Coulter: "Read My Lips: No New Amnesty"

There are times when you have to carefully choose your path through the barbs of an Ann Coulter column to find the priceless quotes, in much the same way I look for delicious morel mushrooms in the nothern woods after the brambles get thick.

Today Ann is talking the President's immigration plan, and she has a few things to add that I suppose the President would smile at, if only in public. From Front Page:

Bush has also apparently learned that the word "amnesty" does not poll well. On Monday night, he angrily denounced the idea of amnesty just before proposing his own amnesty program. The difference between Bush's amnesty program and "amnesty" is: He'd give amnesty only to people who have been breaking our laws for many years – not just a few months. (It's the same program that allows Ted Kennedy to stay in the Senate.)

Bush calls this the "rational middle ground" because it recognizes the difference between "an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years." Yes, the difference is: One of them has been breaking the law longer. If our criminal justice system used that logic, a single murder would get you the death penalty, while serial killers would get probation.

Coulter goes on to note that immigration is an opportunity for us as Americans to enhance our culture and our economy. She seems to have a problem with the ideas of some that our country should be only an opportunity for the immigrant, and not bear bi-directional fruit.

Why not use immigration the way sports teams use the draft – to upgrade our roster? We could take our pick of the world's engineers, doctors, scientists, uh...smoking-hot Latin guys who stand around not wearing shirts between workouts. Or, you know, whatever....

As Peter Brimelow says in his book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, why not choose immigrants who are better than us?

Bush thinks it's not fair to favor people with special skills – a policy evidenced by his Harriet Miers pick.

How about this: It's not fair to want to go out with someone just because that person is attractive and has a good personality because it discriminates against people who are ugly with bad social skills! That's our immigration policy.

And, this isn't going Dutch. In this little courtship, we get to pay the tab too!