I am not sure if the award was timed to the recipient's condition, but was it ever deserved, and was it ever marvelous that he was alive to see it. I wonder how many of us were "born-again" as a result of our exposure to the editorial board of the WSJ. May he rest in peace.

I feel like a close relative died.

Under Bartley and many other colleagues, the Wall Street Journal has become the best newspaper in the United States.

Not the best business newspaper. The best newspaper.

Bartley was a valuable journalist, and he will be missed terribly, but he was profoundly wrong in his endorsement of the obliteration of American culture through mass illegal immigration.

"There shall be open borders," as the constitutional amendment was to read, could be translated as, "we shall commit suicide."

Paul:

Yes, the door should have been slammed shut the day after the Cella's and Judd's got in.

Does OJ maintain that the fact of earlier periods of liberalized immigration (though not nearly as liberal as today) is a moral imperative for more immigration today? That is a strange logic you're peddling. Perhaps the fact of earlier periods of slavery mandate it again today; and we should enslave our descendents through eugenics and other biotech innovations as we enslaved our neighbors before.

Believe it or not, there wasn't even an INS when the slaves got here, while slavery is an excellent example of the lengths to which we're willing to go to in order not to have to do hard labor ourselves. We've open immigration so that we don't have to pick fruit and mow our lawns.

So Lord Acton really was onto something when he observed the strange, almost primordial link between democracy and slavery. Our slavery is illegal immigration, and OJ it one of its apologists.

Yes, in a society where even idiots get to go to college, you have to import people to do scutwork.

Look at it this way: instead of going to the four corners of the world to spread the word and bear the white man's burden, the US just invites the four corners to "come on over."

Much more convenient. And it does occasionally backfire. Still.

OJ has begun with a moral, one might even say self-righteous, justification for mass immigration; he has finished with a purely materialist, one might even say Marxist, justification. The wages of folly.

Barry:

It will backfire. Mexican Christians we can probably assimilate (provided a dramatic reduction in immigration to allow it), but Muslims seems a mite more resistant to the intoxication of Western liberalism.