Mighty Casey Has Struck Out

You have just got to love lawyers...

Apparently in legalese (aka legalsleaze) "illegal" doesn't necessarily mean "not legal."

Below is an excerpt from an interview between Glenn Beck and Rudy Giuliani. Here is the link to the article.

GLENN: ... you've got this quote from '94 and you give me the context on this. Quote: If you come here, you work hard. You happen to be an undocumented status, you're one of the people who we want in this city. You're somebody that we want to protect. We want you to get out from under what is often a life of being a fugitive, which is really unfair.

GIULIANI: The context of that was for people to come forward to report crimes because we needed their help and we didn't want them to be afraid of coming forward. The context of that was we wanted them to put their children in school not to be afraid to do that. Even with the policy that I pointed, I continued it was probably seven, eight years old, there were still people, illegal immigrants, who would not report crimes. But we wanted them to.

GLENN: Right. But isn't illegal immigration a crime in and of itself?

GIULIANI: No.

GLENN: Aren't you saying --

GIULIANI: Glenn --

GLENN: You're protecting criminals by saying that being treated as a criminal is unfair.

GIULIANI: Glenn, it's not a crime. I know that's very hard for people to understand, but it's not a federal crime.

GLENN: It's a misdemeanor but if you've been nailed, it is a crime. If you've been nailed, ship back and come back, it is a crime.

GIULIANI: Glenn, being an illegal immigrant, the 400,000 were not prosecuted for crimes by the federal government, nor could they be. I was U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York. So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it's not a criminal proceeding. It's a civil proceeding.

GLENN: Is it --

GIULIANI: One of the things that congress wanted to do a year ago is to make it a crime, which indicates that it isn't.

GLENN: Should it be?

GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn't be because the government wouldn't be able to prosecute it. We couldn't prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about 6. In other words, you'd have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to have.

GLENN: So what's your solution?

GIULIANI: My solution is close the border to illegal immigration.

There you have it, folks. Rudy will keep the illegal (though not really illegal 'cause illegal in this case really means legal) aliens out by closing the border to illegal (really legal according to RG) immigration. For those of you trying to understand or illustrate Orwellian doublespeak, there you go.

I predict that this statement just sank Rudy's chances at the oval office. It sounds like he has no clue about America's level of frustration with illegal (most of us tend to think that illegal really means illegal) immigration. This frustration is high among both Democrats (at least Southern ones) and Republicans (especially Southern ones.) I think that the backlash from this statement will be severe.

It doesn't matter much to me, though. I wasn't going to vote for him anyway. Now it is definite.