There was a time when many Americans, including me, most likely would have felt sorry for Nicolas Navarrete, the 43-year-old illegal alien who was just sentenced to 40 years in one of Uncle Sam’s slammers for trying to rob his bank while wearing his wife’s wig.{Man gets 40-year sentence for robbery, By David Doege,Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, March 22.

Then I might have figured, given the reasons cited by Navarrete’s attorney explaining his client’s odd behavior, well, this poor guy just snapped under the strain. Today, however, with 12 to 20 million illegals demanding this or whining about that, I can only say to Navarrete what a drill sergeant once said to yours truly and other young recruits when they complained that certain aspects of Basic Training were “difficult”:]

“If you’re looking for sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary between suicide and syphilis.”

Even Navarrete’s attorney, Anthony Rosario, was left scratching his head over his client’s goofy attempt to disguise himself after getting the idea from a TV show:

“He walks into a bank where almost everybody knows him to rob it,” Rosario said. “It just makes no sense at all. “To see him standing there with this wig on is almost laughable,” Rosario said of photos taken of his client by bank surveillance cameras. “One of the bank employees said, ‘What is Mr. Navarrete doing with that silly wig on?’ ”

What sold an unsympathetic judge on the need to put Navarrete away for a longer stretch than what he might have received for, say, just handing a teller a note and demanding money, was Navarrete’s admitted attempt to kill the police officers who were trying to stop him after he had fled the bank:

“When I look at the circumstances, it would be difficult for me to overstate how serious this was,” District Attorney Brad Schimel told Dreyfus . . . “After the chase was over, he was going nowhere, but he continued firing wildly.”

Speaking in Spanish through an interpreter and apparently unaware of the seriousness of his crime, a weepy Navarrete offered, “I was out of my senses,” and begged the judge to allow him to return to his native Mexico.

“I’d just like a chance,” he said. That’s all I ask here.”

Forget it, bub. And I hope you think real hard about whether you want to show up in the exercise yard wearing that wig.

Church leaders in Los Angeles and elsewhere are constructing Elvira-villes (the opposite of Arpaiovilles) within their buildings as little illegal alien barrios in order to thwart the American justice system. After all, they’re the churchy guys, and they believe they know better than mere citizens.

Priests and pastors are basing their sob story strategy on the continuing church occupation of Elvira Arellano, the convicted felon who is avoiding arrest by lounging among the Methodist pews in Chicago.

But there’s not enough room in the inn, er church, for everyone who wants to avoid La Migra, so choices must be made. And churchies are choosing based on the sob stories with the highest sniffle value.

“We’re choosing them for their personal stories,” she said, “but we’re training them in how to respond to questions about their plights.”
[L.A. church offers migrants sanctuary, Los Angeles Times 3/23/07]

Nice they admit their objective is to manipulate the media rather than do misguided good works!

And also to end lawful enforcement of US immigration law: “We have to stop the raids,” stated priest Richard Estrada of Our Lady Queen of Angels in downtown LA.

Incidentally, the word “plight” in combination with “immigrant” can pull up some fascinating sob stories on Google and GoogleNews if you are an aficionado of such things.

Spreaking of amnesty Los Angeles style, check out the Mexico-celebrating outfit of the pedophile protector hypocrite Cardinal Roger Mahony.

That’s Ann Althouse’s reaction to this story about West African polygamy in New York, and the New York City authorities ”Don’t-ask-don’t-know policies “ on the issue. They’re too multicultural to care, and New York is a sanctuary city, anyway.

Althouse adds that “Either there is equal justice under the law or there is not.” But of course none of this would be happening in New York but for the Immigration Act of 1965.

Other women spoke bitterly of polygamy. They said their participation was dictated by an African culture of female subjugation and linked polygamy to female genital cutting and domestic violence. That view is echoed by most research on plural marriages, including studies of West African immigrants in France, where the government estimates that 120,000 people live in 20,000 polygamous families.

“The woman is in effect the slave of the man,” said a stylish Guinean businesswoman in her 40s who, like many women interviewed in Harlem and the Bronx, spoke on the condition of anonymity. “If you protest, your husband will hit you, and if you call the police, he’s going to divorce you, and the whole community will scorn you.”

“Even me,” she added. “My husband went to find another wife in Africa, and he has the right to do that. They tell you nothing, until one afternoon he says, ‘O.K., your co-wife arrives this evening.’[In Secret, Polygamy Follows Africans to N.Y. , By Nina Bernstein, March 23, 2007]

Perhaps the most interesting character in Sen. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is his half-brother “Mark,” even though he appears only briefly. Another half-white son of Barack Obama Sr., Mark, a physics student at Stanford, disturbs Obama with his individualism, well-adjusted personality, and lack of black racialism. He looks so much like Obama, but his values are so different.

While many whites fantasize that Obama “transcends race,” the Presidential candidate’s autobiography is actually obsessed with race. It’s his estranged half-brother Mark who is the true post-racial man.

Mark is the son of Obama’s father and his third wife (and second white American wife) Ruth. She divorced Obama’s drunken dad after seven years of marriage (during which he beat her badly), then married a prosperous Tanzanian. Today, according to the Daily Mail, she works in a Kenyan school.

Unlike Obama, who long dreamed of Kenya but knew little about it, Mark spent his summers off from his American studies in Kenya at his mother and step-father’s upscale Nairobi home, where Obama met him in the late 1980s.

“‘So, Mark,’ I said, turning to my brother, ‘I hear you’re at Berkeley.’

“‘Stanford,’ he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. ‘I’m in my last year of the physics program there.’”

They meet once more, for lunch:

“I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

“‘Fine,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. … As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.’

“‘You don’t ever think about settling here?’

“Mark took a sip from his Coke. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.’

“I should have stopped then, but something — the certainty in this brother’s voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror — made me want to push harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?’

“Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

“‘I understand what you’re getting at,’ he said flatly. ‘You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.’ He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. ‘Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.’

“‘It made you mad.’

“‘Not mad. Just numb.’

“‘And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?’

“‘Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know — it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if looked more carefully at myself, I would …’

“For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

“‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.’

“… Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.”

Notice that it’s Obama’s own dishonesty that is (supposedly) making his heart ache — he can’t know what’s in Mark’s heart as they exchange addresses, but Obama knows that he never wants to hear from his own half-brother Mark again. The physicist is (at least) Obama’s intellectual equal, but his realism about Kenya, his lack of an identity crisis, lack of black ethnocentrism, and lack of illusions about their mutual father leave Obama so uncomfortable that he doesn’t want to see Mark anymore.

[Crossposted at Isteve.com]