Personal Asides: “Rubber Mark” Kirk Wants to Fight Illegal Immigration with Condoms…Victory for Conservatives in the Supreme Court McCain-Feingold Ruling…New York Times Gets Involved in Wall Street Journal Control by Slurring Murdoch’s Wife.

Rubber Mark.

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Illinois), desperately trying to appeal to the social lefties of his North Shore district…and heedless of appealing to the GOP base (believing they have nowhere else to go)… has now seized on an issue that first became popular with affluent exurban voters when eugenicist Margaret Sanger first trumpeted the notion that the fewer Have Nots there are the more will be for all of us Haves. Rubber Mark has been first to apply eugenics to the immigration issue.

Kirk recently told the House that the U.S. should distribute free contraceptives to Mexico since “a slower rate of growth of Mexico’s population would improve the economy of Mexico…reduce the environmental pressure on Mexico’s ecosystem…[and]…also reduce the long-term illegal immigration pressure on America’s borders.” Embarrassing, isn’t it? Actually, birth rates have dropped in Mexico since 1980, ranking at 2.5 children per family compared to 2.1 for the U. S. So distributing prophylactics to the Mexicans ranks almost as high as distributing them to U. S. school children in Kirk’s book.

Treat the Mexicans to rubbers goes in the same package as his embryonic stem cell bill, pro-partial birth abortion, gun control and pro-gay rights position. But we have to take it…or so we’re told…because Kirk is the only “Republican” congressman the 10th will ever have. In reality by shedding any recognition of conservatism, he is following in the footsteps of Childe Chuck Percy who lost conservatives with every step he took to the Left including his espousal of Nelson Rockefeller for president. Childe Chuck who said after a close call with conservative Democrat Alex Seith he had learned his lesson. Until he received a final tutorial from someone more liberal who didn’t swerve--Paul Simon.

When Kirk ran for reelection last year, he told me “you may not like my stand on social issues but you have to acknowledge that on national defense I support the president.” Yeah, until the day after election 2006. After his Democratic opponent Dan Seals came close to beating him, Kirk junked his support of the president and came out against the “surge.” Expect him to do more twists and turns…maybe even support Chuck Hagel for president…if it helps his reelection chances. It won’t. There was a time when Kirk could have been a good Senatorial candidate; not now with his feinting to the Left. You see, you can never get farther to the Left than Dan Seals; thus could history repeat itself with Kirk failing to attract the Left while losing the Republican base.

The courting of the Left goes on: a vote in favor of a Pelosi-supported tax hike, a vote against a bill to require hospital workers to notify immigration officials when they treat illegals. Bodies on the desert are littered with people like Kirk…Percy, John B. Anderson (remember him?) and Paul Findley (no one remembers him).

Too bad principle to Rubber Mark means something he must rise above.

Bush’s Court.

Last night an erudite dinner companion asked me how I believe George W. Bush will be remembered. My answer was jocular, irreverent and scandalously unfair because I was angry at the immigration issue. Let me in the cold dawn of morning restate the answer. Bush will be remembered, I believe, for taking the battle against terrorism to the enemy with the result that the homeland has been spared attacks on it since 2001. With verve, decisiveness and heedless of personal unpopularity, he delivered the battle to the enemy…albeit in a war which, like all wars, was run sloppily and beset with inaccurate intelligence. But I repeat: all wars are like this. Eisenhower was very nearly sacked when the initial battles in North Africa went poorly. MacArthur who brilliantly conceived the Inchon Landing was in fact sacked for not recognizing the danger of Chinese involvement in the Korean War. Westmoreland was sacked in Vietnam. The Civil War saw Lincoln frittering away time by promoting and removing generals until he found one who could fight and lead. That is the nature of war…and was the nature of wars in which we have been involved since the very first, the American Revolution where the Continental Congress favored generals Horatio Gates and Nathaniel Greene over Washington.

So first, Bush will be remembered as a president who disregarded personal popularity to do what was right (and that goes for immigration as well on which this writer is strongly opposed). Second, Bush will be remembered for doing what presidents had vowed to do since Roe v. Wade—make the Supreme Court more conservative. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush all made incremental changes and some disastrous backsteps. George W. Bush finally began to turn the tide with the appointments of John Roberts and Sam Alito. These are two enormously important and salutary benchmarks.

Earlier the new majority on the Court upheld the ban on partial birth abortion. Thanks to Roberts and Alito and newfound strength from Anthony Kennedy the pendulum has begun to turn. Yesterday the Court ruled 5 to 4 in upholding an appeals court ruling that an anti-abortion group, Wisconsin Right to Life, should have been allowed to air ads expressing the group’s point of view in the final two months before the 2004 elections. The portion of the McCain-Feingold Act unnecessarily limits free speech and violates First Amendment rights. Voting right were Bush appointees Roberts and Alito plus Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas. Voting wrong were Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens (Chuck Percy’s revenge; it was Percy who convinced Gerald Ford to name the 87-year-old lefty).

Thus in the midst of great abuse, let this writer congratulate George W. Bush on turning the Court around. Mr. President, you will leave office with the same ignominy of Harry Truman but unlike Truman will live long enough to see your major actions justified without Arthur Schlesinger’s cosmetics. The only black mark will be your fallacious view on immigration—but it shows you’re human. The other black mark you can rectify before it is too late…by giving Scooter Libby a pardon, recognizing that the constitutional nature of the pardon does not involve whether the one being pardoned was right or wrong—but that in conferring it the president tempered justice with mercy.

Slurring Murdoch’s Wife.

Don’t believe for a minute that the struggle to keep Rupert Murdoch from controlling The Wall Street Journal doesn’t carry a threat to the Left. The New York Times hits the street today with an assault not on Murdoch but on his Chinese wife…carrying out all the vindictiveness of personal injury on her heritage and raising the bogey of the Yellow Peril…warning that when the 76-year-old Murdoch dies this former native of Commie-run China will control a major lever of American journalistic power.

Liberals don’t like to be accused of such pettiness and as result are spared generally but their minions who like to pretend they take the high road. The Times has never been one to waste time putting on gloves before they scoop up mud and hurl it. This story, originally slated for Sunday, is timed to appeal to the Dow Jones owners to spurn Murdoch’s overtures. I hope they don’t. Instead it would be salutary for someone to try to capture The Times from the arthritic old craven fingers of the Sulzbergers.