Is this the Macaca incident part deux? Virginia Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr. has opened his mouth and stuffed his foot firmly inside. How much more un-American can you be than to issue this kind of warning?

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

His website gives details on how to contact him directly to complain. Or perhaps you might want to point out the real threat to the nation’s values are the closed-minded intolerant folks and lying cheats who try and find scapegoats.

If Goode needs to bellyache, perhaps he could highlight the defeat of men like Congressman Don Sherwood this past November:

A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 (€390,000) in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after election day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press.

Congressman Don Sherwood is locked in a tight re-election race against a Democratic opponent who has seized on the four-term congressman’s relationship with the woman. Republicans are struggling to hold onto power in Congress in the Nov. 7 elections, and President George W. Bush recently campaigned for Sherwood.

Sherwood, a 65-year-old married father of three who is considered a family-values conservative, had one of the safest seats in Congress until Cynthia Ore sued him in June 2005, alleging he physically abused her throughout their five-year affair.

Or is Goode afraid to take a stand against lying, cheating and manipulative members of government for fear of having a platform that is too controversial?

If he wants to come to terms with the true threats to his nation’s values, like George Allen, perhaps he should first take a long hard look in the mirror. I mean when it comes to someone who calls upon “tradition” do you really want Goode as a leader? Consider this analysis of Goode’s loyalties:

This is no story of a man without a party, a representative as solid as a rock in an ever-changing political world. Virgil Goode is a turncoat, plain and simple — he’s available to the highest bidder.

And then, in August of this year, the heat headed towards Goode based on some rather shady financial dealings:

Mitchell Wade is giving Jack Abramoff a run for his money in the headlines department. Wade, he of the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, has also had questionable dealings with Reps. Katherine Harris (R-FL) and Virgil Goode (R-VA). It’s Goode that we’re concerned with now.

Company of Cunningham and Harris? Interesting. I also can’t help but notice he has been rated as a 100% regressive unAmerican by the Vote Record and Cosponsorship site. It is not hard to understand why, if you read some of the details:

Regressive, destructive, and downright unAmerican actions Rep. Goode has taken that contribute to a RCS of 100:

[…]

The way that U.S. citizenship works is pretty simple when you get down to it: if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. Leave it to Representative Virgil Goode to come up with a way to change that. Representative Goode has thrown support behind H.R. 698, which would deny citizenship to American-born babies if their parents aren’t themselves citizens. Such a change would move us toward the German model of citizenship, in which families who have lived in Germany for generations were denied citizenship because they lacked the so-called “virtue” of a German bloodline.

Even more bizarrely under this bill, if a baby is born in America of a father who is a citizen and a mother who is not, the baby is denied American citizenship if the father and mother are not married. Yes, you are reading that right — the Republicans even want to deny babies citizenship when the father is himself a citizen. How extreme. How xenophobic. How simply unacceptable.

Ouch. And a little more research found that the co-sponsor of this bill explained himself this way:

“If you’re coming here illegally, you shouldn’t be benefiting from it,” [co-sponsor, Rep. Gary Miller, R-CA] said. “If I rob a bank, and left some money to my kids, should they be allowed to keep it?”

Fitting analogy from someone who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. Too bad he’s so incredibly off-base with his analysis, and also too bad he’s being accused of using his office for personal profit. It will be a real shame for his children and his children’s children if he is convicted. Maybe these new allegations will slow him down a bit before he proposes that Homeland Security scan records for criminal activity in your family going back two generations and then penalize the entire family for the crime? Imagine what happens when your grandparent can’t find (or never had!) a birth certificate or immigration papers? Sorry, your entire family will have to leave the country now. And then maybe he’ll just advocate that the US create an official profile for suspicious or “potentially illegal” people and come up with a “solution”….

Incidentally, Miller used to run the G. Miller Development company in the 1970s. Wonder how many people with foreign ancestry he relied upon in Whittier, CA (Los Angeles) to get his career started? And I am absolutely sure he does not count people who lived in the area prior to its annexation by America as “native”.

Major ancestry groups reported by Whittier residents include:
· Mexican – 46%
· German – 8%
· English – 7%
· Other Hispanic or Latino – 7%
· Irish – 6%
· Italian – 4%
· French (except Basque) – 2%
· Central American: – 2%
· Scottish – 2%
· American Indian tribes, specified – 1%
· Black or African American – 1%
· Dutch – 1%
· Polish – 1%
· Japanese – 1%
· Filipino – 1%
· Swedish – 1%
· Norwegian – 1%
· Scotch-Irish – 1%
· Russian – 1%
· Armenian – 1%
· Chinese, except Taiwanese – 1%
· Salvadoran – 1%
· Spanish – 1%
· Danish – 1%
· South American – 1%
· European – 1%

Nonetheless, I have to ask who traditionally lived there?

Inhabited by indigenous people for millennia, California was first colonized by the Spanish in 1769, and after Mexican independence in 1821, continued as part of Mexico. Following a brief period as the independent California Republic in 1846, California was annexed by the United States that same year, and was admitted to the Union as the thirty-first state on September 9, 1850.

Ok, anyone who can not prove their Mexican/Spanish/indigenous descent, Congressman Miller and Goode say that your non-traditional “Bear Flagger” ancestors did bad things (like illegally settling the area and starting a revolt and secession movement — robbing Mexico of the territory) so you have to leave now. Hmmm, any chance Miller will follow his own advice and leave California? But who would allow such a staunch opponent of immigration to immigrate?

The Wikipedia has a nice entry on this famous Robert Browning poem:

It is not a biography of Abraham ibn Ezra; like all of Browning’s historical poems, it is a free interpretation of the idea that Ezra’s life and work suggests to Browning, but the poem is Robert Browning using Ezra as a mouthpiece, not the other way around. At the center of the poem is a theistic paradox, that good might lie in the inevitability of its absence:

For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.

Reminds me of the saying that the best security is the stuff that is rarely or never seen.

Amazing how good Wikipedia can be sometimes.

From September 23, 1999:

Bush proposed restoring trust by increasing military pay and benefits and by clarifying the mission of U.S. forces to “deter…and win wars,” not to undertake “vague, aimless, and endless deployments.” [emphasis added] Candidate Bush gave few specifics on his second promise but indicated that as president he would make substantial new investments in anti-terrorism efforts and “deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses, both theater and national,” at the earliest possible date.

Anti-ballistic missle defenses? How about anti-small arms (e.g. kaytusha rockets and stinger missles) defenses (not to mention anti-IED) for Americans stuck in vague, aimless and endless deployments? I guess I could have left it at that, but then I started to wonder whether the President ever reflected back on his campaign promises. Sure enough, not too long after…

From December 11, 2001:

I have come to talk about the future security of our country, in a place where I took up this subject two years ago when I was candidate for President. In September 1999, I said here at the Citadel that America was entering a period of consequences that would be defined by the threat of terror, and that we faced a challenge of military transformation. That threat has now revealed itself, and that challenge is now the military and moral necessity of our time.

[…]

The first priority is to speed the transformation of our military.

When the Cold War ended, some predicted that the era of direct threats to our nation was over. Some thought our military would be used overseas — not to win wars, but mainly to police and pacify, to control crowds and contain ethnic conflict. They were wrong. [emphasis added]

Who now says American forces must be maintained overseas mainly to police and pacify, to control crowds and contain ethnic conflict? Uh huh. Anything else “some” people might have been wrong about?

America’s next priority to prevent mass terror is to protect against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. I wish I could report to the American people that this threat does not exist — that our enemy is content with car bombs and box cutters — but I cannot.

[…]

And almost every state that actively sponsors terror is known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them at longer and longer ranges.

I see the logic. Pull troops back from those expensive overseas peace-keeping and diplomatic efforts in order to free up the budget for defense industry spending on technology (e.g. the military-industrial-congress complex Eisenhower warned the US not to pursue); this prepares America for the almost non-existant threat of long-range missles laden with weapons of mass destruction. Strange how things turned out, given these plans. Anything else “some” people might have been wrong about?

Our third and final priority in the fight against mass terror is to strengthen the advantage that good intelligence gives our country.

[…]

There have been times here in America when our intelligence services were held in suspicion, and even contempt. Now, when we face this new war, we know how much we need them.

Wait, I thought we had good intelligence before 9/11 but the real problem identified by the Commission was mis-management of that information. How does that get translated into someone saying we don’t “need” intelligence services? President Bush used a false dilemma fallacy, it seems to me, to say you either know how much we need intelligence services or you are suspicious of them. Have you ever needed something but remained suspicious of it?

Historians will have a good deal of material, I think, to display the dark contradictions and logical fallacies of this administration.