"An Incredible Week"

Let’s just pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been Mae-Westian, as in “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”  It’s been up and down all week.

Some people are getting triumphal, as in Mark Tapscott’s:

First, there was the success of the Right side of the Blogosphere in stopping the attempted revival of the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform bill in the Senate.

I think that we need to temper the enthusiasm.  The Washington Times’s  Stephen Dinan has it about right.  It was going to be “a defining moment for the old guard.”

Instead, the young guns &mdash, a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It was the young guns, assisted by the firepower of the conservative New Media, that got the job done. But we can agree with Mark Tapscott to this extent:

Nobody can legitimately doubt now that conservative New Media has genuine political power to shape American public policy.

But let us not get above ourselves.  The New Media is a blunt instrument, like a great army.  The key is to appoint generals who can use the army to fight a great battle and win. 

That is what politicians are for.  When they are not deep in the trough giving out pork to their clients.

After this week, politicians all over America will be getting the message on immigration.

Here is the defining issue for me from Stephen Dinan:

"Those of us who have been on the campaign trail in the last couple of years have had to talk about immigration reform and we’ve campaigned — [Sen. David] Vitter made campaign promises, I made campaign promises — we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

That checks with the results of the cloture vote taken on Thursday, reported here.  The biggest group of Democrats who voted to kill the bill were in Class I, elected to the Senate last November.

No doubt they, like Jim DeMint, were out on the campaign trail talking about immigration reform and making promises.  So they have a pretty good idea about the sentiments out there on immigration.

And I’ll bet that you’d find that about 80 percent of the American people would agree with the notion that “we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship.”

And then there was the Supreme Court’s decision on race and schools.  What a concept from Chief Justice Roberts:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[.]

Do tell.