Politics and the environment

One of the things that often gets lost in the hurly-burly of politics -- especially when the burly is being hurled as much as it is under the current regime -- is that the gamesmanship often becomes bigger than the reality of how policies play out in the real world.

What often results is that, while we remain preoccupied by the minutiae of the political shell game, those realities accumulate, a step at a time, until they release an avalanche of disaster that can no longer be swept under the political rug -- and, indeed, becomes the most pressing political issue of the era.

One of these making headlines currently is the matter of gas prices and American oil dependency, manifesting the growing warnings about the peak oil phenomenon (The American Prospect recently did an exemplary job of compiling the requisite information and analysis on it).

As James Wolcott noted awhile back, a lot of this falls at the feet of our current national leadership:

The only explanation, apart from Bush's cognitive disability in facing reality, is that he sociopathically doesn't care about the coming calamity endangering the planet because he and his cronies will be financially prepared even as most Americans lose their standard of living.

It isn't just Bush, of course; the same could be said of the entire leadership of the conservative movement, including its media figureheads. Nonetheless, as I pointed out at the time of the Katrina disaster,, Bush embodies what is congenitally wrong with movement conservatives:

Those policies were a product of this administration's priorities, which in the end are always about promoting the well-being of the moneyed class at the expense of the middle classes and poor, while effectively driving a wedge within those classes. That's no conspiracy; it's just the way the world works, especially with men like Bush in charge.

The Katrina disaster, though, was the embodiment of the power of nature to overwhelm the false "reality" created by movement propaganda and White House spin. The disaster was a fiasco for Bush because it laid bare his administration's incompetence. The nation saw, clearly, that this malfeasance in disaster response and preparedness was similarly reflected in the mounting disasters and casualties in Iraq, in the growing national income gap, in confronting corruption within their own ranks, and in those steadily skyrocketing gas prices.

But of all the historical gaffes committed by this administration -- and by conservative-movement rule generally -- perhaps none will have greater long-term ramifications for Americans and for the world than its manifest failures in confronting the realities of global warming. Like Katrina, it is a mounting force of nature that cannot be wished away by spin. And like the peak oil crisis, it will affect millions of Americans and the very way we live. There's a reason Al Gore is out stumping on the issue now: He was right in 1992, and he's right now.

Even a manifestly Establishment organ like Time magazine recognizes that this is not, in the stock characterization of corporate apologists (see especially Michael Crichton), mere fear-mongering. The evidence and scientific consensus has become insurmountable, and any "controversy" that might remain is largely manufactured for the benefit of vested short-term interests.

Nonetheless, the response both of movement conservatives at large and the Bush administration in particular has been simply to "deal with it", to just "adapt" to whatever changes we might wreak on the global environment:

Perhaps the action -- or rather, inaction -- that most typifies Bush's disastrous approach to the environment has been his handling of the global-warming phenomenon. After spending most of his campaign and the first two years of his Oval Office tenure denying that the problem even existed (a la Rush Limbaugh's typically hallucinatory assertions), the administration did a stark about-face and admitted that global warming indeed is real. However, the Environmental Protection Agency's report said that -- even though the phenomenon is certain to destroy many of the nation's natural resources, particularly forested areas, alpine lakes, glaciers and wetlands -- no serious steps were warranted outside of "voluntary" efforts by corporations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and typified those looming disasters as requiring mere "adjustments" on the part of Americans. A couple of days later, Bush dismissed the report as the work of "the bureaucracy."

Moreover, as Chris Mooney has been steadily documenting, this administration, and Republicans in Congress as well, have simply subverted science so that contradictory data is suppressed.

Are salmon counters finding too few salmon on the Columbia? Cut their funding!

Likewise, government data-gathering that indicated a looming environmental disaster has been meeting an ugly death at the hands of the Bushevistas:

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

What are those NASA scientists trying to say? That we're looking at a significant natural catastrophe that will raise ocean levels at rates unheard of in geological history, incuding climatic changes and certainly rapidly increased extinction rates:

This new satellite data is a remarkable advance. We are seeing for the first time the detailed behavior of the ice streams that are draining the Greenland ice sheet. They show that Greenland seems to be losing at least 200 cubic kilometers of ice a year. It is different from even two years ago, when people still said the ice sheet was in balance.

Hundreds of cubic kilometers sounds like a lot of ice. But this is just the beginning. Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.

Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today's forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic.

Once the ice starts to melt at the surface, it forms lakes that empty down crevasses to the bottom of the ice. You get rivers of water underneath the ice. And the ice slides towards the ocean.

Our NASA scientists have measured this in Greenland. And once these ice streams start moving, their influence stretches right to the interior of the ice sheet. Building an ice sheet takes a long time, because it is limited by snowfall. But destroying it can be explosively rapid.

This is what we know is happening right now. Hansen then tells us what this means for us in the future, largely in terms of the rate of change:

How fast can this go? Right now, I think our best measure is what happened in the past. We know that, for instance, 14,000 years ago sea levels rose by 20m in 400 years -- that is five meters in a century. This was towards the end of the last ice age, so there was more ice around. But, on the other hand, temperatures were not warming as fast as today.

How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today -- which is what we expect later this century -- sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.

It's hard to say what the world will be like if this happens. It would be another planet. You could imagine great armadas of icebergs breaking off Greenland and melting as they float south. And, of course, huge areas being flooded.

How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don't have much time left.

This is just taking into account the Greenland ice cap, which alone would contribute to a global oceanic rise of 15-20 feet were it to melt; it doesn't begin to account for what's happening to the much larger polar ice caps.

Mary at the Left Coaster put it just about right:

What's clear is we have no more time to waste. And we can't wait until Bush is out of office to get moving. The wholesale evacuation of New Orleans is a small harbinger of what we will see along all our coasts. 30 meters is more than 95 feet and many places like Portland, Oregon have sizable elevations significantly lower than that. (In downtown Portland, the US Bank Tower is at an elevation of 34 feet.) Manhattan would be gone as would much of Florida.

In the United States alone, much of the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf Coast would be underwater, as well as major population centers along both coasts. Then there are the thousands of South Pacific islands that would be inundated, as well as the numerous major coastal populations in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Neither does all this take into account related global-warming phenomena such as the warming of frozen methane at the bottom of the world's ocean's, or the catastrophic effect of oceanic warming on major ecosystems like the world's coral reefs and salmon populations. We're not simply endangering our own habitat and that of wildlife; we're putting the world's food supply at serious risk.

All this stands in direct contradiction of the corporate apologists and conservative naysayers who, like Rush Limbaugh and friends, have tried to pretend that there really isn't a problem here. How many have spouted suppositions -- such as claiming that any ice-cap meltoff would take "thousands of years" -- that now look Pollyanish?

Yet, how many have paid a price for it? Will Bush, for that matter, ever pay a price for his stubborn inaction, besides the condemnation of history that he already seems to be earning?

Probably not, because there will always be an army of sycophants, people invested (both financially and emotionally) in the conservative movement and Bush, leaping to gloss over the mounting evidence. The primary tactic here, as with the Bush approach to science generally (especially the question of Darwinism and "intelligent design"), is to pretend that the views of a tiny fringe of (mostly well-financed) dissenters have status equal to an unusual broad consensus among the vast majority of informed scientists.

Witness Jonah Goldberg (complete with an approving link from Professor Lloyd Christmas) opining that simply pointing out that the scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming means you're cutting off debate:

And if you disagree, get ready for the witch hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.

Of course, people like Goldberg -- who seem, strangely, not to blanch the slightest at the prospect of half-baked geopolitical jihads that definitely waste trillions of dollars, as well as thousands of lives -- couch their charges in words like "could" and "possibly," because they really don't know.

And that, for conservatives, is the key: Because we really don't know what will happen, nor can we prove the cause beyond any reasonable doubt, we should just continue with the status quo. Even for centrist/liberal observers like Mark Kleiman [note: this analysis was done as a class exercise, and does not necessarily reflect Kleiman's views] this cost-effectiveness argument trumps everything. If we can't prove it, then won't taking action run the risk of just being a big waste of money?

This is the same misguided calculus behind the Katrina disaster, when federal officials believed the tiny likelihood of a large enough hurricane made levee upgrades a lesser priority:

This calculus is deeply flawed, for the reason that just played out in New Orleans: Even if there were only a 0.5 percent chance that the city would be hit by a Category 4 hurricane or worse -- a questionable figure in any event, given that hurricanes have been rising in frequency and intensity in recent years -- the costs of allowing the flooding that would ensue under the existing system to occur were so high as to be incalculable. Planning to simply evacuate the city in the event of a Catgory 4 or 5 hurricane was horrifically bad planning.

Likewise, the costs of doing nothing to reduce carbon emissions, as well as to slow the rate of global warming to a reasonable pace, are so high as to be incalculable. When the potential costs include massive economic and demographic dislocations, massive natural disasters (including, most likely, more Katrina-sized storms), and massive starvation and loss of life, those trillions of dollars will seem like a drop in the bucket.

And that's presuming that it actually would prove to be a waste. In reality, many of the potential solutions could actually deliver real efficiencies to the economic system. We won't know until we try.

Conservatives can sit on their hands all they like. It's time for the rest of us to learn just to ignore them and get moving. They have already earned their place in history, and it won't be a kind one.

For the rest of us, the mounting and irrevocable evidence of a looming disaster -- from melting ice caps and starving polar bears to vanishing reefs, glaciers, and alpine lakes to tropical storms of historical ferocity -- demands that we act. It's called responsibility. And it's one of those things where actions always speak louder than words.

The beast within

If you listen to Lou Dobbs or Michelle Malkin or Sean Hannity, you'd have the impression that the Minutemen are just a bunch of sincere citizens whose only concern is hearing the border. Sure they are.

That would explain why a Colorado legislator received racist death threats late last week for making some disparaging remarks about the Minutemen:

Colorado Rep. Terrance Carroll received an e-mail Thursday, purportedly from a supporter of the Minuteman Project, the anti-illegal immigration group, that referred to lynching and told Carroll to "enjoy hell."

The Denver Democrat turned a copy over to the Colorado State Patrol, which is investigating.

Carroll, a lawyer who is black, said he was most bothered by the lynching reference.

"It was disturbing," he said. "This nation has an awful history of lynching."

The e-mail said, "You are so SOOOO lucky lynching and the firing squad for treason aren't available punishments anymore . . . I'd vote you in, in a heartbeat . . . "

"Enjoy Hell, Yellow Belly," the e-mail continued. "It takes a patriotic man to represent his country, and Sir, you are neither patriotic . . . nor a man."

What inspired this ugliness? Some remarks Carroll made earlier in the week, suggesting a little turnabout as fair play for the Minutemen:

The subject line in the e-mail read, "Build a wall around Colorado to keep out the minutemen." Carroll said that was a reference to a joke he made, which appeared in the Rocky Mountain News.

"I said, 'Perhaps we should build a wall around Colorado and keep Minutemen out,' " Carroll said.

He said the joke was made about what he sees as doomed approaches to "trying to stem the flow of immigration."

I'm sure I sound like a stuck record, but this incident is also notable for the naked eliminationism expressed in the e-mail. But then, eliminationism and racism are essentially two sides of the same coin.

So, for that matter, are the nice, "sincere citizens" and the ugly brutalists on the unlit side of their ranks -- whose presence, of course, is just a coincidence.

The annual question

Yesterday being the 11th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I suppose I should just be grateful that, this year at least, we're not cursed with an Ann Coulter profile in Time.

Still, every year since 2002, this sad anniversary reminds me of a question I still haven't heard answered:

Why wasn't April 19, 1995 the "day that changed everything"?

Oh, those merry Minutemen

To hear their mainstream defenders tell it, those poor Minutemen are being smeared as racists merely for demanding secure borders. And the Minutemen constantly repeat the refrain.

But they never seem able to explain why their cause seems to draw so many overt, unrepentant racists. Recently, one of the Minutemen offshoots, an outfit called Border Guardians, has been making common cause with the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, according to a new SPLC report:

A prominent anti-immigration leader has secretly urged the nation's largest neo-Nazi group to launch a campaign of violence and harassment against undocumented workers in the United States.

Laine Lawless, who started a group called Border Guardians last year, sent an April 3 e-mail to Mark Martin, "SS commander" of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement, which has 59 chapters in 30 states. It was titled, "How to GET RID OF THEM!"

The e-mail from Lawless, who was also an original member of Chris Simcox's vigilante militia before it morphed into the Minuteman Project in early 2005, detailed 11 suggestions for ways to harass and terrorize undocumented immigrants, including robbery and "beating up illegals" as they leave their workplace.

"Maybe some of your warriors for the race would be the kind of people willing to implement some of these ideas," Lawless wrote. "I'm not ready to come out on this. ... Please don't use my name. THANKS."

At the request of Lawless, who declined to respond to questions from the Intelligence Report, Martin posted her suggestions to a number of neo-Nazi bulletin boards. Those suggestions included:

-- "Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place."

-- "Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status. ... I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination."

-- "Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative."

-- "Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as 'racists & vigilantes.' "

The report makes clear that Lawless played an integral role in founding the Minuteman Project:

Lawless, the former high priestess of Sisterhood of the Moon, a lesbian pagan organization, has been heavily involved in anti-immigration extremism since 2004, when she joined Simcox's Civil Homeland Defense outfit, as it was then called. That same year, she invited "militiamen" nationwide to "crawl through the woods in a ghille [sic] suit with sniper rifle" on her private ranch in Cochise County, Ariz. "I coordinate with Chris [Simcox], so anyone who wants to come is welcome," she wrote in a post to an online user group, "A Well Regulated Militia."

Lawless was featured in numerous media reports on the first Minuteman Project campaign in April 2005, during which she patrolled side-by-side with Minuteman vice-president Carmen Mercer. Lawless also traveled to Texas to join the Texas Minutemen in October, when she was quoted in The Austin Chronicle saying she gets an "intellectual and political orgasm" from spying on pro-immigration groups. In that interview, she accused one pro-immigration activist of inserting chants of "White Power!" into an audiotape of Minuteman rallies to discredit the movement.

Meanwhile, according to USA Today, the Minutemen are expanding to a nationwide membership:

The Minuteman Project is authorizing state chapters for the first time, says executive director Stephen Eichler. The group, created in 2004, organizes armed patrols on the southern U.S. border and calls in the Border Patrol when members spot people trying to cross illegally. President Bush referred to them in March 2005 as "vigilantes."

Eichler won't release membership numbers but says about 200,000 people identify themselves as Minutemen. By the end of the year, Eichler says, the group expects to have 500 chapters in states across the country, including Minnesota and elsewhere in the Midwest. Members could help with border surveillance or focus on immigration enforcement in their own communities.

"Over 5,000 people have come forward and said, 'I'll do anything,' " he says. "Right now, about 200 people that we have contacted look pretty serious." Eichler says the group will do background checks to prevent white supremacists from forming chapters.

The Illinois Minuteman Project, which is patterned after the California-based group, has about 600 members and is growing rapidly, says Rosanna Pulido, who just returned from patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border.

"Our membership is going up every day," she says. "We're getting flooded. Nothing has generated interest like the pro-immigration protests." The group plans a May 4 debate with a proponent of citizenship for illegal immigrants in Chicago and a town hall meeting May 6 in Rockford, Ill.

Meanwhile, the white backlash to the recent pro-immigrant marches keeps building, with recent protests in Cullman, Alabama, and Kansas City, Missouri, each drawing several hundred participants. In the latter, the crowd cheered the call for "a 2,000-mile wall."

The nativist faction has just begun. Here are some of the counter-protests being organized in the next few weeks in response to the immigration marchers:

April 22: Saturday, 9 a.m. at the offices of the pro-migrant Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), in Woodburn, Oregon. Protest planned by Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

April 23: Sunday, 2 p.m., The National Mall in Washington, D.C. A "Pro-America 'Secure Our Borders' Demonstration."

April 24: Monday, 10 a.m., Washington, D.C., at Lafayette Park opposite the White House. Protest arranged by 9/11 Families for Secure America.

April 24: Monday, nationwide state capitol protests. Protest arranged by Concerned American Citizens.

May 3-12: Protest Caravan each day across America. Protests arranged by the Minuteman Project.

If folks like Laine Lawless have their way, these marches will be thick with those very extremists the nativists claim not to be.

Radio Rmalkin

Michelle Malkin loves all the perks that come with being a media figure -- the TV appearances with people like Bill O'Reilly fawning all over her, the kid-glove treatment from journalists, the fame and recognition. It's all quite lovely, especially when it translates into dollars.

Most of all, it seems, she likes the power: the ability to disseminate her point of view and have it be not only widely read but widely adopted as "factual" by a substantial number of people. (In Malkin's case, it's almost purely the power of propaganda, since that is primarily what she purveys.)

In the end, that means her point of view is acted upon, both officially and unofficially. That, as anyone in the "mainstream media" knows, is real power.

Malkin wants that power. She just doesn't want any of the responsibility that comes with it.

And it can easily be abused. You can use your megaphone to lie shamelessly. You can use it to smear the good name of public officials. You can use it to rewrite history. And you can use it to intimidate the "little people" who don't possess the same kind of power.

Because these potential abuses exist, a sense of ethics is obligatory for anyone who possesses this power. It's why the Society of Professional Journalists has a Code of Ethics that abjures such behavior.

Violating the Code won't get you fired per se, but it certainly brings into question your professionalism and honor. It also brands you, forever, as deeply irresponsible.

Particularly when it comes to using that power to attack ordinary citizens and subject them not just to ridicule but actual threats and potential violence.

As Georgia 10 points out, there is an entire section in the Code urging restraint when it comes to the media's power to intrude on and affect people's private lives.

This is especially the case when it comes to handing out people's personal contact information: phone numbers, e-mail addresses, even home addresses.

Because without that restraint, mass media can become an instrument of humankind's worst impulses -- including mass violence and genocide.

Remember, most recently, what happened in Rwanda: the owners of talk radio stations, working in the interest of the moneyed class, used their megaphones to target individuals who were then slaughtered by mobs armed with machetes:

"In Rwanda," Gowing writes, "hate radio ... systematically laid the groundwork for mass slaughter from the moment it was licensed in July 1993." It also helped facilitate the genocide, as RTLM broadcast names, addresses and license plate numbers of Tutsi targets. "Killers often carried a machete in one hand and a transistor radio in the other," according to Power.

RTLM and the propaganda it broadcast did not happen by accident. Rather, the founding of the station in 1992 by Hutu hard-liners closely associated with the government and its subsequent activities were "directly promoted by government authorities" as "the political and military elite established RTLM as part of this broader strategy to thwart the impact of internal reform." Further evidence of this strategy is found in the fact that prior to the genocide the government distributed free radios around the country in order to allow Rwandans to tune into RTLM, and that RTLM was "allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio when Radio Rwanda [the national state-owned station] was not transmitting." Though officially private, RTLM "was essentially the tool of Hutu extremists from the government, military and business communities."

There is a good reason that using the power of mass media to expose individual citizens' private lives to abuse and threats is considered unethical: It represents unchecked and abusive power. No one interested in holding the public trust should either want or seek it.

Yet this, of course, is exactly what Malkin did this week in publishing, on her blog, the home phone numbers of three students who led anti-military protests on the campus of UC-Santa Cruz.

Predictably, the students were deluged with hate mail and phone calls, including a number of death threats.

Malkin not only refused to take the numbers down -- in response, she reverted to her timeworn victimization schtick, posting some of the nasty e-mails she received in return and pretending there was nothing wrong or unethical in her behavior.

We're all too familiar with this routine. After all, it's what the entirety of her book Unhinged was predicated upon. Malkin, as I said then, is like the lunatic who walks around the public square and pokes people in the eye with a sharp stick, and then is shocked, shocked, that anyone would respond with anger and outrage.

Of course, there's more than ample reason to question Malkin's professionalism. Indeed, this isn't the first time Malkin has shown a predilection for abusing the power of her large readership.

Back when Unhinged first came out, I noticed a little anomaly:

Y'see, the early reports on the book indicated that not only would Malkin feature nasty, ugly quotes from nasty, ugly liberals on the back cover, but it would include their e-mail addresses.

And that's what they showed when Malkin appeared on O'Reilly's show the other day. O'Reilly even specifically mentioned it.

But when my copy arrived, the nasty quotes were there ... but not the e-mail addresses.

We've never been told why the addresses were removed, but one has to assume that Regnery did so on advice of counsel. It's also my understanding that one of the scurrilous and ugly quotes was actually penned by a 14-year-old, though I haven't confirmed that; but it certainly underscores the nature of this kind of retaliatory abuse of the power of mass communication.

Malkin's not the first right-wing blogger to try the Rwanda radio routine on one of their perceived enemies. Remember that the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (who resides on Malkin's blogroll) attempted a similar tactic against someone deemed "despicable" enough to warrant having someone visit them at their home.

I've seen this tactic being used by radio talkers in Montana as well:

The primary targets of Stokes' venom, though, were conservationists and environmentalists, for whom not even the most appalling comparison nor the most groundless accusation was adequate: Stokes constantly referred to them as Nazis, and the central thrust of all his attacks was that "greens" were responsible for nearly everything that was wrong with life in Western Montana, particularly the depressed economy. Indeed, Stokes has referred frequently to Patriot conspiracy theories, and not merely on the subject of environmentalists (who are viewed by militia types as a cult intent on enslaving the rest of mankind); he's also trotted out Patriot theories on such subjects as taxation and the Constitution.

Unsurprisingly, his audience reflects this kind of proto-fascist orientation. Many of his callers have outright advocated violence against conservationists, and Stokes has encouraged them to do so.

The real-life consequences of all this talk made quite clear that this was not merely "entertainment," and that Stokes' "hot talk" was doing more than just garnering ratings. Beginning in the summer of 2001, local conservationists began receiving a series of death threats, some delivered in person, others by phone. Car windows were smashed in, tires slashed. Strange men would show up in people's yards at twilight, then run off when confronted. People's homes were vandalized. Others would be followed home by men in pickups or on motorcycles. Sometimes the teenage children of the targets were threatened.

And egging all of these people on was John Stokes. Sometimes callers would announce on his show that a local conservationist was on vacation, which would present an opportunity to "visit their home." In others, a caller would simply give the home address of an environmental activist who had just been vilified as "Satanic" on the air by Stokes.

It's doubtful that Michelle Malkin has ever heard of John Stokes. No doubt she cooked up the idea of publishing these students' personal-contact info -- which they gave out in a press release that was clearly intended not for broadcast but for media contact purposes -- more or less on the fly. It just felt good, so she did it.

But it fits in with a pattern of behavior, not just by Malkin but by right-wing pundits generally, of pretending that ethics don't really matter -- or that longtime ethical standards just don't exist.

Maybe she just spent too much time hanging out with Ben Domenech when he was editing Unhinged.

But it's clear that she has a little problem. No, make that a big problem.

Reconquista!

How the nativists saw the immigration marches:

"Green cards? We don't need no steenking green cards!"

Their response:

"Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Mexican infiltration, Mexican indoctrination, Mexican subversion and the Mexican Reconquista conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

___

This seems to be the upshot of the current drumbeat coming from the Sensenbrenner/Tancredo wing of the conservative movement, thrummed most prominently by such luminaries as Michelle Malkin ("Welcome to Reconquista" reads her headline). Having already characterized the current wave of Mexican immigration as an "invasion", she is more recently making the unsubstantiated claim that:

Aztlan is a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class, which asserts that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. Advocates believe the reclamation (or reconquista) of Aztlan will occur through sheer demographic force. If the rallies across the country are any indication, reconquista is already complete.

Stepping into line with the reconquista theory this weekend was the Washington Times, which ran a long profile describing the theory rather credulously:

La reconquista, a radical movement calling for Mexico to "reconquer" America's Southwest, has stepped out of the shadows at recent immigration-reform protests nationwide as marchers held signs saying, "Uncle Sam Stole Our Land!" and waved Mexico's flag.

Even as organizers urged marchers to display U.S. flags, the theme of reclaiming "stolen" land remained strong. One popular banner read: "If you think I'm illegal because I'm a Mexican, learn the true history because I'm in my homeland."

"We need to change direction," said Jose Lugo, an instructor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder at a campus march last week. "And by allowing these 50,000, 50 million [immigrants] to come in here, we can do that."

The revolutionary tone has surprised even longtime immigration watchers such as Ira Mehlman, the Los Angeles-based spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"I've always been skeptical myself about this [reconquista], but what I've seen over the last few weeks leads me to believe that there's more there than I thought," Mr. Mehlman said.

"You're seeing people marching with Mexican flags chanting, 'This is our country.' I don't think that we can dismiss this as youthful exuberance or a bunch of hotheads," he said.

The reporter, to her credit, does include at least a touch of reality-based stuff:

Hispanic rights leaders insist there's nothing to the so-called reconquista, sometimes referred to as Aztlan, the mythical ancestral homeland of the Aztecs that reportedly stretches from the border to southern Oregon and Colorado.

Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association in Los Angeles, one of the march organizers, was infuriated when a reporter asked him about the reconquista.

"I can't believe you're bothering me with questions about this. You're not serious," Mr. Lopez said. "I can't believe you're bothering with such a minuscule, fringe element that has no resonance with this populous."

More to the point, the reporter -- as well as Malkin, and most of the other reconquista theorists -- seem confused about a very basic point: The belief that the Southwest is part of their historical homeland is a legitimate belief for most Latinos, and the marchers they cite seem to be expressing that point. They're also expressing the belief that this historical claim overrides the latter-day borders that would deny them their heritage. What's utterly absent is any claim that they intend to retake the Southwest for Mexico, which is what the reconquista theory is all about. On the contrary, they seem intent on becoming American -- but they also are claiming they have a right, by virtue of their heritage, to become one.

That doesn't sound like an invasion to me.

Of course, when I think of invasions, I usually think of armed forces crossing borders and attempting to defeat the other nation's military and ultimately depose its government. You know, what we did in Iraq. Planes, tanks, bombs, the works. Shock and awe.

I don't think of poor people trekking across the desert, looking to land some hard labor in our farm fields and on construction sites, quite the same way. But maybe that's just me.

Listening to the reconquista theories, I am taken back, back, back -- back to those halcyon days when conspiracy theories were the entire raison d'etre of the far right of America's conservative movement. Which is to say, every day of the past half-century.

After all, the far right can't really exist for long without a scapegoat, an Enemy, on whom it can blame all the world's ills. It has always been so, and will always be.

In the post-Civil War period, it was the ominpotent threat of "black rape" that inspired the American far right into a decades-long orgy of lynching whose effects remain with us today.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was the "Yellow Peril." This was a conspiracy theory which held that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific Coast, and that he was sending immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action. James Phelan, one of the "peril" theory's chief advocates, explained in 1907 that the Japanese immigrants represented an "enemy within our gates." Advocates frequently cited a 1909 book promoting this theory, Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance, which detailed the invasion to come and its aftermath. Moreover, the larger "Yellow Peril" was framed as simply a wave of nonwhite immigrants who would swamp the existing white population if left unchecked. (See more here.)

Then, for most of the post-World War II period, the Enemy was those dirty Communists. This, of course, inspired an entire universe of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, particularly embodied by the McCarthy witch hunts and their offspring, the John Birch Society.

With the demise of the Communist threat in the late '80s and early '90s, right-wingers were left with no one to scapegoat in elaborate conspiracy-theory fashion -- except, of course, for Bill "New World Order" Clinton. But he was only good for an eight-year stint (though if Hillary resurfaces in 2008, hey, they've got another eight more years' worth).

They've really been in need of a more permanent conspiracy-theory scapegoat, and the foreignness of radical Islam makes it difficult to successfully concoct any theories that stick, other than Hannityesque smears identifying liberalism with terrorism.

But reconquista? Woo-hoo! Made to order!

Already, it's a theory that's being endorsed by supposedly mainstream Republicans, even in non-border states like Connecticut, where one of the GOP candidates for Lieberman's seat, Paul Streitz, weighed in:

"It is time to get the troops out of Iraq and put them on the Mexican border. Thousands of Mexicans and other illegal aliens from other countries come into this country every day. This is an invasion, not immigration," Streitz said in a press release.

"The Mexicans are serious about their Reconquista claims to Aztlan. The Senate is headed toward surrendering the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas," the press release continued.

In case anyone's wondering, this latest conspiracy theory in fact originated on the far right -- specifically, with Glenn Spencer, leader of American Patrol:

The so-called reconquista, an alleged plot to turn several American states into a Mexican state or some kind of puppet government controlled by Mexico, has been a top concern for Spencer for years. Back in 1999, he put it like this: "The consul general says Mexico is reconquering California. A Mexican intellectual suggests that anyone who doesn't like Mexicans should leave California. What else do you need to hear? RECONQUISTA IS REAL... . EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN OUR NATION MUST BE DEPORTED IMMEDIATELY. ... IF WE CAN BOMB THE TV STATION IN BELGRADE [in the former Yugoslavia] WE CAN SHUT DOWN [U.S. Spanish-language stations] TELEMUNDO AND UNIVISION."

Spencer got involved in the anti-immigration movement in 1992, when he formed Voice of Citizens Together, also known as American Patrol, in California. In 2002, saying the battle was lost in that state, he moved to the "front lines" of the Arizona border, where he formed American Border Patrol. He was one of the first to call for border citizens' patrols and pioneered the use of surveillance technology.

He also was one of the first well-known anti-immigration activists to more or less openly court white supremacists and anti-Semites. He has attended conferences of American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in racist theories about blacks and others. He interviewed the magazine's editor, Jared Taylor, on his syndicated radio show. Another guest was California State Professor Kevin MacDonald, who is the architect of an elaborate anti-Semitic theory dressed up as evolutionary biology.

Spencer's voice has been particularly strident in pushing the reconquista theory as a Minuteman Project promoter:

Glen Spencer's Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) almost makes AICF look tame by comparison. A Mexican invasion, Spencer warns in his own videotape, is racing across America "like wildfire." There are drugs in Iowa, gang takeovers in Nevada, and "traitors" in the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church and among the "corporate globalists."

Bringing crime, drugs, squalor and "immigration via the birth canal," Mexicans are a "cultural cancer" from which Western civilization "must be rescued." They are threatening the birthright left by the white colonists who "earned the right to stewardship of the land." And this invasion is no accident.

Working in league with communist Chicano activists and their allies in America, Spencer warns, Mexico is using a little-known but highly effective plan ý a scheme already successful in "seizing power" in California ý "to defeat America."

The name of the conspiracy is the "Plan de Aztlan."

"Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest," says Spencer's video (which also features a scuffle between VCT and antiracist activists). The video then answers with an assortment of sound bites from Latino activists and Mexican officials -- including references to "la reconquista" (the reconquest) -- that "prove" that there is a Mexican plot to break the Southwestern states away.

A "hostile force on our border," the narrator warns, is engaging in "demographic war" against the United States. "Mexico is moving to capture the American Southwest."

Variations on this Aztlan conspiracy theory are now widespread on the American radical right. Columnists like Francis and Joseph E. Fallon, who has written on the subject for journals including American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly, a publication specializing in race "science," have helped to publicize variations of the theory.

The theory was also heavily promoted by the Barnes Review, which otherwise prefers to occupy itself with Holocaust revisionism.

Of course, Michelle Malkin and the Washington Times will never tell you that this is where these theories originate. Nor will they ever be able demonstrate that the notion of reconquista exists among Latino immigrants as anything more than a fringe element.

All that they can do is offer anecdotal evidence, mostly pictures of people carrying signs claiming they belong here. And they'll tell you that what they're claiming is that this country belongs to Mexico -- when no such claim is in sight.

What matters to people like Malkin is whipping up their audience, appealing to their fears. Because fearful people are irrational people, and likely to defer to authority; malleable, because they're eager to be safe. For the lot of them, scapegoats are de rigeur.

What matters to the rest of us, though, is that yet another innately racist appeal from the far right gets neatly repackaged and sold to mainstream Americans as somehow legitimate. And that, folks, is how transmission works.

Immigration and eliminationism

Those mass marches are having their effect: They're scaring the crap out of the nativists.

And they're fighting back in the usual, expected fashion ... by lying and making ugly but empty threats.

At least, we hope they're empty. Because what they're advocating, increasingly, is eliminating all 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. How they'll achieve that is something, however, they leave to our imaginations.

Recently a powerful Arizona legislator named Russell Pearce, a Republican from Mesa, recently uttered the following in response to the marches:

They're illegal and they have no right to be marching down our streets. They have no constitutional rights. They don't have First-, Fourth-, Sixth amendment rights. They're here illegally and they chose to be here illegally.

Pearce heads the state's House appropriations panel, has served as a judge, and was for many years a law-enforcement officer. And he really believes this?

As Blogs for Arizona explains, illegal aliens in fact have all kinds of rights under the constitution, including due-process rights, free-speech rights, search-and-seizure rights, and criminal-justice rights.

Of course, we hear the word "illegal" all the time in the nativists' arguments. "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?" is one of the Minutemen's favorite T-shirt slogans.

To which the appropriate response is: "What part of 'bad law' don't you understand?"

The bottom line in the immigration debate is that current immigration law -- as well as the proposals being floated by the Tancredo wing of the Republican Party (including James Sensenbrenner) -- is inadequate for dealing with the realities forced on us by economic forces which no amount of border fence and no mass expulsions will overcome. As I explained before, there are two forces driving the current wave of emigration: 1) a massive wage and standard-of-living gap between the United States and its immediate and most populous neighbor, and 2) the increasing demand for cheap labor in the United States.

Stressing that these immigrants' status as "illegal" begs the whole question of whether the laws on the books are adequate or just. They just create a whole class of criminals out of people who come here to work, and the latter has always been the driving force in immigration throughout our history.

But the nativists don't care. They like simple solutions. It's easier to blame the poverty-stricken pawns in this economic game, and take their anger out on them, than to deal with the core problems. What they're interested in is a scapegoat. After all, that's what they do.

Constantly shouting "illegals!" furthers the nativists' aims by separating these people from the rest of us: they're non-citizens, and thus by extension almost non-entities. Perhaps even non-human.

That certainly seems to be the line of thinking adopted by at least one right-wing blogger (wouldn't you know it, another of those "reformed liberals" who now claims that he and his "Red State" kind represent the real America). In a post decrying those "illegal aliens," he compared them to rats:

We can learn from Buffalo, New York. Now in Buffalo the rat problem in the city was a huge one. Exterminators could not handle the problem. But then in 2001 the city mandated that everyone would have to begin using special anti-rat garbage totes that the rats could not open. With no way to get to the garbage, the rats left Buffalo. Now, they went to the suburbs and now the suburbs are fighting them. But it is no longer a problem for the people of Buffalo, New York. Here is how to do the same with our problem:

1) No services.

Absolutely no services of any kind for those who cannot prove they are in the country legally. Nothing but emergency medical care. Without all the social services, medical and other services provided for them, the illegals will find life here less attractive.

2) No schools.

Absolutely no schooling for anyone who cannot prove they belong here legally.

3) No easy birthright.

Change the law. Now, if you are born here, you are a citizen. I say, if you cannot prove that you were born here and that your mother was here legally at the time, then your citizenship is that of the mother and not of the USA.

4) No legal status. No drivers licenses. No bank accounts. No ability to sue a citizen. No legal standing for anyone who is in this country illegally.

5) No free lunch for "The Man".

Make it a criminal offense (and enforce it if it is already on the books) to hire an illegal alien, or to rent a dwelling place to him, or to sell him a home knowing that he intends to live there. Make employers provide documentation for all of their workers. You put the onus on "The Man" and it suddenly becomes less appealing to take advantage of the illegals.


THE RATS WILL GO SOMEWHERE ELSE

Anyone familiar with eliminationist rhetoric recognizes this motif: compare the object of elimination with vermin, and then describe the steps you need to take to "exterminate" them.

Indeed, the "rats" comparison has a particularly ugly history: it was, after all, one of the most effective pieces of imagery in film created by Nazi propagandists in drumming up hatred of Jews, as Richard Webster explained:

The film Der Ewige Jude, which formed part of a propaganda programme designed to justify to the German people the deportations of Jews which were already taking place, included a powerful montage sequence in which Jews were compared to rats. In the words of the commentary, 'rats ... have followed men like parasites from the very beginning … They are cunning, cowardly and fierce, and usually appear in large packs. In the animal world they represent the element of subterranean destruction.' Having noted that rats spread disease and destruction, the commentary suggested that they occupied a position 'not dissimilar to the place that Jews have among men'. At this point in the film, footage of rats squirming through sewers is followed first by the image of a rat crawling up through a drain-cover into the street and then by shots of Jewish people crowded together in ghettos.

In the Security Service report on the film, the comparison of the Jewish people to rats was held to be 'particularly impressive'.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically anti-semitic (or racist) about the image of the rat. However, presenting images of Jews as unclean insects or rodents was perhaps the most effective way not only of arousing and confirming anti-semitic hatred but of directly inciting physical violence by stirring some of people's deepest fears and anxieties. The same idea was used in 'instant' propaganda exercises to prepare for mass murder. According to one account, peasants recruited by the Germans in occupied countries in order to help in mass murders were given an intensive training course which lasted only a few hours, and which consisted in the study of pictures representing Jews as small repulsive beasts (Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1949, p. 54)

It also has a history of use in America, particularly in immigration and race debates. Recall, for instance, that James Phelan, a U.S. Senator from California, made nearly identical attacks upon Japanese immigrants. Phelan was urging the passage of immigration restrictions and "alien land laws" that stripped immigrants of the right to own land, and whipping up fears that the West Coast would (thanks to those evil "picture brides" and their progeny) soon be overrun by "yellow people," when he explained it thus:

The rats are in the granary. They have gotten in under the door and they are breeding with alarming rapidity. We must get rid of them or lose the granary.

It's also been used in recent years to demonize gays and lesbians.

Fortunately, the blogger in question seems to be extremely obscure, with limited influence. But it's interesting to see the "vermin" motif popping up increasingly in discussions of illegal immigration, particularly paired with discussions of rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens.

After all, it's not just obscure bloggers doing this. It includes guys like Michael Savage, who claims millions of listeners.

Likewise, you're hearing a lot of talk about rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens. But you don't hear any of them telling us how they intend to achieve this --despite the fact that we're talking about 11 million people and, without question, one of the pillars of an economy increasingly built on cheap labor.

You can hear this not just from organizations like VDare -- rated a "hate group" by the SPLC but endorsed by Michelle Malkin and many others -- but also from people with real influence and power, like Newt Gingrich and James Sensenbrenner.

Kinda puts that news a few weeks ago about Halliburton building mass detention centers to cope with an "immigration emergency" in perspective, doesn't it?

Bigotry and freedom

The religious right sure has a funny idea of what constitutes freedom in America. It's pretty clear that when they talk about free speech and constitutional rights, they intend it to include only themselves and no one else.

This doesn't merely cover such matters as sexual orientation. It even appears to include the freedom of religion.

Take, for instance, their latest campaign to give themselves the right to bash gays and lesbians:

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

What's revealing about their argument, as always, is that they insist that antidiscrimination laws should only cover such "inborn traits" as race and gender:

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different -- a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

"Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will only get worse."

We've heard this argument many times before, most often when the issue of hate crimes arises: Because being gay, we're told, is a "chosen behavior," it is undeserving of civil rights protections.

As I've noted previously:

It's the same reason given by many evangelicals -- and particularly black and minority evangelicals, and people who claim they support civil rights -- for not supporting gays and lesbians in hate-crime protections: "You can't compare being gay to being black. One's immutable, one's chosen."

Well, yes, this is true when it comes to race. And even ethnicity. These are, after all, two of the three main legs of anti-discrimination and hate-crimes laws.

But it's not true of the third leg of these laws: religion. Last I checked, this too was a "chosen behavior."

If we restrict antidiscrimination laws only to "inborn traits," then the right to choose our religious faith (or lack thereof) will immediately be at risk, too.

Of course, this doesn't much bother fundamentalists, since they already claim that they represent the only "true" Christianity, and consider anything that departs from their dogma to be "unChristian." Along similar lines, they also claim that this is a "Christian nation" that should abide by Biblical laws.

But it should bother the rest of us -- particularly those whose religious beliefs may not be in line with the fundamentalists'.

It doesn't take much imagination, after all, to see the same principle -- that free speech rights include the "right" to discriminate, harass, intimidate, and threaten -- applied to other "chosen behaviors" like religious faith.

So if you're a liberal Methodist, or Catholic, or a Jew, good "Christians" believe they should have the right to discriminate against you, too.

It all leads one to wonder: Is ignorant, unAmerican bigotry also an "inborn trait"?

Ashamed

This may put me in the minority of bloggers, but I don't much care for blogging when I travel. Especially when I'm spending my days escorting my daughter through the commercial wonders of Disneyland, which primarily constitute serial adventures in line-standing and swollen, aching feet.

But duty beckons, thanks to Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse, who wrote a lengthy response to my recent post at Firedoglake regarding the way that mainstream conservatism has increasingly come to reflect genuinely extremist values and ideas, largely through the sorts of thinly veiled appeals it makes.

It's noteworthy because, as readers know, this is a trend I've been documenting for some time, most notably in my two Koufax-winning series. And in all that time, I haven't seen anyone on the right try to tackle the argument in anything approaching a serious fashion. Most avoid my thesis like the plague, and if any do acknowledge it, it's usually given the standard substance-free airy dismissal (to wit: this is just too absurd to dignify with a response).

Alas, for all the words that Moran expends on my behalf, the end product is thin gruel indeed.

Take, for instance, Moran's claim that I "put the cart before the horse" regarding the movement of far-right appeals into the conservative mainstream; he claims, instead, that right-wing extremists have simply adopted mainstream positions and tried to spin them as their own:

The only problem with Mr. Neiwert’s notions of insidious issue creep by racists and fascists into the mainstream of conservatism is that he is blaming the responsible right for the fact that the racists adopted these issues, mixed them into an unrecognizable porridge of nauseating half truths and bowdlerized slogans, and spewed the result onto the internet and elsewhere trying to appear reasonable.

In short, while trying to connect Neo-Nazis to conservatives, Mr. Neiwert makes a classic, some would say stupid mistake; he puts the cart before the horse. It was not conservatives who adopted these issues from the extremists; it was the other way around.

This is his strongest argument, incidentally, and if his chronology were actually correct, he'd have a point. But it's not.

You see, David Duke and like-minded neo-Nazis were adopting these issues in the 1970s, well before they became part of Republican cant. And while it is true that many of them surfaced in the Reagan '80s, well before Pat Buchanan offered his formula for transmitting far-right ideas into the mainstream, the reality is that the trend has rapidly accelerated since then.

Take, for instance, the way the extremist right served as an echo chamber for mainstream conservative appeals during the Clinton years, especially in building up anti-Clinton animus with a whole raft of bizarre charges that formed the foundation for the impetus to impeach. Moreover, it's become embodied in the way that genuinely fringe figures like Randall Terry, Jim Gilchrist, and Jared Taylor have been subsequently embraced by the mainstream right as somehow representative of their ideals. It's also embodied in the way that Duke themes -- particularly his 1990s tomes describing how white America's values were in danger of being overrun by brown hordes -- keep popping up among mainstream conservatives; not surprisingly, the best example of this was Buchanan's book The Death of the West.

Moran's subsequent point borders on the downright inane:

I would suggest to Mr. Neiwert that his next article deal with the adoption by the Communist Party USA of many liberal issues such as racial justice, anti-war agitation, universal health care, and reigning in corporate power. Or better yet, he might want to take on Osama Bin Laden and that worthy’s peculiar habit of regurgitating liberal talking points about America, the war, and western civilization every time he makes a videotape.

Of course, it's Moran who himself is putting the cart before the horse himself here -- that is, extremists like the Communist Party are simply latching themselves onto legitimate mainstream issues, such as they did with civil rights in the 1950s -- if he thinks this kind of argument has any legitimacy. But it's clear he doesn't; he's just hoping to score rhetorical points, which only works if your characterization of the case is accurate. (As for Mr. Bin Laden, perhaps Moran hasn't noticed that the reality of fundamentalist Islamic radicals is that what they hate most about the West is embodied most in what are traditionally liberal quarters: free speech, sexual tolerance, a desire to break free from the chains of oppressive traditionalism.)

Perhaps more to the point, he seems not to understand that the concept of "transmission" -- that is, the movement of ideas and appeals from the extremist fringes into the mainstream through their careful repackaging -- does indeed hold as true for the left as for the right. Likewise, what he also neglects to comprehend is that the very real difference is that, for mainstream liberalism, such transmissions are nearly nonexistent now, however much they may have occurred in the past (and the historical instances are actually few and far between, and typically relegated to lesser issues, unless you're one of those nuts who believe FDR really was a communist). The nearly opposite is true of the mainstream right currently.

Moran goes on to not only demonstrate an abysmal grasp of the facts regarding right-wing behavior, he actually goes on to reproduce some of the same transmissions by way of acting as an apologist for his cohorts. To wit:

-- Michelle Malkin, he claims, has only a peripheral association with the hate group VDare, which exists only because they run her syndicated column. If Malkin's associations with the VDare clan ended there, he might have a point -- though a limited one, since columnists do have the right to deny anyone they like (or dislike) the right to run their work; if the National Alliance or Council of Conservative Citizens or Stormfront, all nakedly racist outfits, wanted to run Malkin's column, I would assume she would deny them that option (though that might be a bad assumption). Moreover, Malkin blogrolls VDare on not just her blog, but also on her subsidiary Immigration Blog. Additionally, she has on several occasions sprung to the defense of the VDare crowd, particularly Steve Sailer.

-- Glenn Reynolds, he claims, is really not a right-wing blogger at all but a libertarian one. Of course, Reynolds has made this claim for years as well, but those familiar with Reynolds' track record of uniform support for conservatives and their agendas, and converse animus towards liberals and theirs, tends to belie the claim. The decisive factor for me has been Reynolds' uniform support for the Bush administration's seemingly endless undermining of civil liberties, supposedly the heart of libertarian ideals. I have in my possession an e-mail that Reynolds sent in 1997 to a listserv I was on, attacking Clinton's post-Oklahoma City push for bolstering law-enforcement efforts for intelligence gathering on domestic terrorists and claiming that he didn't think any American should be willing to give up their privacy rights for the purpose of preventing terrorism; and yet his track record regarding the Bush administration has been precisely the opposite (uniform support for the Patriot Act -- which made the Clinton initiatives look minor in comparison -- and its sequel, as well as Bush's use of NSA for domestic surveillance).

-- He goes on to defend Reynolds' and other right-wingers smear of MEChA without really comprehending that what Reynolds did in calling MEChA "fascist hatemongers" and "racist and homophobic" was, among other things, to link MEChA to a group of Latino anti-Semites without any grounding for doing so, and then, after the mistake was pointed out to him, simply noted that the connection was in error: no apology, and no attempt to explain to his readers that his characterization was grossly off course.

-- Even worse, Moran defends Reynolds and Malkin by citing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (a document written in 1969) and noting:

The translation of that last little ditty is "On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing."

But hey! Don't call them hatemongers!

Note that Moran calls this phrase MEChA's "motto" when, in fact, it is not; it's simply a slogan that appeared in some of its early organizing documents. Its actual motto is "La union hace la fuerza," or "Unity creates power."

Moreover, as I explained way back when, in a post that was included in the links of the Firedoglake post:

Most of the characterizations of MEChA's rhetoric have ranged from the extremely tendentious to outright gross distortions. And nearly all of them are devoid of both historical and current social context.

One of the prime examples of distortion in the debate is the way a number of the anti-Mechistas, including Malkin and Kaus, have zeroed in on the MEChA slogan: Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.

Kaus offers the translation of this slogan that in fact has been used by every one of the MEChA critics:

(Many American Jewish groups fight against assimilation too, but I haven't seen any with a slogan equivalent to "For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.")

Before supposedly smart people go publishing such nonsense, it would help if they consulted, say, a native Spanish speaker (and one would think one would be available somewhere in Santa Monica).

A more accurate translation of the slogan would recognize that though "Por" translates to the English "For," it is used in a very specific sense of the word -- namely, "On behalf of" or "In the service of". "Fuera" is not "for those outside" but rather refers to the speaker, and means "Apart from." So what the slogan actually says is this:

In the service of the race, everything
Apart from the race, nothing

There is nothing remotely racist, particularly in the sense of being exclusionist or derogatory, about this, of course. The second line clearly only refers to the need to maintain one's ethnic and cultural identity. It is only racist if you deliberately mistranslate it: "For those outside the race, nothing."

Perhaps even more to the point, as I explained subsequently, "la Raza" is specifically a pan-racial concept, describing a populist notion of "the people," a notion that specifically includes a number of races, since the people of Mexico are actually constituted of a range of distinct races:

A more accurate translation would read, "In service of my people, everything; [for] apart from my people, [I have] nothing." There is neither the exclusionist nor the racist content that Malkin implies. La Raza, it must be noted, is not a racial concept but an ethnic one (it comprises multiples races, in fact).

This kind of sloppiness is typical of Moran's entire argument here. As you can see, his case simply falls apart when you examine it with any care.

In the end, though, I was most amused by Moran's remark that I "ought to be ashamed of [my]self."

And you know, it's true: I am ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed for having worked for so many years in mainstream media and, even while recognizing these trends as they developed in the 1990s, never having written about them with any detail or clarity because I thought it would be impolitic.

I'm ashamed for having assumed, for so many years, that the differences between the extremist right and the mainstream right were more significant than their similarities. That is, until it became all too apparent that the differences were growing smaller and the similarities growing much, much greater.

That's what I'm ashamed of.

But it's amusing that Moran would think I should be ashamed, yet he somehow couldn't bring himself to say the same of Ann Coulter when she called Muslims "ragheads" in a major convention speech; instead, he just called her "beyond over the top" and tut-tutted her obvious extremism. Though perhaps we should give him some credit for at least recognizing that.

However, he seems unable to bring himself to admit that Malkin and Reynolds -- let alone the Little Green Footballs or Lucianne Goldberg crowds, all of whom reside on his blogroll -- likewise have plenty to be "ashamed of." Indeed, it seems that there's little right-wing behavior he can find that anyone should be ashamed of.

Which is, really, a shame. But hardly surprising.

Those transmitters

I'm late getting this up (it's been that kind of day) but I hope all my regular readers got a chance to read my guest post at Firedoglake regarding the creep of right-wing extremism into the conservative mainstream, and the role of right-wing bloggers in making that happen.

Many thanks to Jane and the gang for giving me the opportunity to speak to their deservedly large audience.

And a special thanks to James Wolcott for the link and lengthy cite. Be sure to read his take on all this, including his always-trenchant account of the antics of one Dr. Jack Wheeler.

Crazy Curt and the Moonies

Somehow, I suspect that if Republican Rep. Curt Weldon had such a choice available, he'd be recommending that his opponents' families obtain treatment in hospitals operated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. A flashback:

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, former felon and current owner of The Washington Times, was the man in the spotlight, declaring himself humanity’s "savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

The event, which took place March 23, was sponsored by the Washington Times Foundation and the International Interreligious Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), a Moon-led group. Present at different points during the event were Reps. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Sen. Mark Dayton (R-Minn.).

One of Moon's claims that evening was that "Hitler and Stalin have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."

Reporter John Gorenfeld originally broke the story in Salon, and followed up a few weeks later by examining Weldon's role and his response:

Well, when it comes to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the office of U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon is speaking with a definitive -- uhh, well, not so fast.

While Weldon vows that Moon will never again dupe him, his chief of staff, Michael Conallen, won't rule out Weldon's attending future events held by Moon's front group, the International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), which apparently tricked several members of Congress into attending the March 23 "Crown of Peace" awards at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

After I broke the story on Salon.com last week, subsequent publicity centered around legislators who claimed they were duped into attending the meeting. (The usual method of the IIFWP and Washington Times Foundation -- Moon owns the paper -- is to invite VIP speakers for Day 1 of the conference, photograph them and keep them in the dark about what's to be discussed Day 2.)

"I can definitively say," adds Conallen, "the congressman will never speak at any event where anything remotely like what happened on March 23 occurred."

As Gorenfeld searched further, though, it turned out that Weldon had indeed been fully informed about the day's events. Not only that, this wasn't the first time:

After the pictures finally went through, the story changed to "apparently he was there, but we really had nothing to do with it. … We may have been a Congressional co-host, but we have nothing to do with the agenda, the organization, the scheduling, and our role would be limited explicitly to the attendance of the Congressman."

Not so, as it turned out. While Weldon's office maintains there was no way of knowing Moon would be there, a March 8 invitation stated that Moon and his wife "will also be recognized that evening for their lifelong work to promote interfaith cooperation and reconciliation," according to the Washington Post.

Seoul, mid-February 2002: The U.S. is at war, but Weldon is at the IIFWP's Assembly 2002 festivities, according to several Unification Church Web sites. His appearance, says his office, was related to his historic delegation to North Korea, though it wasn't on the same trip.

Speaking there was Chung Hwan Kwak, the president of the UPI wire service, the man who was in charge, according to estranged Moon daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, when members of the D.C. church were imprisoned and beaten by a man Moon believed to be the reincarnation of his son. Kwak tells the Seoul audience about a "culture of true love." Moon then gives a speech identifying the "Four Conditions for World Peace." The next day, Weldon speaks at the event, which, like most Moon events, is an exercise in making the founder look like the greatest man on earth.

"For decades," says Steve Hassan, a former group member who's now a self-described cult counselor, "Moon recruiters have deceptively lured people to isolated workshop settings and indoctrinated them to believe that they should renounce their own family and become a member of the "True Family.'"

On Nov. 22, 2002, Weldon was a keynote speaker at the IIFWP's U.S.-U.N. symposium, according to the IIFWP site. The site claimed the speech foreshadowed Weldon's partnership with U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, a Democrat from Illinois, which would see both praising the IIFWP's "Ambassadors for Peace" on the floor of Congress on June 19, 2003.

In April 2003, while the country's eyes were on Iraq, two things happened. One, a remarkable new edition of the church's Unification News came out. Two, Weldon spoke at an IIFWP symposium in New York.

The church newsletter described cross-removal hitting its stride, declaring that the painful symbol (painful because it prevents religions from uniting under Moon) was gone from 123 church walls. ("The Congressman does not accept or support any of Rev. Moon's teachings or beliefs," explained Conallen cautiously. "That statement certainly applies to any specific attacks or insults against the Christian faith.") And at the conference, held at the Moon-owned New Yorker Hotel, Weldon spoke about the United Nations.

Money from these events, according to Conallen, wasn't pocketed by Weldon, but went to pay for the Michael Horrocks Playground Fund, named for a 9/11 pilot. Today, Weldon remains listed on the Pennsylvania Parents Day nominating committee of Moon's American Family Coalition. As the Washington City Paper revealed in its 1995 story "Honor Thy Parents: How the Unification Church Convinced the U.S. Government to Endorse Its Holiday Honoring the Rev. and Mrs. Moon as the True Parents of Mankind," Parents Day is yet another way to glorify Moon, while pretending to honor others.

As Chris Bowers at MyDD points out, Weldon actually pinned a medal on Moammar Ghadafi at the March 23 event.

President Pants-On-Fire

The news today:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

And that's not all:

Although not reflected in the court papers, two senior government officials said in interviews with National Journal in recent days that Libby has also asserted that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with the Vice President, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war.

In yet another instance, Libby had claimed that President Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack," a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war.

Bush three years ago:

"There's just too many leaks, and if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." [Bush, 9/30/03]

"I want to know the truth. ... I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers." [Fox News, 10/8/03]

"I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information." [Bush, 10/28/03

I'm sure footage of these fibs exist. I wonder if they'll get as much play as Clinton's finger-wagging Lewinsky denial.

The Minutemen's month

When I pulled up to "Camp LeBas" -- the rural acreage the Minutemen are using for headquarters this month in their operations on the Washington-British Columbia border -- the first time Saturday, I was struck with a brief sense of deja vu, since the setting had the look of the Montana Freemen compound in miniature: the rough edges; the clusters of cars, RVs, and trailers; the flags and signs.

The Freemen place was more spread out, by far; the Minutemen have several neighbors right across the road and others just above and below them on the hill, while the Freemen's nearest neighbors were not even visible from the place. Still, the look of the place reminded me not just of the Clark ranch in Jordan but a dozen other "Patriot" properties I visited in the 1990s, from Cal Greenup's to Bo Gritz's: slightly chaotic, slightly grubby, but strategically situated.

I especially took note of the flags, since one of them -- a "Don't Tread on Me" Revolutionary War flag -- was identical to one that John Trochmann used to sell through the Militia of Montana, while the second flag was a military one:


As I took the photos from the roadway on Sunday, a Minuteman official -- Gary Cole, the Minutemen's former national director of operations, who you can see standing just outside the trailer, checking me out, in the top photo -- came out to greet me. I pulled in the driveway and got out to talk.

I wound up chatting with Cole, a glib and pleasant man, for a good 45 minutes, during which time he more or less regaled me with a presentation about the Minutemen he'd obviously given a number of other times. He continually emphasized that the organization's prime concern was with border-control issues.

Cole admitted to me that a border watch on the Canadian border wasn't really going to be about catching illegal aliens as they attempted to cross surreptitiously. What the Minutemen were about, he said, was "making a statement."

It was also clear that "making a statement" entailed attracting as much media attention as possible, which meant that they were far more media-friendly than the militias and Freemen ever were. They were quite successful, too; there were Seattle TV news stations there, and a variety of newspapermen too. They kept track of how many reporters they'd talked with that weekend, and they carefully tailored their talk for the cameras and tape recorders.

After I finished chatting with Cole, I talked for awhile with Tom Williams, leader of the Bellingham Minuteman contingent, inside the outfit's operations center, which was located inside the smallish equipment shed. Coffee and doughnuts were spread out on a table, and a map showing the border watch locations was spread across a wall.

Williams, who was involved with last April's Minuteman Project in Arizona (he says he was charged with weeding out white supremacists) is a pleasant and straightforward-seeming fellow. He was even more insistent about emphasizing border-security issues, and was likewise adamant that he had nothing against Latino immigrants.

For all the resemblance they bore to the Patriots on the outside, inside the Minutemen's compound things were remarkably different. There was none of the paranoia and anger that hung in the air like a fetid smell at Patriot compounds. It was jovial, friendly, and seemingly well organized.

That same feeling prevailed when I talked with the Minuteman volunteers. One of them, a retiree named Larry Pullar who lived in the nearby town of Custer, manned one of the outposts next to the Canadian border where, it was apparent, someone could just walk across a grassy ditchway between two roadways to cross the border.

Pullar was clear that what drove him to join the Minutemen was his concern about the lack of border security, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He said he has nothing against Latino immigrants and is not concerned about them.

I asked Pullar about the Minuteman leadership and their national advocates, who do emphasize those issues. He said he hadn't paid any attention to them; he was in this to push for more secure borders. He seemed sincere.

The Minutemen had attracted about some 22 border-watch volunteers, and a number of support people, to the camp for the weekend, most of them from the region. Most of them were like Pullar. Indeed, it was remarkable that, in all of my discussions that weekend, the only person who was interested in talking about Latino immigration was Gary Cole -- who, as it happened, was all too happy to expound on the notion that illegal Mexican immigrants constituted an "invasion" of America.

It was clear that they were all "on message," that is, to keep emphasizing border-security issues, because those enabled them to steer clear of the rising charges of racism. And indeed, if that was all that the Minutemen were really about, they might have some legitimate points to make (even if their concerns might be overstated).

But you don't have to look far to see that the border-security issue is more of a ruse than a reality. Because from the very top, the advocacy for the Minutemen has come from quarters where the primary concern is about the supposed evils of illegal Latino immigration.

This begins with national organizations like VDare and American Patrol, who concocted the Minuteman idea as an adaptation of the old white-supremacist and militia tactic of border militias. And it continues right down to the state level, where Minuteman supporters are proposing draconian measures aimed at eliminating health care and emergency services to illegal aliens:

Washington voters may be asked to decide in November whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to receive public benefits.

Bob Baker, a Mercer Island resident who heads a group called Protect Washington Now, has filed an initiative to force the state to deny illegal immigrants benefits like those in a handful of programs administered by the Department of Social and Health Services.

Baker volunteers with the Minuteman Project, which got its start in Arizona two years ago to spot and report illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.

This reality belies the Minutemen's savvy public-relations efforts, and is the real reason for an opposition campaign that likewise has formed in Whatcom County:

"The reason this has escalated to such a national level is because of groups like the Minutemen project that are out there causing fear, pain, and frankly pushing people to the limits," said Rosalinda Guillen, director of the Aguila Del Norte Legal Observer Program for the Coalition for Professional Law and Border Enforcement.

The Aguila Del Norte legal observers are there because "we've been getting second-, third-, fourth-hand information from the sheriff, the media. We want to get the information ourselves," she said.

The program will monitor Minutemen, watching for aggressive or harassing tactics that target Latinos. She said that four to six observers visited Minutemen border sites over the weekend.

"We still believe this is an extremist group, it's racially motivated," Guillen said.

Guillen is far from alone in this belief, and it's certainly a well-founded one. Juan Santos at Dissident Voice recently explored the way the Minutemen are reviving old-style nativism, and how the recent pro-immigrant rallies have been the first wave of opposition to them:

Minutemen co-leader Chris Simcox would have us believe that "we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them [migrants] up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these people as mere crackpots. The problem with that analysis however is clear. These people have power. They've dominated and defined the debate on immigration for the past year, at least until this past weekend, when well over a million -- even two million people -- marched in opposition to their xenophobic and persecutorial dementia.

Southern California activists have seen that racist dementia up close, time and again, as we confronted the Minutemen and their allies in an effort to keep things from ever getting this far.

We saw it in the eyes of breakaway Minuteman leader James Chase in the darkness of the southern desert at midnight, he armed with a shotgun, we with nothing but our bare hearts.

We saw it in the eyes of Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin as he slammed his car into a crowd of mostly Chicano protestors as Jim Gilchrist addressed the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Gilchrist joined the Coalition, which has been identified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Painted as American a hero by the likes of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gilchrist has been accused by a former campaign volunteer of integrating Nazi activists into his campaign for Congress. He lost the special election, despite his endorsement by Sensenbrenner ally Tancredo.

But he put fear into Republican politicians -- fear that incumbents would face vote draining, immigrant bashing third party candidates in November if they didn't take a ard right line against migrants. They feared Gilchrist sympathizers like the rightist California group Save Our State, which has regularly drawn organized Nazis to their protests, and which uses the exact rhetoric used by open white nationalists and supremacists, such as calling Mexican culture a "cesspool".

The corporate media, informed time and again of Nazi, white nationalist and militia connections to the anti-migrant movement, has continued to paint the anti-migrants as part of a mainstream. Gilchrist himself has claimed he has "240 million" supporters, despite the fact that the anti-immigrant movement as a whole could field only 700 activists for its "National Day of Protest" this year. They were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned across the country.

Even so, Tancredo, Sensenbrenner and the extreme, racist right wing elements they represent were on the verge of a major legislative victory. They were so close they could taste it.

Until Sunday.

Nonetheless, the Minutemen are claiming that that the rallies have actually stirred a backlash that will bolster their support:

Within 48 hours of the 20,000-strong march in Phoenix, the Arizona-based Minuteman Civil Defense Corps signed up about 300 new volunteers for patrols along the U.S.-Mexican border, said Chris Simcox, the organization's leader.

Today, volunteers plan to kick off a monthlong border watch in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas and report undocumented immigrants to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Simcox said the pro-immigrant rallies "really went a long way to awaken the sleeping giant in America."

"People are just astounded," he said. "They had no idea about the number of illegals in the country."

Nationally, major organizations that push for tighter immigration controls have been flooded with sometimes-alarming phone calls from people upset about the mass demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters, some waving the Mexican flag, into the streets of Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago.

... Susan Tully, national field director for the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates reducing illegal immigration, said her office has been "overwhelmed" with phone calls from frustrated people looking for a way to get involved in a counterprotest.

Tully said she has been alarmed by some of the calls and urged restraint and caution.

"I can tell you the frustration you can hear in their voices and the outrage. It's pretty scary," she said.

"I really think the best way for the American public to oppose this guest-worker plan at this point is to continue to make phone calls, faxes, write and go visit U.S. senators and representatives rather than taking to the streets."

She also worried about how pro-immigrant demonstrators are interacting with members of FAIR and other anti-illegal immigration organizations.

"I promise you if we announced tomorrow that we were going to have a march in Los Angeles or Phoenix, the other side would be out there to confront them, and it could get really ugly," Tully said.

It certainly looks that way, especially considering the kind of fresh support that the "backlash" seems to be producing. Check, for instance, the White Revolution Web site, where the posts all prominently play up those Mexican flags and, moreover a plan for "Anti-Invasion Day" events across America on April 10:

Will you just sit idly by on this historic day and allow the mestizo hordes to claim America as theirs? Then stand with us, for Race and Nation and let's Take America Back Now!

April 10th: Anti-Invasion Day

Bush calls for civil debate ...

Illegal immigrants push for civil war ...

White Revolution calls for nationwide patriotic display on April 10th!

Tens of thousands of illegal invaders and their treasonous collaborators are calling for a national "Day of Action" on Monday, April 10th, to support illegal immigration.

In response, White Revolution is calling for a national day of patriotic expression against illegal immigration on the same day.

You can wear an American flag t-shirt or baseball cap. A lapel pin, or tie. A red, white, and blue ribbon. Even an American flag sticker. There are many ways that you can show your support for this great country our ancestors built with their sweat and blood. Wherever you are, whatever you will be doing, stand with us on April 10th, to demonstrate against illegal immigration and the invasion of our nation.

Mark your calendars, now! April 10th: red, white, blue, and you!

I believe people like Larry Pullar and Tom Williams are sincere about not wanting to be associated with this kind of element, and not just because it makes them look bad. As with the militia movement in the 1990s, the Minutemen's success has been predicated on its ability to draw in people from mainstream America, largely by disguising their larger agenda and promoting themselves in a way that appeals to mainstream concerns (in this case, about keeping our borders secure).

But they seem not to stop and question why it is that their organization actually attracts neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and various ill-disguised hate groups whose existence is predicated on scapegoating racial minorities. If they did, the answer would be a simple one: Whatever concern the Minuteman leadership might actually have regarding border security is inextricably bound up with their belief that Latino immigrants are harming American culture.

In the end, the Minuteman vision of "border security" is just a pretext for "keeping the Latinos out." The Minutemen attract these elements because their agenda is only a vague reformulation of a major component of the traditional white-supremacist program for America.

They're not fooling the racists. They're only fooling their mainstream recruits -- and a blinkered press.

Those lazy Mexicans

Rush Limbaugh, on his March 27 radio show:

I mean if -- if you had a -- a -- a renegade, potential criminal element that was poor and unwilling to work, and you had a chance to get rid of 500,000 every year, would you do it?

The first time I encountered Mexican workers was in 1975, when I came home to Idaho Falls from college in Moscow, Idaho, looking for work for the summer. The first place I could find that would hire me was a potato warehouse out on Lindsey Boulevard, next to the rail tracks.

Most of my co-workers were from Mexico, were likely illegal immigrants, and most of them spoke only Spanish. But they were friendly and tried to help me and my friend Scott, who had also gotten a job there. We both towered over them, and we were both in pretty good shape; I was 18 at the time, and had spent the previous summers hauling pipe in potato fields, so I knew what hard work was about. But we weren't quite prepared for this work.

Basically, the job entailed loading 100- and 50-pound gunny sacks of potatoes into rail cars: stacking them onto a dolly, rolling them into the car, and stacking them up. This is a reasonable job when the stack is less than chest high, but loading them over our heads was a real test.

After two weeks, I failed it. I was completely exhausted and broken down by the end of that time. I called in, said thanks for the opportunity, and quit. (So did Scott.) I wound up setting up my own house-painting business that summer and making my tuition that way.

But I'm sure that most of those Latino co-workers not only stayed on, they probably worked at the warehouse year-round. Because they were simply unfazed by it all. They could load, stack, and load some more, all of it far more efficiently than I ever could. And at the end of every day, as I collapsed in a heap, they were still in good spirits.

Not only were they the hardest-working people I ever met, they also had the best work ethic I ever saw. That is, not only did they work hard, they worked smart. I muscled those 100-pound sacks of spuds up to the top row, while they simply tossed them up with a little leverage and technique.

Oh, and my old boss back at the potato farm where I hauled pipe? Within a couple of years after I left that farm, he went to an all-Latino crew, and he admitted to me that they were mostly illegals. But, he said, they worked harder and better and far more reliably than any crew of teenagers ever had for him. Having been one of those teenagers, I knew exactly what he meant.

Since then, I have had many other encounters with immigrant Latino workers -- as well as many working-class people living in Mexico -- and my experience has been uniform. These are hard-working, decent people. America can use more people like them.

Yes, they are often poor, and poverty does spawn crime. But the notion that they are innately criminal is absurd.

And the notion that they are lazy? On what planet?

But reading Limbaugh's rant, the big question that lingers is: How does he propose "getting rid" of 500,000 illegal immigrants annually?

Waving that flag

Right-wingers are all up in arms over the Mexican flags that have been prominently displayed during the recent immigration demonstrations.

Michelle Malkin especially has worked herself up to a fine froth, while UberWanker Mickey Kaus has been doing the same. We've heard similar refrains from Jed Babbin, hosting Hugh Hewitt's show.

Some of the more, ahem, creative responses have included Michael Savage's ("Burn the Mexican flag!") and those mental wizards at Wizbang, who suggest we "shoot it off the pole."

Then I noticed this in an L.A. Times piece on Bush and the immigration issue:

During the 2000 election, Bush previewed a campaign video from ad-maker Lionel Sosa that used emotion-laden themes to woo Latinos.

As he watched, Sosa recalled, Bush's face lighted up. "How much do you need for this?" Bush asked as the two men sat with Rove in the governor's mansion in Texas, Sosa said.

Sosa replied that it would take $3 million. According to the ad-maker, Bush then turned to Rove, saying: "Give him five."

Four years later, Sosa produced a variation of that video for the 2004 campaign that was mailed to Latino voters across the country.

The video includes images that would probably rile those who today are calling for the most restrictive immigration laws. At one point, Bush is shown waving a Mexican flag. The footage was shot, Sosa said, during a Mexican Independence Day parade in San Antonio in 1998, when Bush was running for reelection as governor.

Funny that none of these people were offended by Bush's earlier gesture. Guess it all depends on who's doing the waving, right?