Tea at Trianon: Amnesty and the Blue Wave

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Amnesty and the Blue Wave

From The American Thinker:

Amnesty for illegal aliens has never been a winning issue for Democrats. Barack Obama seemed to operate with this knowledge. But his successors obviously don't share his political cunning.

Obama, you see, always played his cards close to the vest when it came to the politics of this issue. He paid lip service, at least, to constitutional protocol: "I'm not a king," he told many audiences who desired that he unilaterally cease deportations for criminal trespassers.

Deportations had to happen by law, he asserted. But beneath the table, he was undermining the laws of the people as only the shiftiest despot might.
Take what's commonly become known as his "catch and release" policy, more formally known as his administration's "prosecutorial discretion" guidelines. Under these guidelines, ICE data from 2013 reveal, "hundreds of thousands [of illegal aliens] who were identified in the interior of the country were released instead of removed." In that year, only 25% of criminal trespassers in America were charged with their crime. To make matters worse, a large number of those released were criminals, even beyond their having committed the crime of entering this country illegally. In fact, 68,000 (or 35% of the illegal aliens encountered by officers) had "criminal convictions," and they were released into the population "without formal notice to law enforcement agencies and victims." For the record, more than 80% of Americans disagree with this "catch and release" policy to this day. (Read more.)