Tomorrow, tomorrow — you’re always a day away

"Senator Harry Reid retreated today from having the Senate move quickly on immigration law changes, saying any overhaul would have to wait," Eric Hulse of The New York Times reported Tuesday.

“We won’t get to immigration reform this work period,” Mr. Reid, D-Nev. and the majority leader, told reporters after the private weekly luncheon of Democratic senators.

"Over the weekend, Mr. Reid raised the hopes of immigration advocates by suggesting at a rally in Las Vegas that he was ready to put immigration on the legislative front burner now that health care legislation was out of the way and Congress was returning from a two-week break," Mr. Hulse writes, using a standard statist technique of misdirection, in which the perpetrators refer to "immigration" or "immigration reform" when they mean amnesty for illegal trespassers already here.

(Imagine "bank robbery reform" under which the loons in Washington might change the punishment for bank robbery to a $500 fine. Would we then release all convicted bank robbers from prison? Probably not. "Reforms" are not generally retroactive; while "amnesty" is. Giving "a path to citizenship" to those who broke the law to come here, pushing aside in the process other members of racial minorities who have played by the rules and waited their turn in line, would not be a "reform" of immigration laws, but an effective repeal. It would simply advise the entire world that America is a land of free government handouts for anyone who can get here, and they're free to ignore any supposed "immigration laws" they may have heard of. Or have we done that, already?)

“We’re going to come back, we’re going to have comprehensive immigration reform now,” the senator said at an outdoor rally of several thousand people, many of them cheering illegal aliens, in Las Vegas last weekend. (Darn those clever lawbreakers, always gathering on the weekend, when they know our federal immigration workers get the weekends off, while Metro police enforce only "some of the laws some of the time, and the rest not at all." ICE workers are apparently also banned from checking the IDs of people sending "remittances" at the post office, or doing business at locations that advertise "llantas usadas."

"The declaration caught lawmakers and Obama administration officials off guard since the politically dicey subject was not on the immediate agenda," The Timesman reports of Senator Harry's rousing weekend rhetoric. "Senators have shown little appetite for taking on the issue" in an election year.

Aides to Mr. Reid said he never meant to imply that he was going ahead immediately.

Ah. So when the senator says "We’re going to have comprehensive immigration reform NOW,” he apparently means "not anytime soon."

For words, you see, mean only what the senator wants them to mean ... and often something entirely different, the next day.