Vin Suprynowicz

President Barack Obama said some interesting things in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech. They’re interesting not so much because they’re lies (we all know that, to determine whether a lawyer or politician is lying, you merely watch to see if their lips move) but because the political class — the kind of people who field lobbyists in Washington and file lawsuits for the ACLU and edit major American newspapers — were so confident that these utterances were lies that they simply ignored what might otherwise have been some earthshaking developments.

For instance, the president said, according to the White House’s prepared transcript: “We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system — to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.”

I agree with that. I suspect Jim Gilchrist of the border-watching Minutemen could happily agree with that. The only people I can assure you don’t agree with those words are Barack Obama and his liberal cohorts in Congress.

The words are designed to convince an unsophisticated rube — the kind of person out in televisionland who believes the president speaks plain English and means what he says — that Mr. Obama wants to “secure our borders.” (After all, that’s what he said.) How would we do that? Since trained military personnel are expensive and currently mostly busy overseas, the most cost-effective way to “secure the border” would be to use a reliable, century-old technology.

I haven’t talked with Mr. Obama about this personally — he hasn’t dropped by. But I have talked with my own liberal Democratic Nevada congresswoman, Shelley Berkley, on the topic.

Last year, at a meeting here in the offices of the Review-Journal, I heard her use virtually the same formulation, saying, “Everyone agrees we need to secure our borders.”

I asked: “Are we going to use land mines and machine guns?”

The first, spontaneous expression on Ms. Berkley’s face — a mixture of horror and disbelief — was priceless. Then, laughing a bit nervously and glancing from side to side, as though checking to see whether men in white coats were about to remove me, she replied “Oh, no one is considering THAT.”

Would minefields, behind barbed wire to keep out livestock and prominently marked in both English and Spanish, be inhumane? In fact, once they were in place, I suspect far fewer would die than currently die of thirst and exposure crossing our remote, southwestern deserts.

But that’s not the point. The point is that when liberal Democrats say “We should … secure our borders”, what they mean is “I’m NOT going to secure our borders.”

And now the interesting part.

Did you see any headlines in the days following the president’s speech, reporting “Immigration advocates” (meaning “Illegal Immigration advocates,” of course ) “express outrage at border-sealing initiative / La Raza and ACLU file lawsuit against deadly land-mine plan?”

Of course not. No one responded as though the president meant it — or even bothered to ask if he meant it — because they all knew he was lying, mouthing tested but blatantly untrue things merely to assuage those rubes out there in the sticks.

How about the part about how he wants to “enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation”?

That’s intended to make an unsophisticated voter think “‘Those who play by the rules? Well, good. That means those who filled out their proper forms, waited their turn, and came here with legal immigration visas. Of course they’re welcome. Meanwhile, the president clearly also means those who did NOT play by the rules will NOT be allowed to stay and ‘contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.’ Otherwise, he would have said ‘Anyone who has come here, WHETHER THEY’VE PLAYED BY THE RULES OR NOT, can stay and contribute to our economy,’ et cetera. And he didn’t say that.”

But that last is precisely what the president meant, of course. Mr. Obama wouldn’t need any congressional authorization to start rounding up non-English-speaking illegal aliens tomorrow at workplaces, in our clogged hospital emergency rooms, waiting in line at the post office to send their “remittances” home to Mexico and Guatemala. Dwight Eisenhower did it 50 years ago without any problem.

But no reporter even checked back to see when he plans to start; no radical group in favor of the reconquest of Aztlan bothered to voice a protest and file a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the coming round-ups and mass deportations. Why? Because they all know Mr. Obama was lying up a storm.

What fig leaf of a defense can the Democrats offer to this charge? Here it is: While bending over backward to NOT enforce our current laws, they hope to enact an amnesty bill disguised as “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” — as though “reforming” the law now can retroactively restore legal virginity to 11 million immigration felons.

Then, under their hoped-for “new rules,” illegal aliens would be asked to fork over a $1,500 fine while demonstrating they can pat their head and rub their belly at the same time. Once they’ve done this, they’ll be told, “Congratulations, you’ve played by our (new) rules; here are your citizenship papers.”

The president also said: “We are going to crack down on violations of equal pay laws — so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.”

What century does the president think he’s in? Yes, back in the 1940s and 1950s, my Aunt Frances was the secretary to the manager of the Travelers Insurance office in Middletown, Connecticut. Every few years the (always male) manager would be promoted to some larger office, and Fran — who by this time knew the whole operation and essentially ran the joint — would be called upon to train some new young pup who was brought in to be the “new manager.”

Was Fran ever paid as much as these “managers” she was training? Of course not. Was she ever considered for promotion to manager, herself? Of course not. True, she’d never been able to afford a college education, but we all knew the main reason: She was female.

But that was 60 years ago. Does anyone really believe there are American employers today — leaving aside some mom-and-pop fruit stand — who routinely tell new hires, “Jill, Jack, you’ll be doing essentially the same job, but Jack will start at $30,000 and Jill at $24,000, because Jill is a girl?”

Once again, this is code talk. The statistical disparities between male and female pay in America can be almost entirely attributed to the fact that many women (God bless them) leave the workplace for a period of years to bear and raise children. Returning after a hiatus, they need to be re-trained in the new technology that’s come along; they’re unlikely to ever catch up on their lost seniority and the pay hikes that went with it.

The far-left feminist agenda is not merely “equal pay for an equal day’s work,” as the president claimed, but equal pay for a very UNEQUAL day’s work, in cases where women seek jobs involving upper body strength where they literally can’t carry their weight (policeman, firefighter, soldier), or in cases where the feminists seek to establish “pay equivalency” between the job of the male power lineman climbing poles and dealing with high-voltage lines in all kinds of weather, versus the same company’s lady dispatcher sitting comfortably in some heated, air-conditioned office.

Why the code talk? To send brief, reassuring messages to these extreme minority constituencies, assuring them the president is still fighting for their dangerous and economically crazy balderdash, but disguised in bland-sounding language designed not to tip off, arouse, or offend those rubes out there in TV-land.

I could go on. Others have already detailed Mr. Obama’s pathetic attempt to wrap himself in the cloak of fiscal austerity, vowing to “freeze spending” on programs that make up a small percentage of the federal budget — programs on which he and his Democrat allies hiked spending by 25 percent in 2009, meaning that this “freeze” merely locks in place those unsustainable spending levels.

Though I did find it interesting that the next day, Jan. 28, The Associated Press reported “WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled Senate has muscled through a plan to allow the government to go a whopping $1.9 trillion deeper in debt.”

Did the senators not get the president’s “freeze spending” message? Or did they, in fact, read his cynical, Kabuki double-talk with practiced ease?