Won't listen to me about immigration? Listen to Ronald Reagan then.

Supporters of the new Arizona immigration law (which gives state sanction to what the Sheriff of Nottingham has already been doing with no legal justification at all) have been jumping all over the shooting of a Sheriff's deputy in Pinal County as 'proof' that we need the law.

This of course is absurd. The shooting was carried out by suspected drug smugglers and smuggling drugs is a felony and local law enforcement already have the full authority to take action against suspected drug smugglers. So the people in more danger from the new law (and the past six years or so of increasing anti-immigrant and anti-Latino legislation and ballot initiatives pushed by Russell Pearce) are 1) migrants who are NOT otherwise committing a felony that the police already have license to go after them for-- in other words those who are here working at a job and not committing any crimes, and 2) people (like one of my close personal friends) who are Hispanic American citizens who have been detained, questioned and humiliated by police for apparently no other reasons than their skin color or surname.

In fact, if they really want to catch the drug smugglers, human traffickers and others who are causing violence along the border, then destroying any remaining trust that members of the Latino community might have towards local law enforcement seems a curious way to do it. As unscrupulous employers, drug kingpins, prostitution ringleaders and others who often exploit migrants know well, someone who is afraid to go to the police is someone who can very easily be intimidated into doing anything. Any law that makes them even more afraid of the police strengthens the hand of the real criminals, not weakens it.

Maybe GOP members might want to consider and contrast the view of migrants that this law puts forward with that espoused by their biggest icon:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. -- Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address, 1989

Because in this law and others I don't see the optimistic and forward looking spirit of conservatism of the type embraced by Reagan, but instead a reactionary, angry and misguided spirit that is as far as possible from anything that Reagan ever stood for.

Hat tip: To Pres Winslow, who first pointed this out.

Tired of hearing about Reagan all the time.

It seems that every time someone on the right is asked to come up with an alternative for fixing the economy to President Obama's economic programs they invariably suggest that we do what Reagan did. It's always 'Reagan this, Reagan that.'

Of course they do have one point right. Reaganism has dominated the national paradigm for the past quarter century. Even Democrats were debating Republicans over who could do the best job of cutting taxes, deregulating businesses and shrinking the size of the government.

But what in the end has thirty years of Reagan dominated philosophy done for us? It has increased the national debt by 1300%, it included such lowlights as the S&L bailout (if you think that massive taxpayer bailouts of banks that made bad decisions about real estate were something new, they're not,) Michael Milken and the junk bond crisis, recessions beginning in 1991, 2001 and 2007, Enron and the present housing crisis that is requiring bank bailouts on a scale that dwarfs even the S&L bailouts.

In fact the only years during the Reagan era when we did have a balanced budget was following the CLINTON TAX INCREASE (that was also when we grew 20 million + jobs in only eight years.

Yet it seems that for some of these folks they have grown Reagan into some kind of infallible myth. It's been more than twenty years since the man left office (in fact young people registering today weren't even born when he left office) and the old twentieth century solutions of 'tax cut, trickle down, deregulate' just haven't worked in the 21st century (note that the Dow was down about 25% between January 20, 2001 (inauguration day when George W. Bush entered office) and the same date eight years later.

So it's time to apply some new, 21st century solutions. John McCain advocated for smaller government and more tax cuts. If that's what people want then that's what they could have voted for. But they didn't. They voted for a candidate who promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, pledged to implement real health care reform and promised to improve the environment through better government oversight.

The era of Reagan is now over. And after 28 years, none too soon.

conservative tantrum against McCain

There are times in my life that I look back on fondly. For example, I played rugby in college, and enjoyed myself quite a bit, despite not being particularly good at it (the rugby games were just a warmup for the rugby parties, and I was good at that part of it.)

But now I'm in my mid forties, have a family and go to work every day. I can enjoy reminiscing in the old days, but I'm realistic enough to know that was a long time ago, and those days came and went once, and only once.

But apparently not to conservatives. They fell in love with Ronald Reagan, in fact many of them are my contemporaries and they loved Reagan when they were in college or high school too (though I never embraced their philosophy, and going to an engineering college, that meant I disagreed about Reagan with about 90% of the student body.) Reagan's zenith came in 1984, when he came only a few thousand votes in Minnesota short of winning fifty states in his re-election bid.

Since then though, they've tried over and over and over to resurrect Reagan. After an attempt led by Michigan congressman Guy Vander Jagt in 1988 to repeal the twenty-second amendment (Presidential term limits) so Reagan could run again failed, they were happy with George H.W. Bush (after all, who could be a better heir to Reagan than Reagan's Vice President?) In 1992 they were furious with Bush senior though (they read his lips, so the 1991 budget agreement that included a tax increase sent them running for the doors) and many of them either voted for Pat Buchanan in the primaries or decided that billionaire Texan Ross Perot was their new savior or just didn't care. By the time they'd had eight years of Bill Clinton they settled on Mr. Bush's son, mainly because he didn't tell them to read his lips. But because of his position on immigration and failure to reign in spending during the bloated GOP Congress of the first part of the 2000's, even those who still like Bush (for example, because of the fact that under Bush the United States refused to be bond by that irritating Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners) admit he's no Reagan.

All of that pales in comparison though to the ire they've directed at John McCain. Lead by the same cabal of right-wing radio talk show hosts who have demonized Democrats for years, they are now calling McCain 'Benedict Arnold' (that is a direct quote from a caller on Rush Limbaugh's show today-- see Althouse for text of the complete call.) and claiming that they will even vote for a Democrat to keep McCain out of the White House.

While I fervently disagree with John McCain about a whole host of issues (and will have plenty of opportunity to post on that between now and the election) it seems from this rhetoric that the far right is becoming unhinged (an easy task for them.) Are they suggesting that McCain was somehow brainwashed in Hanoi and is the Manchurian Candidate?

What it really boils down to is that the far right can't get over their infatuation with the Reagan era. To them, he was a demigod, and any Republican is measured against the standard of Reagan, Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that any Republican is measured against the myth of Reagan-- they seem to forget that the Reagan who campaigned as a 'fiscal conservative' exploded the deficit, that the 'anti-abortion' Reagan sent abortion defender Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court and that the Reagan who railed against the evils of communism actually became quite chummy with Mikhail Gorbachev by the time he left the White House. In fact, by the end of that term, Reagan even agreed to a number of tax increases, but as the 'teflon President' he didn't suffer the same kind of damage to his image with conservatives as Bush Sr. did a few years later. For more on this, see Reagan's liberal legacy. But today conservatives view Reagan as being ten feet tall, and simply forget what they want to forget.

The good news for the GOP is that this is February, and the election isn't for nine months. And like any spoiled, immature children, that will be time enough for conservatives to get over the temper tantrum they are throwing because there isn't any more Ronnie. Even Limbaugh, who has led a by now well-documented attack on McCain the past few weeks, began to apply the brakes in order to reverse himself with breakneck speed, trying to talk the caller who compared McCain to "Benedict Arnold" out of voting for Obama instead in his first show after Romney quit and made it certain that McCain will be nominated by the GOP.

The good news for the rest of us is that they've done so much by now to saw down the support poles of their 'big tent' that there still won't be enough of them, if Democrats get out and vote.