Now that we've heard from the Immigration President, don't you feel safer from all those invading hordes massed at our borders?

No, I didn't watch the speech. I always figure I'll find out only too well what I need to know about these "events." And indeed I got to hear, though not yet see, His Chimpiness do his little false start on the speech, then stop and wait, in one of his famous brain-locked dazes, to be told by the people with actual working brains what the f--k to do. Hey, don't most big-time acts like to send out a little comedy act to warm up the crowd? You could say that Chimpy was just doing his own warmup.

The speech itself turns out to present a more elaborate immigration plan than most of us were expecting, though not necessarily a more sensible one. To the extent that it strives for nuance, of course, it will fail to achieve the goal of placating Chimpy's openly rebelling far-right flank.

Still, probably the message that most folks are hearing is yet another military solution from a band of governmental incompetents who are out to prove that government can't do anything right except to further enrich the rich. You have to wonder, though, if any significant portion of the populace is really so addled as to hear the idea of sending the National Guard to the rescue as anything but a cruel joke at a time when the Guard has been so seriously compromised—darned near broken, in fact—by our adventure in Iraq.

Which makes you wonder whether the speech will even accomplish its obvious primary function: changing the subject. As E. J. Dionne Jr. points out in a really good column in today's Washington Post, "Rove vs. Reality," changing the subject has from the start of the Bush administration been not just a political tactic but what Karl Rove and his Pinocchio-boy president thought was a matter of transforming actual policy. Unfortunately for them (and, alas, for the rest of us as well), their malignant ideological fantasies ran up against reality, at just about every turn, but nowhere more graphically than in Iraq. Will the American people really not make the connection?

Yesterday I quoted the opening of Bob Herbert's terrific NYT column "America the Fearful." Today it seems more appropriate to quote the closing:

"There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw."