Readers warned me not to be overconfident and to guard against complacency. Let me make abundantly clear that I am under no delusions. I know that we have many more battles to fight. I am fully aware that, as Peter Brimelow predicted, ”It has been obvious for some time that this will be a long and terrible war.”

Like myself, other immigration reform warriors remain steadfast. No one has disconnected his Internet, canceled his e-mail or stopped reading VDARE.COM

But let’s not underestimate the magnitude of our triumph. My friend Paul Nachman, in his blog earlier this week correctly pointed out that not all of the Senators who voted ”NAY" ” on cloture are our friends.

And Paul offered the post mortems of Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne as insider’s views of why the vote went the way it did.

Lowry and Beirne have their opinions on what happened, Paul has his, you have yours and I have mine.

None of them matter.

What counts is this: a 46-53 vote against cloture for us.

Do I wish Sam Brownback were truly on our side? Of course I do. Do I trust him on future votes? Not as far as I can throw him.

But on June 28th, Brownback and some others of dubious credibility, were with us.

The losing side’s whining reminds of football teams who blow the big game: if only the star quarterback hadn’t thrown the key interception, if only the ref hadn’t muffed the call, if only a wind gust hadn’t come up out of nowhere to push the last minute field goal away from the uprights. Then we would have won.

As with the hypothetical football game, all that matters is the score.

And the score, to remind you once more, was 46-53