Adding insult to immigration.

PRESIDENT BUSH, stuck with an approval rating variously estimated between 28 and 34 percent of the population, has settled on a novel political strategy: Insult your remaining supporters. Here is how he characterized critics of the immigration bill in a speech: "Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don't like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it. You can use it to frighten people. Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all."

In an interview, he added: "When you grow up in Texas like I did, you recognize the decency and humanity of Hispanics. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of this immigration debate is driven as a result of Latinos being in our country."

Bush aides later told reporters that the president had ad-libbed his remarks, as though that made them better. Clearly the president considers himself morally superior to many of his supporters because he wants to legalize our illegal-immigrant population and they do not. This type of moral vanity has always been one of the president's besetting sins. He entered the national stage, after all, by implicitly placing himself apart from those other conservatives who were not, like him, "compassionate." This type of self-regard can have beneficial effects: It can make a leader stick to sound principles under pressure. At other times, as here, it can lead to a dangerously distorted view of reality.

The truth of the matter is not that this debate is about whether Hispanics are decent and human. Nor is it about a "narrow slice" of the bill. Many of the critics of the bill want to kill it, not out of some strange desire to foment fear for its own sake, but precisely because they do not think it is "right for America." The president's description of the immigration debate is neither civil nor honest, and it shows little confidence in the appeal of any serious arguments for the bill.

Those arguments are looking rather more shopworn by the day. Critics of the bill point out that it grants "probationary" legal status to illegal immigrants immediately, before any of the bill's vaunted "enforcement triggers" are put into effect. An illegal immigrant would only have to pass a one-day background check to get this status. It is hard to believe that this mass legalization would ever be revoked. So we would have an amnesty whether or not we got any added enforcement of the immigration laws. The administration has not put forth a single serious response to this criticism, preferring to change the subject to the critics' allegedly low motives. We must assume they have their reasons.