Politics > People.

That was some serious emotion behind the immigration bill that tanked in the Senate today. Setting aside the obvious effort on the part of the President to salvage what credibility he's lost with Americans because of his failures in Iraq by approving this bill, it is perhaps the one measure backed by him recently that I actually found sufficient reason to support. Which is why I was puzzled by Democrats when they started sounding off all these populist-sounding concerns about mistrust of government and how the American people wouldn't buy it even if the president delivered on his promises of tightened border-security and amnesty for illegal workers. It's a plausible concern: would the promises of the measure have materialized? While it's hard to say, any bit of hope for illegal workers and their families got sacrificed on the altar of power politics. It cut two ways.

1. Dems used it as yet another excuse to make Bush look like an ass. (Like this was even really necessary).
2. We're racist and who can't face up to the fact that we don't want to share our resources and rights with people whom we don't perceive as deserving to belong here.

Try as it will, Congress can't escape the 8 pound gorilla in the room. Which means that this issue gets blissfully frozen for the time being only to start up again at fever pitch once the problem get so big as to threaten to swallow us whole. Ignoring it seems tantamount to coping with an illness by pretending that it's simply going to go away.