The Speech

First thoughts... Standard rhetoric, but well delivered, with some ideas worth considering.

A Huffington Post commenter sums it up, though, at its most basic level: "This plan has less to do with poor Mexicans going north than with Bush polls going south."

Money quote from the President tonight- and irony overload-

"We cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger, or playing on anyone’s fears, or exploiting the issue... for political gain."

Yes, George, it would be bad for a politician to incite fear and anger and to exploit important issues for cheap political gain. Boy, I'm glad we haven't had a leader like that in the past few years!

To be fair to the President on an issue where he's gone against his increasingly scary base, there was a lot that was good in the speech (having border enforcement focus not on the draconian wall building and minuteman vigilantes the far-right is yearning for, but on providing adequate funding and resources for the Border Patrol, cracking down on employers who exploit immigrants, paths to citizenship for many illegals, understanding the solution is less about new laws and more about enforcing existing ones, and telling the far-right to get over their obsession of calling every proposal 'amnesty'), but ultimately nothing new that would justify a primetime television address. While I do support some of things noted in the speech (secure borders should be a no-brainer), most of it has been outlined by the White House before.

And hey, for once a speech that didn't mention 9/11 and/or accuse his critics of hating America!

There was a lot in the speech that was bad (the deservedly-maligned National Guard ploy which wasn't worth the hype, the slave labor guest-worker plan which sounds more awful every time he mentions it, the cheesy 'human' interest story of the nice immigrant in the hospital at the end that all politicians apparently feel obligated to use, and finally, the fact that this is only being discussed because everything else- the war, etc- is going bad), of course. He does seem genuinely to want to find compromise with Congress, though the House will likely not play along.

Who knows if anything will come of this or if it will quickly be lost in all the political noise.

UPDATE: A good take on the speech by Marc Cooper at TruthDig:

His address had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics.

The real mission of the 6,000 National Guard troops he has called out is to quell the rebellion on the president’s right flank, the flaring mutiny of his own conservative base. Indeed, if the president were being honest, the mobilized troops would be taken off the federal payroll and moved onto the books of the 2006 national Republican campaign.

They certainly aren’t going to be stopping illegal immigration. Most of the Guard will be unarmed. They will be barred from patrolling the border itself, as well as from confronting, apprehending or even guarding the undocumented. The troops will be given solely behind-the-scenes, low-profile, mostly invisible tasks of pushing paper, driving vans and manning computers. Bush could have saved the taxpayers a load and sent a few battalions of Boy Scouts to do this job....

...What a media spectacle was whipped up, by the way, over this totally forgettable speech. CNN treated the speech with all the gravitas of the launching of a manned mission to Mars, complete with a countdown clock and rolling all-day coverage. With boundless shamelessness, the all-news network ensconced the sputtering Lou Dobbs as one of its color commentators for this artificially constructed event, something akin to having asked George Wallace to objectively narrate the Great March on Washington. I don’t fault Dobbs, a modern-day Ted Knight who has found a lucrative niche as CNN’s resident Minuteman. But, please, let us heap industrial amounts of shame on the babbling Wolf Blitzer, who repeatedly deferred to Dobbs as if the latter was the font of all authority on this issue.

A phalanx of reporters will now head to the border, seeking to file feature stories on newly arrived Guard members. And one can expect the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to accommodate the media spoon-feeding. The safe bet, though, is that this speech, in spite of the cable hype, will soon evaporate into the mists of memory.

The truth be told, the totality of Bush’s speech was rather reasonable. Stripping away the political theatrics and the empty phrasing, and putting aside the undue emphasis on deployment of the Guard, the president did endorse the sort of bipartisan reforms proposed by a coalition stretching from John McCain and the Chamber of Commerce to Ted Kennedy and the Service Employees International Union. And he called directly on both houses of Congress to finally agree upon and pass a bill that reflects that consensus. Problem is that Bush should have been speaking out forcefully in favor of these moves ever since he raised comprehensive reform as a priority in his 2004 State of the Union speech. Unfortunately, he hid under his desk on this issue for the last two years. Only after the right wing of his base rebelled and only after the pro-immigrant movement blossomed in the streets—that is, only after the White House was completely overtaken by events—did the president act. And as usual, it was too little, too late.

That seems to be the general sentiment.

To see why nothing will appease the far-right, read the rant here.

[AP: Bush to Send Up to 6,000 Troops to Border]

[PS- CNN actually broadcast the feed too early. Crooks and Liars has the humorous video.]