According to radio reports, President Bush is going to use his oval office address tonight to order 10,000 national guard troops to the Mexican border.
Now there are a couple ways to view this development (below).
One theory would be that this action offers a genuine solution to a pressing problem - that by disrupting the lives (and emergency availability) of tens of thousands of guardsmen (assuming some limit to an individual's deployment and some rotation), will be helpful in fixing the supposedly spiraling immigration crisis the Republicans have been trying to manufacture over the past couple months.
Make no mistake: immigration is badly broken. But the recent emphasis on the subject is curious, to say the least, and Republicans have shown little evidence that they take the topic seriously. The efforts of Republican proposals such as French-style guest-worker programs or harsher criminalization of illegal entry (making it a felony) would be laughable policy - if the potential consequences for those ensnared were not so tragic.
Positioning thousands of troops on the border does not appear to address the real issue of what to do about the 7-10 million (or more) illegal immigrants already living and working within US borders, or what our policies should be toward other would-be immigrants going forward. The marginal 1/100th of a percent that will be deterred from illegally crossing the border, from that direction, this week would not appear to be that meaningful.
So what are they really up to?
One theory would be that sending troops to the Mexican border fits a broader pattern: President Bush might believe that somehow deploying troops must be the best answer to any problem (after all, its what Kings have done for millennia). He might believe that, one of these days, through practice, he will figure out how to wield this magical solution successfully. (One can imagine the thought process: "somehow it did not work as well as Dick and Don said it would in Iraq; going to the other extreme and abandoning the tactic completely last summer in Louisiana also didn't work out so well; Must keep practicing...")
Another theory would be that sending large numbers of troops to hot places, to toil fruitlessly against problems that can't meaningfully be addressed through these means, serves some other purpose. Now we all have strong hunches about what those other purposes might have been the last time Bush did this (writ much larger) in Iraq in 2003.
Now what might those other purposes be at this juncture?
Two possibilities come to mind:
Possible Purpose 1. The Administration might be trying to distract people from the waves of revelations and indictments that, day-by-day, reveal with greater clarity how completely corrupted and rotten to the core is Bush's administration, his party, and the very doctrines of "conservatism" - and make no mistake: no one has put the "con" in conservatism better than Bush and his advisers.
Now, the last 6 years have shown clearly that the Washington Press Corps is like a group of frisky puppies - they're cute, they're easily confused, and as long as you give them snacks (i.e., the occasional interview or leak), take them out for an occasional walk, and offer an occasional pat on the head, they will (for the most part) return unconditional love and affection. (If any of the puppies exhibits unseemly distemper, you just call Rupert, Jeffrey, Bob, or Dick, and they'll take care of calming the bad puppies down, muzzling them, or putting them to sleep.)
So sending 10,000 troops to New Mexico might be seen as the equivalent of throwing a big stick across the country and saying to the press corps, "go get it fellah!" - helping to keep the puppies from investigating all the smelly little critters in DC writhing intriguingly in their death throws.
Possible purpose 2. The Administration might be trying to subconsciously remind the Republican base just which tribe it is that they belong to. Bush voters, having eyes, ears, and noses, must be increasingly as disgusted as anyone else about what the Republicans have done to our country (one pictures Vice President Cheney mumbling about "the whiny ingrates").
Well, looking back to what worked in the past to win and hold on to these overwhelmingly white, caucasian voters, Bush advisers may have recalled that playing the race card was a huge part of the famous "Southern Strategy" and the "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon - inciting people in both cases to vote against their economic self-interest, and suspend their moral judgment (and suspend their common sense) about the corruption of those eras, by enlisting these voters in the cause of bashing all those minority "welfare queens" and affirmative action beneficiaries, who surely must have been a root cause of all of our problems in the 1970s and 1980s.
Remember those wink-wink references to "states' rights" Republicans used to spout all the time? Reagan kicked off one of his campaigns in Philadelphia, Mississippi - known almost solely for being the place where three civil rights activists were brutally murdered in the 1960s for protesting discrimination, or, in the idiom of those in power, attempting to undermine federalism - and Reagan's speech in that seeting was about (you guessed it -- wink, wink!) states' rights. Alas, nowadays states do things like setting meaningful emissions standards and actually regulating industries, so conservatives no longer like states' rights.
Welfare reform in the 1990s deflated the traditional race balloon somewhat. Maybe the Bushes and Roves of the world figure it's time to put out a new pinata (if you will) and see if enough people in the Republican electoral base are still keen to play!
Too cynical?
Or maybe I'm just too cynical. Maybe this is brilliant, inspired policy and I'm too blinded by my Bush rage to appreciate its appropriateness, timeliness, nuance, and sure-fire efficacy.
In which case, we might at least get to look forward to a "Mision Cumplido" photo-op when the policy has been brilliantly validated -- perhaps some time later this month.