Republican Hot Flashes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/25/AR2007102502234_pf.html

Republican Hot Flashes

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, October 26, 2007; A21

Has America become a mean, ungenerous, cramped and crabby nation, a deeply insecure colossus -- one that just might be taking all those Viagra and Cialis commercials a bit too personally? Is the country desperate to find scapegoats for a perceived decline in, um, vigor? Or is America still a confident land of hope and promise, a place still potent with possibility?

//////////////

The latest was the Senate vote Wednesday in which Republicans, supported by a handful of red-state Democrats, narrowly scuttled the Dream Act, a bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for some young undocumented immigrants -- but only those who did everything this country once found worthy and admirable in pursuit of the American dream.

Under the proposal, men and women who fulfilled several conditions -- they had to be under 30, had to have been brought into the country illegally before they were 16, had to have been in the United States for at least five years and had to be graduates of U.S. high schools -- would have been given conditional legal status. If they went on to complete two years of college or two years of military service, they would have been eligible for permanent residency.

Let's see. Here was a way to encourage a bunch of kids to go to college rather than melt into the shadows as off-the-books day laborers -- or maybe even gang members. And here was a way to boost enlistment in our overtaxed armed forces. Aren't education and global competitiveness supposed to be vital issues? Aren't we fighting open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The vote against the Dream Act was so irrational, so counterproductive, that it seemed the product of some sort of hormonal imbalance.


.............

But I think they're badly misreading the country. I think this is still fundamentally a hopeful, generous nation, aware of both its challenges and its strengths. And not yet ready to start downing Levitra by the handful.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com