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Hornberger’s Blog, June 2011

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 Immigration Controls and a Police State Yesterday I commented on conservative Pat Buchanan’s recent anti-immigration rant. Today, I wish to comment on an aspect of immigration controls that both conservatives and liberals rarely confront — the federal government’s police-state powers that come with enforcing immigration controls. I’d venture to say that most Americans who are upset with the abusive tactics of the TSA at airports have no idea that Americans who live along our country’s southern border have had to deal with this type of federal abuse for decades — from the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Over the years, the mindset among Americans living elsewhere in the country, I think, has been, “Oh, well, it’s not happening to me, so why should I care?” Consider, for example, the fact that in Texas the Border Patrol has the legal authority, under the guise of immigration controls, to arbitrarily enter onto any private property that adjoins the ...

The Unchanging Imperial Paradigm

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Despite President Obama’s trumpeted force drawdown in Afghanistan, by the end of next summer more than twice as many U.S. troops will be fighting in that country’s civil war as there were when he became president in 2009. His soothing words notwithstanding, a force of about 70,000 will remain there at least until the end of 2014. We can be sure, however, that that won’t stop the president from campaigning for reelection on a peace platform. Obama’s speech the other night was mostly show, a spectacle to make the war- and deficit-weary public think he’s taking substantial steps toward disengagement. He did something similar in Iraq, though 50,000 troops remain and are still taking casualties. It is easy for a president to manipulate public opinion, especially in foreign affairs and most especially when the mainstream media — conservative and “liberal” — are so compliant. The war will go on, but probably under the radar more than before, just as the war ...

The Isolationist Red Herring

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The media have picked up a new buzzword: “isolationist.” They jumped on it after Sen. John McCain, who seems to want the United States to be at war everywhere, said after the last Republican presidential debate, “I do want to send a message, and that is that we cannot move into an isolationist party.” He was soon joined by his fellow advocate of empire, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who told his party’s critics of President Obama’s Libyan intervention to “shut up.” Is the GOP going isolationist? Presidential aspirant Jon Huntsman calls for an “aggressive drawdown” from Afghanistan. Mitt Romney wants the troops out “as soon as possible.” That brought rebukes from rivals Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. Speaking at the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, Pawlenty accused some Republicans — presumably Huntsman and Romney — of “trying to out-bid the Democrats in appealing to isolationist sentiments,” while Bachmann said the U.S. government must “finish the job” in Afghanistan. Pawlenty and Bachmann need ...

The Story Behind the Permanent War

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Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 286 pages. During the last decade, left-liberals accused the controversial Bush administration of a wickedness, arrogance, and incompetence that supposedly set that presidency apart from others in American history. Bush was an especially bad warmonger who broke with the traditional and venerable principles that had ...

Yearning for the Iron Fist

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Last Friday’s New York Times carried a front-page article entitled “Desperate Guatemalans Embrace an ‘Iron Fist,’” which showed how the failures of government interventionism inevitably lead toward calls for dictatorship to bring “order and stability” to society. The article is about the drug war, perhaps the most failed interventionist program in history. Like Mexico and other Latin American countries, Guatemala ...