As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past. (On Americans who avoided conscription during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars)
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we'll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we'll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.
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Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don't really mean our immigration law.
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Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
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Politically, what this is intended to do is show enough senators on the Republican side that the president is serious about enforcement to get them to vote for the amnesty. It's a spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down.
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Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
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Amnesty is a terrible policy, and it's terrible politics. It's a terrible policy because you are rewarding people for breaking the law.
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