. . . New York might actually be a pretty OK place to live. Alas, we may find ourselves sporting RealID cards – a thing which I would have thought neither Right nor Left would have wanted – because Spitzer made an attempt to try to solve the dissonance between Federal immigration law and State need for highway safety. Rottenchester at F29 does a good job of summing up the situation:
Drivers’ Licenses Will Still Be An Issue – The Fighting 29th
I didn’t have an objection to Spitzer’s earlier plan, because I don’t think that it’s the state’s business to become immigration police. But his endorsement of the intrusive and pointless RealID program now has turned me against it. Since nobody is happy with issuing illegals second-class licenses, I’ll bet that the final outcome will probably be no license for illegals, and RealIDs for the rest of us. Our highways won’t be any safer, but we’ll all be packing a big-brother identity card.
Fie and a pox on the ReadID card! An unnecessary thing for an unproven crisis of identification. But then, the entire illegal immigration debate, the license debate, the voter registration debate, the RealID and the War on Terror are all rooted in the same garbage. It’s the exact same xenophobia that compels housewives to buy antibacterial soap where humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years without it. It is the fear – and the intentional amplification of the fear – of the unknown.
Because it benefits someone, you are expected to believe that dangerous bugs crawl on your skin; that terrorists lurk in the back rooms of every 7-11; that people are driving in droves from one polling station to another, voting four and five times for the same candidate; that Mexican illegals are carting canisters of Sarin gas with them as they creep across the border. Even if Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that they’ve been getting gamed all along, the Republicans are even up for playing the fear card on local issues as banal as driver’s licenses because they still think fear is a winning issue.
And, I fear, they’re right.
Technorati Tags: RealID, Security, New York State, Drivers License
