Inside the Conservative mindset: Law and order for immigrants but for themselves many excuses

I got the following response from a reader that demonstrates the Conservative mindset, which demands bedrock law and order when it comes to the powerless and minorities but excuses and no prosecution for its own.

I think that Steele is a great choice. I forget labels and think about if someone is breaking the law or not. I also try to be understanding to someone's plight. It is a very fine balancing act. The law is absolute and final though, if I do something illegal I expect to be punished.

Certainly, Sen. Larry Craig should have been punished for his bathroom homosexual solicitation and then lying about it. But he escaped truth and justice.

How about the Bush administration that illegally prosecuted a war in Iraq with falsehoods to the American people that have cost more than 4,000 American lives and more than 100,000 civilians lives? No prosecution for law and order there either. And so another war is made much more possible since there were no consequences for the last one.

Everyone loves Colin Powell, but he sold the falsehoods to the United Nations.

Liberals love to hate Dick Cheney, but it was Condoleezza Rice who sold this war to the president. She was his foreign policy teacher. And Bush was a man who depended more on the counsel of women. Like me, he is a momma's boy.

And in my one-on-one interview with Rice in Nashville, I could tell she was the passion behind the war. She, as a historian, saw it as a needed historical exercise as in the Cold War. Yet she forgot how many men and women died in Korea and Vietnam.

For her, however, those were acceptable historical losses. She never had children. What did she really care that other people lost their babies in uniform?

Tell me then: which situation presents to greater threat to this nation? The undocumented immigrant whose numbers decrease in this country with the decline in the economy, or the Executive Branch offficials who deceived us into a war in which so many have died and more than $600 billion in taxpayer money has spent in a foreign land that could have gone to citizens here.

You must make a choice. Because good government is about setting priorities.

For the powerless regarding immigration, the Conservative mindset demands that the book be thrown at them, and even to the point of denying them due process as in the raid on the Iowa meatpacking plant last fall. Defendants could not even understand the charges against them. Many spoke an Indian dialect from Guatemala. And they were sent to prison, not deported.

Our Constitution guarantees due process to anyone tried here, citizen or not. You must be able to understand the charges against you and not just accept the bad advice of a court-appointed attorney to plead guilty.

Why? Because we want to same courtesy and protection provided to our citizens overseas as tourists and workers.

Yet no one was prosecuted by the Bush administration for this heinous act that violates Constitutional protections. The Bush administration enacted it.

Being here illegally in this country is a misdemeanor. Violation of due process is a felony. Yet all the resources are aimed at the misdemeanor and nothing at the felony. That makes no sense except to the Conservative mindset, which has historical bigotry deeply mixed in its roots.

The list of violations of Constitutional law and order is longer. But the Conservative mindset I am afraid is not smart enough to consider this matter in its entirety. Sometimes simplicity of mind with complex issues and matters of humanity too easily escape the Conservative mindset.

That's all right. Hispanic numbers are growing in this nation as American citizens born here. And because of that, some Conservatives in Washington State, who supposedly respect law and order, have petitioned to change the Constitution to make children born here of undocumented immigrants as non-citizens.

Alas, the Conservative mindset betrays its own values. Then it disgusts by claiming allegiance to law and order when its real intent is law and order for everyone else except themselves.

May this kind of mindset be damned. And most certainly, its day are numbered as people who look like me grow in rapid numbers. We will not forget the indignities and lack of respect for real law and order heaped upon us.