© St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Tad Armstrong

No nation so openly welcomes all of goodwill to join in the blessings of liberty, and no nation’s promises are sought more by others. Naturalized immigrants cherish their newfound citizenship with a passion few natural-born citizens ever attain. These people do not define their loyalty with a hyphen.

If we do not get honest with our politically correct selves, we are going to witness a United States whose shores are no longer sought by the “tired poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and will eventually lose our identity. Arizona has become a tragedy with far greater implications than imagined by the most hopeless of cynics.

If you believe the president, you believe the recently enacted Arizona statutes permit a police officer to stop and question a father out with his family for ice cream simply because of his skin color. You then have no choice but to conclude that a majority of the elected legislature of Arizona and 70% of its citizens who favor these laws, are racist.

If you believe the president, I suppose you believe that bad cops in Arizona are breathing easier now that their pre-enactment propensity for racial profiling has become the law. In other words, you have to believe that bad cops need bad laws before they dare act badly.

If, however, you care to read the actual written words of these statutes, you know that no one in Arizona can be lawfully detained or questioned unless cops (good or bad) have formed a lawful reasonable suspicion based on hard facts other than race that a person is about to commit, is committing or has committed a crime. In that event, you must believe that our president, a lawyer and former instructor of constitutional law, supports anarchy, defined as the absence of the rule of law.

This sugar-coated ice cream lie contributes to economic hardship of the people of an entire state and feeds the ignorant in places like Los Angeles with kindling that will likely grow into fires of misguided hate. This is not what presidents should be doing.

In spite of a moral obligation to denounce governmental boycotts, the most President Obama has done in recent days is to say the Arizona law has a “potential” for being enforced in a discriminatory fashion and announced plans to send 20 percent of the necessary troops to the border with orders to do little more than twiddle their thumbs.

The American people are not so gullible to believe that the laws of Arizona are any more susceptible of being improperly enforced than are the existing laws of anywhere else in the nation except, perhaps, Chicago, where we Illinoisans know there are no bad cops. Should we boycott every other city or state that has the “potential” to enforce stop-sign laws discriminatorily? Corrupt human beings corrupt sound laws, even in the District of Columbia.

That past leaders in Congress and the White House have ignored our growing immigration nightmare is no excuse for those in power today. The president and Congress should get serious about protecting our sisters and brothers of all ethnic origins on the front line of the drug-infested border war to the south. They should do something they actually have the constitutional obligation and authority to do, for a “change.”

In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton said, “The citizens of America have too much discernment to be argued into anarchy.” Ask the victims of crime in Arizona (including some illegal immigrants) or move your family to the border and try out the reality of Arizona life for yourself if you wish to study anarchy. Being unlawfully questioned by an overreaching cop until you can show your passport or birth certificate will be the least of your worries. And, finally, I have nothing against the law abiding citizens of Mexico, but in this country, we raise the American flag, speak English and abide by the rule of law. Or, at least, we used to.

That our leaders in Washington, D.C., care more about protecting their jobs with future new voters than they do about their constitutional obligation to defend the borders of their own nation is a disgrace. The most powerful nation in the world spends whatever it takes in money and blood to defend foreigners half way around the globe and prevents manicure scissors from getting onto planes, but refuses to defend its own people from invasion. Our president will not enforce the federal laws, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not accept criminals arrested pursuant to Arizona laws. Anarchy has arrived. Sorry, Mr. Hamilton.