EckerNet.Com

Throughout my life, during conversations I’ve often find myself drawn to small, seemingly insignificant, comments that are casually stated and I’m sure to most forgotten about. But often enough, they are keys to the internal dialogue that happens in everyone’s head, before the intellectual and societal filters happen.

Often times these comments you consider off-handed and insignificant are also considered so by their speaker and as such pay less attention to what and how they say something. If you pay attention to them, they can serve as road signs to what an individual is really thinking, regardless of what they are actually saying.

It should be of no surprise that this is particularly useful in politics and wow, I came across a doozy today.

In a statement, where Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is trying to convince us of the laughable notion that the federal government really is trying to enforce current immigration laws, he made the following statement:

“We’re living in a world in which lettuce and fruit are not being picked because we are enforcing the law.”

Catch it?

While the rest of us are worried about national security, jobs, wages, crime, our health and educational systems, social ills, etc, the White House is worried if lettuce and fruit is spoiling in the fields.

It is more important that the price of lettuce does not go up 2 cents, than if we just legalized the next Mohammad Atta. It’s more important that some fruit farmer be able to cheat the system and hire cheap labor than it is if uneducated native workers have to go on welfare because they can’t get a decent paying job. It’s more important to just ignore the crime than it is to enforce it.

With governments like this, who needs to worry about Al Qaeda?

NOTE: And yes, it’s probably also worth noting Bush’s freudian slip from earlier today…

“You know, I’ve heard all the rhetoric — you’ve heard it, too — about how this is amnesty. Amnesty means that you’ve got to pay a price for having been here illegally, and this bill does that.”

I know I know, it’s not what he meant to say, although I hope to have more on that later today.  And I’m sure in HIS mind, this isn’t amnesty, but it does serve as an amusing quote for everyone else that knows that this IS amnesty.  And like I said, I hope to write on that more later….for now, real life intercedes.