And Now for Something Really Awful...

President Bush is getting ready to push his next big initiative.

WASHINGTON — With President Bush looking to counter a legacy increasingly marred by the war in Iraq, the White House has launched a bold, behind-the-scenes drive to advance a key domestic goal: immigration reform.

Translation: After having wasted thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars in the wasteland of Iraq pursuing a messianic vision of democracy as panacea for Islamic terror, President Bush is going to try and do for America what he did for Iraq, but letting Mexico complete its invasion of the U.S. Brilliant.

For a month, White House staffers and Cabinet members have met three to four times a week with influential Republican senators and aides to hash out a consensus plan designed to draw a significant number of GOP votes.

With that effort largely completed, Republicans were hoping to present their proposal Wednesday to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who would lead the Democrats in any attempt to move a bill through the Senate.

The intense effort — conceived by the president's chief political strategist, Karl Rove — is intended to ensure that Bush will achieve at least one crucial policy victory in the last two years of his presidency.

Karl Rove is the guy who helped created the GOP's "permanent majorities" in congress. Oh, wait. They lost congress. And Ted Kennedy is the man who brought us the 1965 Immigration Act, which he swore at the time would not alter the ethnic balance of the U.S. So, let conservatives take notice, the president's "Immigration Reform" proposal is the brainchild of Messrs. Rove and Kennedy. That alone should send Republican lawmakers running for their political lives.

Success on immigration reform could also accomplish another Rove goal, shoring up the GOP's weakened support among Latinos, who are even more important to the party as independent voters become increasingly disenchanted.

This is the madness of the Rove strategy exposed for all to see. The Latino immigrants that Rove so desperately wants to flood the U.S. will NOT vote Republican, if they ever bother to vote at all. Not unless the GOP goes out of its way to ape the Democrats in terms of welfare promises (entirely possible, at this point). But by encouraging open borders immigration and kowtowing before the Latino vote, the GOP risks alienating its primary base: white voters. Republicans lost Congress not because Latinos walked away from them, but because white independents and conservative voted either stayed home and voted for the Democrats, largely due to Iraq, but also because of deep dissatisfaction with the administration's domestic policies.

Latinos are not going to be the salvation of the Republican party. Drastically increasing the percentage of Latino votes only weakens the future prospects of the GOP, which will never be able to compete for ethnic votes the way Democrats do.

"The president really wants this. He also needs this; it may be the only positive policy thing he can accomplish before he leaves office," said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a business alliance.

Given the rest of his legacy, one supposes that he wants to get one last good thrust of the knife into America's body politic before heading off retirement in Texas.

Republicans stressed that the discreet talks were necessary to avoid the bitter public battles that scarred the last round of debate. "There's a real desire for this to work — it can't be litigated in print," Kyl said. "We have to work senator to senator and representative to representative, the way compromises used to be put together, to maximize our chances of success."

Translation: ""We don't want to do this in public because we know the public doesn't want us doing this at all." The White House is perfectly aware that the overwhelming majority of Americans resent the invasion of the country and wants the U.S. government to stop it. But since the president and his henchmen want to encourage and increase the invasion, they want to keep their plans out of sight until the last moment when they spring it, like a loaded pistol, on the public.

The only thing Americans can do is contact their Senators and Representatives and demand that any "comprehensive immigration reform" be rejected and that current immigration laws be enforced.