What is the opposite of xenophile?

My Honey suggests xenophobe, but I disagree: love and fear are not opposites. Love and hate, or at least dislike, come closer.

Anyway, whatever it is, I think I'm becoming one.

Why, you ask? Well I'm angry at those who come to our country in order to take ad­vantage of our society and our economy, and then stab those of us who were born citizens in the back. I'm angry at people who come here alleging a desire to participate in our society, then try to turn it into something like what they left behind. I'm even more angry at the politicians who are not just letting it happen, but encouraging it.

I think it started with Jimmy Carter. The man has a heart of gold, but he should never have been allowed to enter politics. He couldn't and still can't seem to get it through that peanut he uses for a brain, that we are a sovereign nation, accountable only to God for our actions. We don't need the approval of Mexico, or Russia, or France, and most especially any nation governed by an Islamic theocracy. In the latter case, those nations are our publicly sworn enemies, and we should treat them as such.

Why am I down on Carter? Well, he started the ball rolling with the Panama Canal give­away. I'm sure that giving the Canal "back to the people of Panama" appealed strongly to those among us who feel guilty about the success of the United States, and are always searching for some way to apologize for it. The fact is, though, there was no country of Panama until we created it. The French took the necessary real estate away from the adjoining countries in Central America, and we bought it from the French. We never took anything from the country of Panama, because it didn't exist then! In the immortal words of the late Senator Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, "We stole it fair and square!" In more diplomatic terms, we acquired the Canal Zone in perfect accordance with the laws and customs that were in effect at the time.

Don't forget that the Canal itself didn't yet exist either. The French started work on it, but couldn't finish (hmmm, that's a familiar refrain, too!). That job was left for Americans, and it was American lives, American technology, and American dollars that built the Canal. Then that idiot gave it away. I'm still pissed off about that.

Then there was Ronald Reagan. Talk about an empty vessel. It isn't nice to witness first hand how easily the financial interests of the moneyed few can supersede the best interests of a nation, but have no doubt, anyone who had a brain and was around to see the effect of "Reaganomics" knows that all most US citizens got out of it was the shaft. His somewhat successful campaign to bring about the collapse of the former Soviet Union nearly bankrupted our country, leaving us with a record-breaking $220 billion national debt; and who could forget the Iran-Contra affair? Apparently almost everybody, because nothing Ronnie-boy did ever seemed to stick to him in the public eye.

I guess that shows how many brains were actually active during those years. Even after he admitted that he had Alzheimer's, nobody could connect the dots. Who was really running the country, huh? You know who... the same people who were getting rich from the tax cuts and laissez-faire economic philosophy he implemented.

Let's not forget to acknowledge the contributions of George Herbert Walker Bush. Oh yeah, the guy who failed to deal effectively with Saddam Hussein, when he had him by the throat, in the FIRST war with Iraq! We can also thank him for NAFTA - the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement - which again, protects and promotes the financial interests of the rich at the expense of the best interests of America. It's so-called "advantages" include elimination of tariffs on trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which in reality means that goods shipped from Mexico can enter our country duty-free. There never was much going the other way. Who wins? The industries who closed union shops in the US, that's who. They take those jobs away from US citizens and move them across the border, giving them to Mexican workers, to whom they don't even have to pay the US minimum wage, much less provide other job benefits that were hard-won by now-unemployed US citizens! Not only that, the entry of products produced by all that cheap labor caused the trade deficit with our "trading partners" to grow to $111 billion by 2004, and it's still growing. We don't own America any more, because George H.W. Bush and his cronies sold it.

Clinton? The worst thing he did was finish the job on NAFTA, giving in to the right-wing radicals, who controlled Congress, and giving them the license to kill that they'd been clamoring for. On the other hand, he really didn't act to implement it - he knew it was a pig in a poke. Too bad he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. That was his career-killer as far as the sheeple were concerned - never mind that he enabled the longest period of prosperity and economic expansion in US history, finally balanced the federal budget, and left behind a surplus of $559 billion! Furthermore, the surplus would have been even greater in succeeding years, but that would have required continuing Clinton's economic policies... can't have that! Everybody has stupid moments, and I guess both of his were women. After all, where and when the President gets laid is much more important than the best interests of the country!

We finally come to our current charlatan... er... charismatic leader, George Walker Bush. He's Reagan all over again, nothing more, nothing less, except that instead of engaging in economic warfare with the Soviet Union, he's restarted the hostilities in the Middle East on a scale heretofore unknown. Other than mentioning that he single-handedly destroyed the budget surplus Clinton left him, and has since run the deficit into the trillions, I won't say much more about the ill that he's visited on our country - I did that already in an earlier blog - but I'll summarize it thusly: He's simply continuing the Reagan policies of swaggering, blustering, threats, and wasting resources, while pursuing economic polices designed to make the rich even richer, the poor even poorer, and the middle class nonexistent. Vigorous implementation of NAFTA tops the list, along with currying favor with the Hispanic sector through a policy of tolerance toward Hispanic illegals.

We've come full circle now. I really dislike defacto official tolerance of illegal immigrants. Yeah, show me video of the catch-and-release program staged between Jauarez and El Paso, but don't dare do anything about the thousands who actually make it past the border and move hundreds of miles away. Ignore the fact that they work for shit wages, live 20 bodies to a two-bedroom house, drive vehicles which on a good day violate the laxest air quality standards in the world, overload our social infrastructure with crime, poverty, and disease, while contributing little or nothing to the financial support of that infrastructure. Ignore the fact that citizens are displaced from jobs in the food processing and construction industries, because the illegals will take jobs at pay rates and under conditions that flatly violate the law. An finally let's ignore the fact that most of the money they earn isn't spent here, growing our own economy, but instead sent to their homeland, to grow the economy there. Illegals are a black hole for money. It goes in, but never comes out, at least for the United States.

We have citizens who live like refugees now, because of the economic and international policies of the current (Bush) administration, while that administration kowtows to ethnic groups who support the illegals, and business interests who want to bring in skilled labor at below-market prices. That's just wrong, and it's time we did something about it. November is coming. Vote for your country, not for a political party.

Mariner