TOBY PETZOLD

Steve Chapman at Reason magazine has put up a great post on the Democratic Presidential candidates’ withdrawal of support for one of Bill Clinton’s greatest achievements: the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Even Hillary Clinton can’t bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she’d ever met the man.

“All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts,” she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. “That, sort of, is a vague memory.” In the end, though, Clinton declared that “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.”

I think Hillary’s joke is a reference to Ross Perot, whose low-tech slideshow explanation for why he disliked NAFTA was no match for the wit of Al Gore, as memorably demonstrated in their 1993 debate on Larry King’s CNN program. Remember that? Remember when the Gorebot was a New Democrat and Americans didn’t have to be ashamed of voting Democrat anymore? Ah, yes. The Good Old Days.

Some NAFTA supporters thought it might generate enough growth in Mexico to keep Mexican workers at home. When the tide of illegal immigrants grew, it bred resentment here.

That reaction partly helps to explain the Democratic retreat. By denouncing NAFTA, the presidential candidates can appeal to Americans alarmed about our porous borders without offending Hispanic voters.

I think that’s exactly right. The Democrats have done everything they can to avoid taking responsibility for their part in illegal immigration —and have obviously been abetted in this by Big Media as they do. Trashing up NAFTA only now, in service of whatever retarded protectionist agenda now before them as a party, is still something of a surprise, though.

Both parties are guilty on illegal immigration. And the word is guilty. Whichever one of them who can make the most sense on it is going to win in 2008.

So far —and with the excuse that they are not in power— the Democratic Party has managed to avoid any moral or intellectual responsibility for the issue of illegal immigration. They have —with the help of their enablers in Big Media— put it all off on the Republicans. But on the issue of the War for Iraq? The fur is flying, baby:

WASHINGTON - Anti-war activists at a liberal gathering booed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday for opposing a set date for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq. Facing down the jeers, Clinton said Democrats need to have “a difficult conversation” about the war.

Another potential presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, spoke to the group later in the day and offered an emphatically anti-war appeal.

“Sometimes this is a difficult conversation, in part because this administration has made our world more dangerous than it should be,” Clinton, D-N.Y.

Kerry, who was widely criticized as the party’s standard-bearer in 2004 for being too cautious in his criticism of the war, said Tuesday that politicians “cannot have it both ways.”

In remarks that could have been aimed at Clinton, Kerry said: “It’s not enough to argue with the logistics or to argue about the details. … It is essential to acknowledge that the war itself was a mistake. … It was wrong, and I was wrong to vote for that Iraqi war resolution.”

Ha, ha! Nancy Pelosi’s plan to not make the members of the Democratic caucus toe any party line (i.e., have the balls to own a discernible position) is a crock. As we see.

The moonbats would really like to see Gene McCarthy finally beat Humphrey.

Let’s hope they get their wish.

I saw something about this on Drudge earlier today. From the report at Newsmax.com:

A Florida company wants to implant its Radio Frequency Identification tags in immigrants and guest workers so they can be identified at the workplace.

Scott Silverman, chairman of the Delray Beach-based VeriChip Corporation, said in a “Fox & Friends” TV interview that its RFID implant could be used to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities on the job.

Illegal immigrants could then be readily distinguished from those who registered.

Silverman said: “We have talked to many people in Washington about using it.”

The VeriChip RFID tag is about the size of a large grain of rice and can be injected directly into the body. An antenna in the chip sends data, according to the Web site Technovelgy.com.

It’s the new cattle call, comrades. Get to lovin’ on it!

No. Not that I can see.

So it must be that Mexicans are wanting to be Americans. By the millions. And since it is so, then they ought to do a few things to become Americans.

Paying a fine? That’s fucking nonsense. That’s a sop to asshole politicians who want to be seen to be punitive. But that isn’t how you make an American, is it? By being punitive ab initio? What the fuck?

Instead, Mexicans who want to be Americans should submit themselves to unfalsifiable identification measures by which they can be known forever. Biometric IDs are the way to go. That’s a start. And the rest of us must do the same. Don’t give me your Big Brother nonsense, either: it’s clear that the future will demand that we be known to our government, creditors, and society. Even if it means that we are that much closer to embracing the mark of the beast, we cannot avoid the issue. If we try to avoid the issue, we will be subjecting ourselves to a future of identity theft and fraud that will only worsen.

So get to loving on that microchip up your ass, friend, because that’s how it is going to be.

The other thing is that Mexicans need to learn English. My great-great-great-grandfather Robert Allison Davis (1819-1847) didn’t fight, die, and get dumped in a mass grave in Mexico City along with hundreds of other brave young Yankee men just so that Montezuma could have his revenge.

Assimiliation? That can be a mutual thing. It will be a mutual thing. But it goddamned well ought to start from the premise that Mexicans want to become Americans —and that that hierarchy must be respected.

Lou Dobbs is so strident about this illegal immigration stuff that it is genuinely entertaining.

Thanks for staying angry, Lou. I have no idea what can be done about this inevitable slide into an America para todos, but it’s fun watching you lose your shit.

Keep ‘em comin’, Mr. America.

Word has it that the President’s proposals tonight are going to be an assortment of PR stunts.

Great. Make up some shit and hope that the pro-war conservatives don’t lose both houses of Congress come Novemeber.

Once again, I cannot find at home a great article I happened across at work —this one about Mexican demography. But, until I find it, have a look at this article by Richard D. Vogel. It is suitably socialist and anti-American in its examination of our history, but it explains something about why Mexican immigration is its own thing and cannot be compared to any other group of immigrants:

Two elemental factors have affected the history of Mexicans in the U.S.: first, unlike both the African American and Native American people, they have had sanctuaries — the borderlands of the American Southwest and Mexico itself — places to recuperate from the relentless exploitation and regenerate, and, second, their labor power remains essential to American capitalism.  These two factors have saved the Mexican people from the dismal fate of so many Native and African Americans.

That first factor is correct: Mexico’s eventual reconquest of the American Southwest is a demographic certainty because of the law of propinquity. But the second factor is not uniquely Mexican. Or does Vogel mean to suggest that the labor of black and Native Americans is no longer ”essential” to our capitalist system? Maybe he meant “cost-effective,” instead.

(Oh, and Vogel basically makes the story of the independence of Texas into that of a huge land-grab for slave-owning Anglo-Americans —because, as we know, anything that is not American or Texan enjoys inherent moral superiority, which, as we also know, is not to be understood as romanticizing or whitewashing the nature of Mexico’s own racist and classist history— but it’s still a useful essay.)

I just heard Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, say that he is offended by the reconception of our national anthem (into something called “Nuestro Himno”) and that those seeking to become American citizens should speak English.

I haven’t much followed Angeleno politics since living there six years ago, but Villaraigosa’s opinions are somewhat surprising to me. I don’t recall him being that close to the center back then.

I’m pleased to know there’s a major Latino politician willing to stand up for English as America’s primary language.

I don’t understand the new paradigm.

Actually, it’s been coming on for a while now, but it’s become clearer to me lately that the far Left and the far Right share the same interest in —what do we call it? Transnationalism? Post-nationalism? Whatever it is, the conventional notions of sovereignty are succumbing to a new vassalage for schlubs like you and me.

The Left has always had an open-borders attitude. They embody Einstein’s opinion that nationalism is infantile. But they have also always had to rely on native support for economic and social empowerment —something that cannot easily mix with unconditional support for a borderless America. I mean, do these pro-immigrationists even care what Black America (the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc) thinks about unfettered Mexican immigration —as well as the concomitant ubiquitization of Spanish and that awful polka music the Mexicans enjoy so much? I doubt it.

The Right —associated with Big Business, the super-rich, and the aspiring upper middle-class— may not like the social or cultural consequences of open-borderism, but they certainly like the cheap labor. So, they turn their heads and abide in silence the colonization of Mexican labor in their own back yards (sometimes, literally) because they know that, if push comes to shove, they will still be able to retreat to their gated communities and send their lily-white spawn to private schools.

So who stands up for the lower and middle classes in America —that is, the vast majority of our population? The Republicans may be impaled on these polls we hear so much about, but I don’t see how Democrats are going to really capitalize on the negative numbers.