The Dish

by David Weigel

A Drudge plug, a few controversial passages, and boom – Pat Buchanan’s newest book (with his oldest cover) hits #1 on Amazon. Josh Marshall calls it a "xenophobic hairball," but really it’s not too different from what Buchanan has been shouting into the dark for years, or what Peter Brimelow made a splash saying a decade ago (before boarding himself up into the VDARE.com sanitarium).

America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.

This really is no different than the old Brimelow spiel, although PB always personalized it by noting he didn’t want his young son to grow up in this scary, swarthy future Mexamerica.

I’m sympathetic to Buchanan’s arguments. It makes no sense to ignore, as our midterm-fearing Congress would like to, the bad law and worse economics that have created the border crisis with Mexico. It makes even less sense to introduce de jure bilingualism in communities surfeited with Mexican immigrants. But this idea that Mexican immigration will topple the nationhood and traditions of European-Americans is nine parts alarmism and one part B.S.

Can anyone point me to the border towns where democracy has collapsed, supplanted by Latin American-style caudillos? Have Arizona, California, and the rest of the Southwest become less American or less loyal? Restrictionists are too quick to compare America’s immigration with that of Europe or of collapsed empires of the past. But it’s a false comparison between, say, Muslim immigrants who settle in Rotterdam and refuse to integrate with Dutch society, and Mexican immigrants who go to Catholic mass and long to become American citizens. The former pose a real challenge to a society’s stability, but the latter can be sucessfully assimiliated if policymakers want to assimilate them. (Yes, controlling the immigration flow would be the keystone of any successful assimilation.) Reason’s August/September 2006 issue is a good springboard for any discussion on the topic.

I sense some cognitive dissonance at the Wall Street Journal op-ed desk about this, though. Liberal and conservative politics can apparently be transmitted genetically. But culture can’t. Anyone able to crack that logic?

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by Ana Marie Cox

With the arrival of Oliver Stone’s "World Trade Center," many critics — especially on the right — have taken it upon themselves to ask America if we really remember 9/11. You know, do we think about it enough? Have we kept the terror fresh in our minds as a way to replenish our will to fight the war on terror? Or has the liberal media white washed it, turned that horrible day into a mere memory, a caricature of itself easily compartmentalized and laid aside? Well, yes, they have.

l

From Slate’s "The Worst Horrible Day Ever, a 9/11 Coloring Book for Kids of Ages."

Baltimore City, Maryland, 11 am.

By Michael J. Totten

TEL AVIV – Um…something’s not right. Iran is supposed to nuke Jerusalem today, and today is almost over. All they’ve done so far is harass the Romanians. Well, that’s the Middle East for you. People around here just don’t respect time the way Westerners do. Everything is done at the last minute, late, or never. At least I made it through dinner at that fancy French place on the corner with the piano next to the bar.

by Michael J. Totten

Israel is not a good country to pick a fight with, as what happened to Hezbollah showed. Romania, though. They’re easy, apparently.

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — A Romanian oil rig off the coast of Iran came under fire from an Iranian warship and was later occupied by Iranian troops, a company spokesman said.

The Iranians first fired into the air and then fired at the Orizont rig, said GSP spokesman Radu Petrescu. Half an hour later, troops from the ship boarded and occupied the rig and the company lost contact with the 26 crew members shortly afterward.

Petrescu said he had no information about any injuries or deaths. The Orizont rig has been moored near the Kish island in the Persian Gulf since October 2005, he told the Associated Press.

Eugen Chira, the political consul at the Romanian Embassy in Tehran confirmed the incident, but provided few details.

"Some forces opened fire. That an incident has happened is true. We have no details or the reason yet," he said.

By Michael J. Totten

TEL AVIV — Okay, now I‚Äôm getting annoyed. Here I am, ready to liveblog the first use of nuclear weapons in anger since the end of World War II, right outside the blast radius, and Iran‚Äôs little nutjob-in-chief looks like he might not be into it after all. Maybe he‚Äôs waiting for the sun to set so the flash over Jerusalem will be bright like he promised.

My Nikon, my Sony video cam, and my Olympus podcasting dealie are all on standby. And no, I will not post a photo of myself wearing the helmet and goggles…

by David Weigel

Ryan Sager (read his book) takes issue with my dismissal of Mario Loyola’s adoration of the president, arguing that Bush’s "unique disregard for public opinion" is "a positive trait."

Where he’s gone against conservative principles is in areas where he simply doesn’t have any conservative principles. For a man who came into office without a foreign policy, Bush is uniquely unengaged in domestic policy.

He sold-out small-government values on education in his first major bill as president because he really doesn’t believe the government is the problem in public schools — he thinks the federal government just needs to enforce stricter standards.

He gave free-market health-care reform short shrift and signed the Medicare prescription-drug bill because he didn’t see anything particularly wrong with massively expanding the size of the welfare state.

He signed off on pork-filled highway and farm bills because reducing pork has never been a priority in his administration.

These aren’t moral failings, or a failure to stand up for what he believes in. He simply doesn’t believe in a number of principles that used to define conservatism.

I’ll buy some of that, but I don’t buy that Bush ignores public opinion. He "ignores public opinion" the same way a losing kiddie soccer team ignores its 0-11 scores. He’s obviously peeved when he’s down in the polls, or when Americans rebuff one of his initiatives. It was pretty clear in his yesterday’s press conference, but it was clearest in the 2005 Social Security campaign (an initiative I actually supported, at first). Bush was clearly angry that the polls were turning against him and tried to reframe the fight as his courage versus the whims of a wimpy public.

What Marlo wants to know is whether or not we’ve got the courage, the political courage to take this issue on and solve it.  That’s what she wants to know. And what I want to assure you all is that I like calling Congress to do big things, because that’s what we got elected to do.

He eventually gave up that fight, of course. And he had claimed, as he had claimed about vetoing pork-stuffed appropriations packages, that he was in it to win it and wouldn’t give up, damn the polls and damn the torpedos. He did the same, as Sager points out, on McCain-Feingold. He caved on the Department of Homeland Security – a big government disaster he originally claimed to oppose – when he (or Karl Rove) saw how it could be thumped over the crania of the Democrats.

There’s nothing wrong with retooling an agenda or message to stay afloat and push it through Congress. (OK, it depends on how you retool the actual agenda.) And it’s expected that an administration try to paper over its shifts and mood changes and claim not to care about the polls. But it obviously pays attention to polls in doing so.

(Cross-posted on Hit and Run.)

by David Weigel

The great Radley Balko (read his research on no-knock raids here) flags this video from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: 5000 past and present officers of the law united to lobby for reform in America’s drug laws. The group’s been ramping up its public appearances, and this is a collection of the best stuff. (Warning: The gap between organization quality and website quality will shrink as the group grows in prominence. Hopefully.)

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by David Weigel

Ana, I notice that the DSCC’s graphic is missing one of the GOP’s strongest Senate challengers – Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. Of course, Steele is black (he’s meeting with Russell Simmons this week – alright stereotypes!) After the Weekly Standard caught flak for portraying Al Sharpton as a chauffeur, I bet the Democrats didn’t want to risk the avalanche of negative press for calling a black dude a snake.

by Ana Marie Cox

It’s an improvement over immigrants=terrorists visual rhetoric of the last DSCC video, but, please, make it stop.