from its side of the border into the US, doesn’t it?

A: ?

Q: The Mexican government is in any case doing all it can to help, isn’t it?

A: What, with huge amounts of money being sent back to Mexico by illegal Mexican workers in the US?  Are you crazy?

Q: But Mexico sets a great example of tolerance and humane treatment of migrants who come illegally into Mexico, doesn’t it?

A: Let’s read what Humberto Fontova writes at Canada Free Press:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon can hardly contain his revulsion and rage against Arizona’s SB 1070. He’s “deeply troubled” reports the Associated Press over a law he denounces as “discriminatory and racist,” not to mention: “a dire threat to the whole Hispanic-American population.”

This new Arizona law, “opens the door to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement,” sputters the Mexican President.

Indeed, this “threat to Hispanics” and these “abuses in law enforcement,” have been ongoing for years. The Associated Press carried a story where a Maria Elena Gonzalez, reported how female migrants were “forced to strip by abusive police officers, supposedly to search them, but the purpose is to sexually abuse them.”

Jose Ramos, 18, reported “that extortion by border police occurs at every stop on their migratory route. Until migrants are left penniless and begging for food.”

According to this Associated Press story: “Others said they had seen migrants beaten to death by police, their bodies left near the railway tracks to make it look as if they had fallen from a train. “If you’re carrying any money, they take it from you,” said Carlos Lopez. “Federal, state, local police—all of them shake you down. If you’re on a bus, they pull you off and search your pockets, and if you have any money, they keep it all and say, get out of here.”

All of the above “hate” and “abuses in law enforcement” as reported by the Associated Press, befell Central American migrants who enter Mexico. So perhaps Mexican President Calderon knows what he’s talking about?

But what he’s also talking lately—rather than getting his own house in order—is an economic boycott of Arizona.

“Commercial ties between Mexico and Arizona will be affected by this law,” vowed President Calderon in a speech last week to the Institute for Mexicans Abroad. “We are going to act.”

Fewer US dollars may be remitted to Mexico, it’s true. But will Calderon be able to administer the coup de grace to the ailing US economy?  We wait to see.