MAYDAY



Mayday. May Day. Double meanings: The first is the international call sign for a pilot in distress and he needs a rescue immediately.

The second is the Soviet Communist anniversary of the triumph - Ha! - of their Revolution.

Monday’s May First pro-illegal immigration rallies around our country are also a sign of distress - the distress of the hijacking of our freedoms by people who scoffed at the law and want to use American rights as their own.

Only in America can people violate the law to come here and then use our First Amendment - the right of freedom of speech and assembly - to protest that their crimes should be forgiven.

Monday’s demonstrations - whereby illegals are going to ‘strike’ for the day in hopes of hurting the American economy - will be a turning point in the immigration debate. From Tuesday on, it will be clear that American citizens cannot allow themselves to be hurt or dictated to by foreigners who didn’t come here legally.

Yes, there is much compassion for the under trodden here in America; but that sympathy is going to go out the door this week when it becomes apparent that these illegals are not humble ‘guests’ who adore this country. Rather, their leadership is aggressive, sneaky - and arrogant with power.

Last week’s attempt to win us over by having a Spanish-language version of the Star Spangled Banner went over like a lead balloon. Radio stations rejected it; it turned many people ‘off.’

Like the adjustment that the Illegal Lobby made a month ago by substituting American flags for Mexican flags in their demonstrations, this movement is playing a cooney Public Relations game. Someone is running this movement who is smart and calculating.

But they have now overstepped and over-reached - and thus their movement is going to start to lose support as of the end of Monday’s demonstrations.

How shutting down - or damaging the American economy - is a good thing escapes reason. Striking against America - when you are asking America to accept them makes no sense!

This illegal immigration issue is ripping apart the Republican Party - and, along with Iraq, destroying GW Bush’s presidency. Last week’s report that Bush has told people privately that he favors citizenship for the 20 million illegals already here is further proof of his duplicitous nature.

Make no mistake about it: Bush, like his father, is no conservative; they are both Big Government, Wall Street Republicans. GW Bush just pretends to be a Reagan conservative.

The father used to eat pork rinds in front of the press and changed his preppy madras watch bands so as to look more ‘Texan.’ W has tried to go one step farther: a ‘ranch’ - (with no animals) - and cowboy talk and clothes.

What cowboy rides a trail bike and wants to give amnesty to illegals?

Bush and the GOP are in a self-created corner. They have allowed this mess to fester - and now they are paying a severe price for it.

Their base voters want no part of amnesty - no matter what you call it. And yet Bush, McCain and Hastert all want a so-called ‘Guest Worker’ program which is, in reality, amnesty for the law-breakers.

No wonder so many conservatives have abandoned Bush and the GOP.

Who can blame them?

Mayday...mayday...we need to be rescued! From our own leadership!!!

EXECUTIVE ACTIONS


President Bush is in serious trouble - and faces the very real possibility that his presidency will deteriorate in the next few weeks until he is seen as ‘another Jimmy Carter,’ i.e. a failed president.

What can he do to arrest his slide - and try to salvage his faltering presidency?

He can begin by enacting a sweeping set of Executive Orders that address three of our most urgent problems - rising gas prices, Iraq and illegal immigration:

1) Issue an Executive Order today over-riding all state laws and regulations preventing off-shore oil drilling and mandating the immediate commencement of drilling in ANWAR. Of course this will take months or years - and there will be numerous lawsuits from environmental lobbies - but the President needs to make one thing clear: we are in terrible trouble due to our over-reliance on our enemies for imported oil.

It is a top priority that we now open our minds to every type of energy produced here at home: nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen fuel cells - everything.

We no longer have the luxury of twiddling our thumbs and debating whether one type of energy is better than another; we now need all forms of domestic energy production. Period.

We can no longer tolerate negativity. “No way,” “never,” and “can’t work,” can no longer be in our energy vocabulary.

President Bush - who should have done this the day after 9/11 - comes form the oil world. He can argue that we need to rely on ourselves - not foreigners - for oil and gas from now on.

He needs a dramatic action - and now - to turn around his sliding poll numbers and the accompanying political weakness they indicate.

If he doesn’t do something like this soon, he is headed for an approval rating in the 20's - unseen since President Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal.


2) Iraq and Immigration: with the announcement out of Baghdad that they have finally agreed upon a new Prime Minister and thus a new permanent government will be seated within a month, it is time for the following:

A) President Bush should immediately announce a series of troop withdrawals from Iraq. The goal? To draw down from the 130,000 troops presently on the ground to less than 40,000 by the end of the year;

B) Coinciding with that draw-down, he should issue his second major Executive Order, this one suspending Posse Commitatus, the legal restriction on using US military forces in domestic matters, and order the US Army to re-assemble along the Mexican border and provide border security while we construct a high-tech fence - with underground tunnel sensors - to stop once and for all the illegal entry into the United States.

Please note that the presumptive 2008 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has now come out in favor of this fence. Thus any political opposition is only going to divide the Democrats, which can’t hurt.


The result of these two dramatic Executive Orders?

1) Mr. Bush is back on offense, setting the terms of the debate instead of being a human punching bag;

2) He - and Washington - would finally be addressing the three most pressing issues: energy, Iraq and illegal immigration;

3) He might be doing enough to save the House from falling into Democratic hands in November. That is a result which will bring a flood of subpoenas and investigations certain to ruin the final two years of his presidency.

Plus, we need the energy, we need to get out of Iraq and we need to stem the accelerated flow of illegals.

So, Mr. President, let’s get that pen out and start acting like a President again!

Issue these 2 orders - and expect a howl of outrage.

Smile - and then tell the country why we need these things now - and why we can’t wait for a slow-moving Congress to do them.

It is the only way to turn things around.

GENERALS VS. RUMMY


This group of retired generals systematically attacking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is doing it all the wrong way.

From the safety of their cushy retirements - while some of their former troops are still in mortal danger in Iraq - these generals only now have the guts to take on the formidable ‘Rummy,’ one of Washington’s greatest in-fighters.

Their ‘campaign’ will, in fact, only serve to harden Rummy’s resolve - and that of the President, too - and allow the Defense Secretary to remain in office much longer.

Here is what we know:

1) Rumsfeld is abrasive, tough and often dismissive. Stubborn, too.

2) Many uniformed officers have never liked Rummy’s ways - especially before 9/11 and Iraq when Rumsfeld tried a sweeping Pentagon overhaul.

3) Some senior military officers opposed the Iraq war plans - not the war itself - but the troop levels and occupation plans.

4) One such general, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, had his career ended because he ‘dared’ to disagree with Rummy’s too-conservative occupation troop force. The General advised at least 250,000 troops while Rummy settled for around 130,000. And, as the insurgency has grown, Shinseki has been the rallying point for evidence that Rummy’s thinking was wrong.


So now we have a concerted effort by these now-retired - and thus safe from retribution - generals to get back at Rummy.

As usual, generals don’t have a clue about politics.

The time - and the way - to do this was before the invasion.

And the guy to talk to was not Rummy - who these generals already knew was impossible to deal with - but the President himself.

Instead of risking nothing, these men should have marched into the Oval Office and said to their Commander-in-Chief, “Sir, we respectfully disagree” with the plans, troop levels strategy etc.. “And if they are enacted, we will march out of here in unison, face the White House press corps and voice our disagreement because we can’t send our troops into an unnecessarily precarious situation. If it ruins our careers, so be it.”

Now that is a courageous way to try to change a wrong-headed policy.

And it might have worked.

But, instead, these generals carried out a policy they knew was wrong because they did not want to risk their own careers. Only now, once they are safely collecting the life-time retirement benefits, do they come forward and blast Rummy.

This action actually cheapens their lifetime military careers because it looks selfish and cowardly. And hopefully these are not selfish men who ever acted cowardly while in uniform.

We all would much rather admire generals who have the guts to fight for the policy decision they believe in to the point where they’d sacrifice their careers in order to help save some of their troops.

But we have today a class of flag-rank DC officers who often brown-nose their way up the political ladder - and to them their precious ‘careers’ are more important than the troops they lead.

No wonder morale is so low inside the Army, the re-enlistment rates are down, and a majority of troops in Iraq want out.

And no wonder the President’ approval ratings across the board are down. He looks detached; he sounds like a broken record telling us how great things are in Iraq, blaming the media for only reporting bad. News.

We have lost 47 US soldiers in the first 2 weeks of April. For what? Why did these soldiers have to die? How does it make our country safer? Could those deaths have been prevented?

Our political class has caused this mess.

And these now-reluctant generals carried out knowingly-foolish policies without the courage to publicly object.

There is plenty of shame to go around.

THE PRICE OF OBSESSION



We are living in a strange time.

We are witnessing a Presidency - and a Congress - self-destructing right before our eyes.

We see a GOP House Majority Leader resign and then decide not to run for re-election - all because he has so screwed things up with his greed for power that he has corrupted the Conservative Movement.

We see a twice-elected Republican President also self-destructing - because of his zeal to “get” Saddam Hussein that he took short-cuts with the truth. The result is a huge drop in his credibilty - with almost 60% of the American people thinking Mr. Bush “not honest or trustworthy.”

And we see a Republican Party - with a solid majority of Americans finally on the same page on both economic and defense issues - frittering it all away. The deficit spending and huge trade deficits are a disgrace. Under Clinton, the GOP Congress had the guts to stand up to White House spending; but under President Bush, these folks have lost their convictions and are acting and spending like liberals!

What a shame it all is.

To hear Tom Delay wrap himself in ‘honor’ and claim his resignation is to preserve the conservative movement is almost laughable. He and his cronies have severely damaged conservatism. The Abramoff Scandal shows GOP congressmen to be just as feckless as the liberal Democrats who controlled Congress for 40 years.

Whatever happened to the Republican Revolution of 12 years ago?

Well, it first morphed into the Gingrinch Revolution as Newt’s ego got the best of him.

Then Delay took hold of it and went too far. Power and control became his obsession. And, as with any obsession, it got the best of him.

The same for President Bush. His obsession - from way before 9/11 - was to remove Saddam Hussein from power. A worthy goal indeed.

But Bush went too far too fast. Rather than letting the world catch up to us, he moved too quickly and fudged the truth about WMD and the real rationale for the War in Iraq.

The result is a morass that is ruining the Bush Presidency.

No objective observer can be optimistic that Iraq will ever end up as a peaceful democracy. (Not that that was ever stated as the reason for the invasion in the first place.)

Instead, Iraq is a precursor for the future in the Middle East: internecine religious, tribal and cultural strife against the background of a few rich ‘haves’ and millions of poor and hopeless “have nots.”

We can’t rebuild New Orleans; how did we ever think we could - or should - re-build the Middle East?

Traditional conservatives have always believed in a few simple tenets:

1) A balanced federal budget;

2) A reduced role for the government in our daily lives;

3) Peace through strength.


Instead - under a supposedly conservative Republican president and Congress - we have runaway spending, a whopping 49% increase in discretionary spending since 2000 - and a war that we started.

Yet there is still some good news: the Democrats are so discredited after their own failed attempts to run this country that the majority of Americans don’t want them either.

So what do they want?

Either a re-made GOP with new faces and new truly conservative programs - or an entirely new Independent Third Candidate who runs against both political parties for being inept, corrupt and to blame for the ongoing messes we seem to be in today.

The next year will tell us what direction our country is headed.

COURIC, MCCAIN AND BUSH


1) Various news reports this week predict that the announcement will soon come that NBC’s Katie Couric will jump to CBS to become the “first female sole news anchor.”

If this indeed does happen - and is not another negotiating ploy to extract even more money from NBC (rumors are they have already offered Katie a whopping $20 million per year) - then it will indeed be, as network news veteran Liz Trotta says, “the end of network news.”

Katie Couric is the best at what she does: hosting a morning news program. She is the perfect combination of serious and fun - and always willing to make herself the brunt of jokes from her fellow cast-mates.

But to sit in the chair once occupied by a serious newsman like Walter Cronkite is not her strength.

And it won’t work.

Joking at seven in the morning is one thing; editing and then reading the news at in the evening is another. And she won’t be good at it. (Remember a few years ago when she subbed for Tom Brokaw? It just wasn’t her.)

CBS, as always, is making the wrong choice. Their president, Les Moonves, wants a ‘star’ - despite the fact that their CBS Evening News has recovered from the Dan Rather debacle quite well under the professional tutelage of long-time pro, Bob Schieffer. The ratings have climbed steadily so that they are now pressing ABC for second place.

If Katie Couric indeed jumps to CBS, here are the inevitable consequences:

1) Her first night on the CBS Evening News - with all the accompanying hype - will indeed score huge ratings.

2) There will then be an immediate and subsequent fall-off the next night and especially the third night as viewers return to NBC and ABC. Thus, the ‘novelty’ factor will have lasted one day.

3) Back-stage grumbling will soon appear in the media from long-time CBS news pros who saw this mistake coming.

4) Within three months speculation will make the print press that CBS is thinking of “bringing in a male co-anchor to work with Katie.” She will not like that - and she can be a real diva when unhappy.

5) As the ratings continue to falter - and press criticism increases - there will even be speculation that CBS is contemplating moving Katie from the evenings to resuscitate their always-flopping Morning Show (which she will not do).

6) Meanwhile, over at NBC, The TODAY Show will have a tough time finding Katie’s replacement - and they will struggle to maintain their long-time dominance of morning news.

Conclusion: If Katie jumps, everyone will lose. Her career will head downward - granted at a slow pace and with tons of money (remember Jane Pauley?). CBS News will again demonstrate how totally inept and ‘over’ they are. And NBC will always miss her in the mornings.



2) McCain’s performance on Meet the Press on Sunday showed just what a total fraud he is. Quote after quote was brought out - each showing that this fellow was wrong about everything in Iraq.

And yet Tim Russert and all the rest of the so-called Mainstream Media continue to suck up to him!

Here’s the rub: McCain isn’t as smart as they - or he - thinks. He is making all the wrong political moves at all the wrong times: proposing a guest worker program in a political party that views it as amnesty; defending a war in Iraq that most people have long before given up on; defending the Dubai Ports deal when everyone knew that was a bad deal.

McCain is a bully, arrogant, sarcastic - and angry to his core. The more you see him, the more you figure him out. We cannot have him as our president.

He has nothing going for him other than his former POW status - and the adoration of the liberal media.


3) President Bush has totally mishandled the immigration debate and put himself - once again - on the wrong side. The pictures last week of him cavorting in Mexico with Vincente Fox while the debate raged in our streets is certain to drive his already-anemic poll numbers even lower. And then his own party will defy him even more.

He is only accelerating his lame duck status - and his presidency has deteriorated into almost-irrelevant status.