Chuckling affectionately at Her Anchorship's foibles

You can tell when The Anchoress is really pissed because she fires off a bitterly insulting, you-people-are-such-morons-and-if-you-had-just-listened-to-me-all-along-you'd-look-smarter-now-you-jackasses post...usually within minutes of complaining about "the tone of the debate." (Also she spends a lot of time in a big hurry to attribute disagreement with her to anti-Catholic prejudice, which I can only assume has something to do with nasty comments she deletes and nasty e-mails we don't get to see.) This doesn't bother me because she's usually even-tempered enough to give me an inferiority complex; so the occasional flash of very human weakness and lack of self-perception is endearing rather than infuriating.

The real differences between the Anchoress and the "you've-said-just-what-I-was-thinking, aren't-those-people-who-disagree-with-us-jerks-for-calling-us-jerks" clones in her comments (I'm not at all implying, by the way, that her comment section is nothing but clones) are mostly this, I think:

1. The Anchoress still trusts Dubya to enforce such provisions of the law as would actually stop the flood of unskilled Mexican immigrants; whereas those she sneers at, figure this President does not now and never will have even the slightest intention of doing anything that would keep Mexicans from coming into the country. That would be, you see, because we've actually paid attention to Bush's record on the subject (and I might add that as a Texan for the past two decades I've been watching Bush deal with the Hispanic community quite a bit longer than I suspect Her Anchorship has been). The most hilarious line in her whole post is, "...the president is appreciably weakened..." Um, no, honey, the President has on this particular issue been very much strengthened by getting a Democratic Congress, because the President is far closer to Teddy Kennedy on the question of what needs to be done about immigration than he was to the Republican Congress and is to the majority of those whose votes got him the power he now wields.

2. Her Anchorship, in her post, at least, pulls a Linda Chavez in which she imagines up a straw man whose motives and emotions are easily savaged, and then savages all of us who have dared to disagree with her on the grounds that we have bad motives and emotions. We actually know what our motives and emotions are and have been, and her performance does not move us to awed respect for her powers of insight.

3. Her Anchorship suffers from the fallacy of bifurcation that says, "We have to either solve the problem with new laws or else deport the whole 12 million." She thinks that the people who disagree with her disagree because they want "perfection." I don't think it's possible for any person to come to such a conclusion unless they have not bothered at all to pay attention to what their opponents have been saying with an ear for understanding them rather than with an eye for snatching out phrases that will allow you to insult them. I don't know a single serious opponent of this immigration bill who is holding out for perfection, and if the Anchoress thinks that's what's going on then she needs to be quiet until her skills of comprehension have improved drastically.

"What are you going to do with the twelve million..."? Leave 'em where they are for now, mostly -- they've got a heckuva lot sweeter deal than they would have as legals, since they currently get the services without the taxes. "But something must be done" -- why? You're durn tootin' something "must" be done, in the sense that if something useful isn't done the country will reap dire consequences: the borders have to be secured. But the bill that's about to be passed has a whole bunch of provisions that we know (because the President is, on this issue, a Democrat) will be implemented to the full and that make the problem vastly worse. These are coupled with a whole bunch of "compromise" provisions that we unfortunately are certain that the Democrat to be elected President in 2008 won't enforce and that we are pretty damn confident the "Republican" currently holding office has no intention of enforcing, either. Plus even if the President were serious about enforcement, those provisions are supposed to be enforced by an agency that is already hopelessly overwhelmed -- and which will see its workload explode by an order of magnitude as a direct result of this bill. But the President and his supporters (like Her Anchorship) want us to approve the bill without any even half-decent explanation of how all the bill's promises to conservatives can possibly be kept. Hm, now that's pretty appetizing. If we fail to be convinced...well, The Anchoress isn't going to give us that explanation, she'll just fire back, "Well, we have to do SOMETHING; so what do you suggest?"

See, Her Anchorship thinks she's being pretty devastating by saying, "Okay, fine, if you don't think this bill will work, then tell us what will." But she forgets that, to true conservatives (and granted that she's a liberal who just got sick of the people running the Democratic Party -- which goes a long way to explain why she just can't grasp why so many conservatives dislike Democrat-in-Republican-clothing Bush, I suspect -- so she may not grasp this concept)...she forgets, I think, that true conservatives want more than anything else for the government to adopt the Hippocratic principle of, "First, do no harm." Doing nothing at all is better than doing something devastatingly and irretrievably destructive, which is what this bill is, especially with this President in charge and a Democrat likely to take the White House in 2008.

And that's the last of the major differences:

4. Her Anchorship thinks that Something Must Be Done. But the truth is more complicated. It is true that (a) Something Useful Ought To Be Done. It is also true that (b) We Ought To Hold Out For The Best Available Outcome. But (c) it's entirely possible that the best available outcome (especially with a leader of Dubya's caliber and proclivities) is the status quo -- that is, doing nothing is often the least bad option even when doing nothing is a bad option. H.A.'s whole deal about "porridge" and "gruel" and "ice cream" is question-begging imagery (that is, it is a petitio principii presented in a picture rather than in a syllogism). A much more accurate image, I think, would be this:

Situation: you are in the initial stages of a disease (rampant illegal immigration and hopelessly open borders) that stands an 80% chance of killing you slowly over the next twenty years if you don't figure out a cure.

Doctor the First: proposes a round of chemotherapy that will make you miserable and will increase your odds of dying in the next five years to 90%, and ensures that your chances of dying within the next two decades to 100%. You turn this down.

Doctor the Second: proposes a course of action that in your opinion not only won't cure the disease you have, but will also give you AIDS, double the severity of your original disease, plus while you're waiting to die it will make your back really, really itchy. You turn this one down, too.

Whereupon the Anchoress calls you an idiot because you turned down Doctor the First, on the grounds that his option was way better than Doctor the Second, and "you have to do something."

See, sometimes there are no good options, and of the available bad options, "just be still and don't make things worse" is the best you can do. If the Republican Congress were to unite against this bill, could they keep it from going through? Yep. If we think this bill will do nothing but make bad problems far worse, is it a temper tantrum to shoot down the bill and stick to the status quo? Pace Her Anchorship and Gerald, I don't there's anything immature or childish in that at all. I can't say as much for the habit of insulting those whose positions you don't understand or who do not share your own unexamined assumptions.

So, since Her Anchorship wants solutions:

President Bush: prove that you are willing to enforce the laws we currently have.

While waiting for Hell to freeze over, we now turn to the Republican Congress.

Republican Congress: do no harm by new legislation that worsens the problems, and give the country a chance to come to its senses and elect a genuinely Republican Congress and (even more importantly) a Republican President whom we trust to have a genuine desire to close the borders and halt illegal immigration.

People like Her Anchorship: stop talking as though people who disagree with you are thereby revealing their moral inferiority to yourself, and stop disgracing yourselves by attacking straw men. Really, how are those of us with an I.Q. above room temperature supposed to respect a person who is capable of saying -- under the apparent impression that he is devastatingly refuting the position of those who disagree with him -- "obviously, if 12 million people vanished over night, the American economy would collapse"? Well, yes, it would. And obviously, if we wiped out the entire Arab world with a series of atom bombs, the nuclear fallout would hurt us as well; and thus have I (by the apparent standards of rationality held by the Anchoress, who recommended this guy's post) refuted the views of the neocons who think we need to take a tough stand against Islamofascist terrorism.

Now, let me wipe the affectionately and sardonically amused grin off of my face and stop giving the Anchoress and Gerald a hard time. In all fairness, I think people like Gerald and the Anchoress really have no idea how far they are from comprehending the genuine concerns of the people who disagree with them, and I think they have no idea how many assumptions they bring to the table without realizing that the rest of us do not share those assumptions, and therefore I think they are trying to contribute useful discussion. The fact that their listening skills are in dire need of enhancement...well, that's not exactly an uncommon failing, now, is it?