“Read my lips: no illegal immigrants”

By Tom Quiner

George H.W. Bush reneged on a foundational promise and lost.

You remember the 1988 presidential campaign. Vice President George Bush the First built his presidential run on continuing the Reagan legacy. His promise:

“Read my lips, no new taxes.”

He won the election.

But once ensconced in the White House, he welshed on his promise and raised taxes … and lost his reelection bid to upstart Bill Clinton in 1992. The rest, ladies and gentlemen, his history.

By contrast, Donald Trump the First built his presidential campaign on extirpating illegal immigrants from American soil and shipping them back to Mexico, or wherever they came from. His words:

“We have no choice” but to deport because “we either have a country or we don’t have a country.”

Very clear. No wiggle room.

He used this line to club Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio into submission. (Senator Rubio, by the way, is the man that polls show beating Hillary Clinton by 25 points if he was on the ballot.)

Now that he’s in the heat, and reality, of a campaign against the candidate of the other party, the Donald is backpedaling from galvanizing a “deportation force” to rip undocumented workers from their families and sending them on the first bus home. He admits that it would be …

“… a very hard thing …”

… to deracinate some 11 million illegals from American soil.

Maybe the “terrific” ones could stay based on some sort of “merit system.” Oh, and they’ll have to pay “back taxes” (assuming that they haven’t been paying any taxes, which itself is a dubious proposition).

Quiner’s Diner was never a fan of the Trump Doctrine. Evidently, neither is he anymore. And yet this ‘expel the illegal’ dogma is what defined him. He used it to gut his Republican opposition. Do you realize that any one of ten, heck, maybe even fifteen, other Republicans could have beaten Hillary Clinton handily?

So here is the question: will the breaking of a campaign promise once again usher in another Clinton?