Cutting through the Lies

Striking back at the Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman's ridiculous - and reality divorced - defense of the President's "comprehensive immigration reform" (read: AMNESTY) bill in the Wall Street Journal, the incomparable Heather Mac Donald, easily makes hash of the argument that California's Prop. 187 alienated Hispanic voters and cost the GOP the state. Mac Donald acidly notes that no Republican presidential candidate has won California since 1988 - six years before Prop. 187 was passed.

Mac Donald then explains - in simple language, in deference to Messrs. Bush and Mehlman and the editors of the WSJ - why California no longer votes for the GOP:

n fact, California’s transformation from “Reagan country” to labor-union country is the far more likely consequence of the growing Hispanic population per se and the corresponding outflow of white Republicans to other states. In 1990, California was one-quarter Latino and 57-percent white; in 2000, it was 32-percent Latino and 47-percent white; in 2005, Latinos constituted 35 percent, and whites 43 percent, of the population. Those shifting demographics have been accompanied by the growing clout of the Democratic party, and of California's public-service unions, not because of some vestigial memory of 187, but because they appeal to low-wage, low-skilled Hispanics. Los Angeles politics are now closely intertwined with the unionized Left, now that Latinos in 2005 made up 47 percent of the population and whites, 30 percent. The idea that Prop. 187, now 12 years old, is driving this massive shift is fanciful. California provides a glimpse of the likely political future if poor Hispanics continue to be the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

Though that's as simply and clearly as it can be put, no doubt Mac Donald will change few minds among the GOP's lemming-like leadership, or at the WSJ, which has committed itself to open borders immigration with the fanaticism of a jihadi on a suicide mission - aptly enough since President Bush's AMNESTY is an act of national suicide.