Are you PC? If so, stop reading here

I've been thinking about Don Imus. The irreverent New York radio talker was fired last month for saying, in the course of some casual on-air banter, that Rutgers University's winning women's basketball team included some "nappy-headed hos."

Did this overgrown teenager really believe those women athletes were whores? Of course not.

Imus, now past 65, was trying to stay hip by imitating the jive talk that our black "entertainers" toss about with abandon, the same way David Letterman graces his monologues with phrases like, "Let me ax you a question" -- though Letterman is suave enough to get away with it.

Thus, Imus was fired not for what he said, but for saying it while white.

If that's too politically incorrect for you, best stop reading now, because this week and next I hope to weigh in with a warning about the dangers of political correctness, and in order to discuss them I'm going to have to violate some of the strictures of this pathetic brand of self-censorship.

A few years back, one self-anointed "Hispanic leader" attending an editorial board meeting here at the newspaper actually covered his ears and told us, "I will not listen to these words," when I kept referring to illegal aliens as illegal aliens.

The goal, of course, is to brand us as boorish, insensitive, tone-deaf racists if we use anything but this month's preferred euphemism. If I'm up-to-date, that would now be "undocumented guest worker" -- a phrase meant to imply these millions of law-breaking trespassers have merely neglected to stop by the nearest federal Guest Worker Services bureau to pick up their "instant citizenship" and voter registration cards, available merely by paying a bribe of some tens of thousands of dollars, which our socialist politicians euphemistically call a "fine."

This is where PC double speak really helps these double-talk artists, because the practice of openly bribing our elected officials is so relatively new here that these liars and thieves can rely on the species boobus voteris Americanus to buy this booshwah while knowing the targeted Third World invaders will immediately identify it as what it is: a Latin-style bribe for our entire immigration bureaucracy to look the other way.

If any of that sounds facetious, it's not meant to be. Democratic politicians, particularly, see this as the huge untapped voting bloc that will put them over the top, likely to embrace a platform tricked up in nice euphemisms but which really adds up to -- wink, nudge -- "We'll tax the hell out of these morons who play by the rules and file their 1040s every spring, in order to give you guys free medical care and 19 years of free child care (complete with free meals) in our Youth Homogeneity Camps, free for all kids age 4 to 22, cradle to grave, baby."

No, I'm not making that up. Democratic presidential candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson stopped by Monday to tell us he opposes private-school vouchers because "They'd undermine the public schools, everyone would go to the, uh ..." (sentence never finished.)

Richardson, who I must say appeared a bit jet-lagged, also noted, "All-day kindergarten is important; preschool is important, you've got to get the kids before they're 4."

His solution to the current invasion of Spanish-speaking peoples with no apparent interest in real assimilation, no visible interest in playing by the rules?

Gov. Richardson parroted every other mainstream politician of our time, asserting, "You can't deport 'em all. How are you going to do it?"

This is an interesting position, which does appeal to my libertarian side. If we got rid of all the welfare programs, I would indeed favor open immigration. I pretty much favor abandoning all unenforceable laws.

What strikes me odd is that these politicians seem to want to abandon only this one (supposedly) unenforceable law.

Drive down any street in Vegas traveling at precisely the posted speed limit. Unless there's a black-and-white in sight, traffic will be zooming past you on both sides. So why don't these same politicians say, "What are you going to do, arrest them all? The battle is lost."

What about the war on drugs? Why don't these same politicians say, "It's obviously a lost cause. What are you going to do, round up every pot smoker? How many more prisons you gonna build?"

I proposed that to Gov. Richardson on Monday. He replied: "I'm not in favor of decriminalizing marijuana. I'm in favor of sentencing enhancements."

They continue to pester us with hundreds of unenforceable laws. So why is this the one law they won't even try to enforce?

If they brought all the nation's immigration cops to Las Vegas tomorrow and started raiding hotels, they could have thousands of seasick illegal maids dumped on the beach in Acapulco next week. The river of trespassers would slow and -- when they saw the celery fields of California getting the same treatment next week -- might actually reverse.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower did it a year after taking office in 1953, with far fewer men than the U.S. Border Patrol has today. It was called "Operation Wetback," and it worked. Arrest and deport the first 10 percent; the rest get wise pretty quick.

No, the real fear here is that if they rounded up and deported and otherwise drove away all the illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans, "Who would make the beds in the hotels?"

The best answer is: "The children of the people who used to do it, who are mostly currently on the government dole."

Cut off "Aid to Families with Dependent Children" -- or whatever this year's euphemism is -- and most unwed mothers would marry their babies' daddies in short order, out of sheer economic necessity. Why continue this disincentive to forming permanent families, long known to be the best route out of poverty?

Cut off the "disability" checks flowing to all those able-bodied fathers with dubious "psychiatric disabilities" (including alcoholism) who line up at the post office on the first of the month, and we'd have a huge new work force overnight.

But that would mean the end of the welfare-state dream, with a concomitant reduction in the power and siphoned-off booty of the welfare-state politicians, wouldn't it?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers," "The Ballad of Carl Drega," and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.LibertyBookShop.us.