One of the things that makes Jon Stewart kind of handy to have around is that, while he's definitely a liberal, he's not willing to make himself look like a total clown by defending the indefensible. So when Democrats find that Stewart has turned on them, that's when you know they've really waded into dangerous territory.
A lot of the left is dutifully trying to come up with a way to defend Obama's amnesty via fiat, because that's what they do - they defend their Democrat president no matter what he does because he is their Democrat president. Stewart defends Obama a lot - way too much in my opinion - but at least you have to give him this: When he defends Obama, he actually thinks Obama's right.
And when he doesn't think Obama's right, well . . .
We already told you that the liberals are full of crap when they claim Reagan and Bush 41 did the same thing. They didn't. But it's worth examining what Obama really has done here. He is leaning pretty heavily on the idea of prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that prosecutors can decide which suspects to charge with crimes. Yes they can, and no one disputes that, but Obama is totally mis-defining what prosecutorial discretion really is.
When you look at an individual case and determine that the circumstance doesn't warrant prosecution - which could be for a variety of reasons including the suspect's lack of a prior record, the severity of the violation, the extenuating circumstances, etc. - you may very well exercise discretion and decide that your resources are better spent prosecuting other suspects. That is perfectly legitimate.
What you can't do, however, is declare that no one who commits a particular crime will be prosecuted. What you're doing there is nullifying an entire law via executive fiat, and that goes 100 percent against the oath of office you take to uphold the laws of the nation. When you refuse to prosecute anyone who commits a certain crime, you are, by definition, not upholding the law.
Obama appears to think that he needs to defer to Congress only up to the point where he gets tired of it or frustrated with it.
As Herman pointed out today on the Cain Gang Unchained, Obama's complaint about Congress not acting rings hollow when you remember that in 2009, the Democrats not only had control of the House but a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. If fixing immigration was so important, they could have enacted any fix they wanted then. But instead they frittered away all their political capital passing ObamaCare and a huge spending explosion.
So now Obama insists that he must act like an emperor and defy Congress because it's so important, even though he couldn't find a place for it on his agenda in 2009. Right. Tell me another one. Even Jon Stewart isn't buying this.
