Good stuff. A head pat from the president can only encourage other teams to take dopey, self-congratulatory stances. Let the political polarization of sports begin.

“I know that a lot of you would rather be watching tonight’s game,” President Obama said this evening to a crowd assembled at the White House Rose Garden for a Cinco de Mayo celebration. “The Spurs against Los Suns from Phoenix.”

The Phoenix Suns are calling themselves Los Suns today in honor of the celebration, with the owner of the team blasting the immigration reform law in their home state, Arizona…

But that said, he continued, “we can’t start singling out people because of what they look like, how they talk or how they dress….We can’t divide the American people that way.”

So says Captain Decency, whose surrogates have been on a “Nazi” name-calling tear for the past two weeks. Can you blame him for this cheap bit of pandering, though? The left’s crushed that he seems resigned to defeat on amnesty, even though in the plane of reality most of us inhabit (a) House Democrats are terrified of another left-wing push that’ll further alienate independents and (b) despite all the concerns over Arizona’s law, majorities nationally and at the state level support it in the interest of doing something, anything about stopping the flow of illegals. There is something Obama could do to improve the odds of creating a path to citizenship — namely, reassure Americans by taking on border security first — but the alleged problem-solving pragmatist-in-chief isn’t going to risk his ass with Latino voters when he’s up in two years. Too bad. That’s his best bet for a solution:

Kate O’Beirne, president of the National Review Institute, did not share that opinion. She indicated that if border security is taken care of, “I don’t even think the idea of citizenship eventually is taboo, actually.”

“It seems to me, if people thought that the border was secure enough that today’s illegal immigrants won’t be replaced by similar numbers 15 or 20 years hence, they would have a whole different attitude about addressing illegal immigrants who are currently here.”

Why, one might even suggest benchmarks (remember those, war opponents?) to gauge progress in sealing the border, with a path to citizenship contingent upon hitting congressionally-mandated targets. But that would require a multi-year process and actual results, and Obama doesn’t want to touch either of those concepts. If he did, we’d have benchmarks for cost control on ObamaCare too, wouldn’t we? So instead he’ll flirt with the idea of a comprehensive bill this year even though it’s doomed and he’ll occasionally toss out bon mots about “Los Suns” to let the right people know that he’s on their side even though he’s not willing to do anything about it. I can live with that.

For your listening pleasure, here’s Kris Kobach, who helped write the Arizona law, saluting The One and his allies for their special brand of demagoguery.