The backlash against the illegal immigration flood is at full boil in Tennessee

You can push people too far

Kit Brewer doesn't like immigrants. "While America was harnessing electricity, while America was winning World War I, winning World War II, inventing the computer, inventing nuclear weapons [and] breaking the DNA code, what were the Mexicans doing?" he asks. "They were making tacos." He pauses to clarify. "By Mexicans, that's kind o' a generic term for me that also includes Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc.. I don't want any immigrants from the Third World." He also mentions Iraq and Sudan.

Brewer used to live in Antioch-which he calls "Hispanioch," because of its large Hispanic immigrant population-but moved after getting tired of his child "having to step over drunk Mexicans in a ditch to get to the school bus." "Thank God I got out," he says. "While I could still get something for my house."

Brewer insists that he doesn't have a problem with all immigrants, just the "Third Worlders." "If somebody wants to come here form Western Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, that's fine. I would have hated to turn away Albert Einstein," he says. "I don't think that the next Albert Einstein is going to come from the Sudan, Mexico or Honduras."

Brewer also thinks that Americans are inherently better and smarter people than those from other nations. "Like it or not, their I.Q.s, except for Orientals, average seven to 20 points below the average American white." When asked how and where he found such a statistic, Brewer cites "the Internet." [See here]

Unlike some other people who have strident opinions about immigrants and the impact that they're having in the U.S., Brewer doesn't differentiate between most legal and undocumented immigrants. "A legal immigrant from the Third World is just an illegal immigrant with a green card," he says.

Kit Brewer is not alone in his isolationist leanings. Throughout Tennessee in recent months, there have been many public and private displays of sentiments that closely echo Brewer's.

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OBAMA AS A RORSCHACH INKBLOT

If you love Barack Obama, as almost everybody interested in U.S. politics does right now, ask yourself this simple question: What do you know about his opinions on any subject? You probably remember he gave a masterful speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. You recall how he spoke and that it was he who spoke: a poised and handsome black man with a deep voice that's reassuring and commanding at the same time.

But what did he say? Admit it. You don't really care. Obama is an uncommonly opaque rock-star politician, though not through any fault of his own. He's written and published two wildly successful books, a memoir and a rumination on politics and policy. But of the million or so people who've bought his books, I'd wager only a tenth have sampled more than a few pages. They don't need to read Obama to love him. They love that he writes and he publishes. They love how he speaks. They love the fact that he exists. They love the way he makes them feel.

This is the key to his appeal, and it places Obama in a very unusual position for an elected politician: He is now the semi-official Rorschach Candidate of 2008. The Rorschach Candidate is the one who provokes enthusiasm not because of the positions he takes but because of who he is. He doesn't seem like a politician; he seems to be better than a politician - fresh, new, different. The Rorschach Candidate is especially exciting because under normal circumstances he couldn't possibly take the nomination, and his race for president would seem like a revolutionary and transformative act in itself. Rorschach Candidates have hovered around presidential contests for the past couple of decades....

Obama is a different kind of Rorschach Candidate, because he's actually run for office and won. A sitting senator, albeit one with only two years under his belt in Washington, he's already cast hundreds of votes - and his votes suggest only that he is a down-the-line liberal Democrat with nothing remotely unconventional about him. Indeed, his close relationship with a crooked Illinois fund-raiser - a relationship that will surely become clearer and more public if he runs - suggests he is a conventional politician in another, more distressing way.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

There is a very good bit of sarcasm here about the media hatred of the too-successful Chilean General Pinochet. It is often forgotten that the world-transforming free market reforms instituted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in fact pioneered some years earlier by Augusto Pinochet. It is also usually forgotten that Pinochet overthrew the Marxist President Allende in response to a request from the Chilean Parliament -- not unlike the way Cromwell and Fairfax overthrew the tyrannical King Charles I in response to a request from the English Parliament (You won't read THAT in the newspapers!). I also have an article about Pinochet on Political Correctness Watch today.

A new monument in France -- to French decay: "This one was unveiled at the end of October in Clichy-sous-Bois. If that name rings a bell, it’s the bell on the fire truck racing through the streets to douse the flaming Citroens and Renaults in last year’s riots. They began when two of France’s legions of — what’s the word? — “youths” were fleeing the cops and decided to hide out in an electrical substation. Bad choice. They were electrocuted. Their fellow “youths” blamed the police and launched a three-week orgy of destruction. Now Clichy-sous-Bois has put up a monument to the unfortunate Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore. As in Arizona and London, this is an official memorial. That’s to say, the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois unveiled the monument to Messieurs Benna and Traore in the front of their school and then led a “silent march” to the substation where he laid a wreath commemorating their death — or, indeed, manslaughter, if some of the complaints against the pursuing gendarmes come off.

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts -- including a big coverage of Tony Blair's recent watering down of official British multiculturalism.

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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