By Lou Dobbs - CNN - Original Article
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Editor's note: Lou Dobbs' commentary appears every Wednesday
on CNN.com.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush says that the installation
of the new Iraqi government was a "watershed event," but
at the same time warns Americans of the challenges and loss
as we continue to prosecute the war against Iraqi insurgents.
Sen. Harry Reid declares that legislation that would render
English the national language is racist.
Thirty-seven Democrats vote for full amnesty for all illegal
aliens in this country, even though nobody really knows whether
the number is 11 million, 12 million or 20 million. The Senate
Republican leadership demands that a "comprehensive immigration
reform" plan must be passed before this Memorial Day weekend.
And the president signs into law a tax cut that raises taxes
on the educational funds of teenagers saving for college.
Never before in our country's history have both the president
and Congress been so out of touch with most Americans. Never
before have so few of our elected officials and corporate leaders
been less willing to commit to the national interest. And never
before has our nation's largest constituent group -- some 200
million middle-class Americans -- been without representation
in our nation's capital.(Watch why Dobbs said Mexico's leader
is in charge of U.S. immigration policy -- 3:16)
George W. Bush's approval ratings have slumped to the lowest
of his presidency. The approval rating for Congress is even
lower, and nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the country
is headed in the wrong direction.
But what is our government doing about that? The president
is staying the course in Iraq and apparently demanding little
of his generals to create a new, far more effective strategy
for urgent success. Of course, he also wants a guest-worker
program and amnesty of millions of illegal aliens. And Congress,
faced with midterm elections in just over five months, is intent
on giving the president what he wants and telling working men
and women and their families, American citizens all, to go
to hell.
Illegal aliens are more important to this Congress than securing
our borders and our ports, more important than those legal
immigrants who have waited in line and who follow the law.
The Senate has added to the litany of lunacy that makes up
what it calls reform: Illegal aliens would only have to pay
back taxes on three of the past five years, they will not be
prosecuted for felonies such as identity theft or purchasing
or using fraudulent Social Security cards, and unlike millions
of visa holders who have to leave the country to have them
renewed, they may simply remain in the United States while
this Congress and this president give away all the benefits
and privileges of American citizenship.
This is an outright assault in the elitist war on the middle
class. And working men and women who've already borne the pain
of losing good-paying manufacturing jobs and having middle-class
jobs outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets are faced with
the onslaught of more illegal immigration and cheap labor into
the American economy. This president and Congress talk about
bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows while they turn
out the lights on our middle class.
President Bush and his most trusted advisers tell us how well
our economy is doing, how many jobs have been created and how
so-called free trade will enrich the lives of the same people
whose livelihoods these policies are destroying.
It's hard not to think of the trusted adviser to Catherine
the Great who sought to hide from her the embarrassing and
shoddy condition of Ukrainian and Crimean villages by having
elaborate facades built to divert her attention and to mask
an uncomfortable reality. I don't know whether Karl Rove is
President Bush's Grigori Potemkin or whether George Bush has
created Potemkin villages all by himself. But the facades are
cracking, and phony fronts of failed policies are quickly crumbling.
Six thousand unarmed National Guardsmen working as adjunct
rear support to our undermanned, under-equipped Border Patrol
is not border security. Three million illegal aliens continue
to cross our borders and depress wages by hundreds of billions
of dollars every year. The millions of manufacturing and middle-class
jobs lost over the last five years have been replaced by lower-wage
employment.
The president's faith-based commitment to so-called free trade
will likely lead to a $1 trillion U.S. current account deficit
this year and a trade debt of $4.5 trillion after 30 years
of trade deficits. And while the president and Congress point
to No Child Left Behind as a solution to our educational crisis,
we're failing an entire generation of Americans whose test
scores continue to fall and whose high school dropout rates
would be embarrassing to a third-world country.
And a third-world country is what we will be if our elected
officials don't soon come to their senses.
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