Today, an al Qaeda-connected guy, Nuradin Abdi, was sentenced for conspiring to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio, but the case has been ignored by mainstream media throughout the legal process. (See my earlier blog, Somali Immigrant Pleads Guilty To Plotting Terrorism.)

Was the failure of the plot the problem, the absence of horrific loss of life? It seems like a big deal that there is a growing list of terrorist arrests and convictions within this country, but not so to the bright lights in the editorial offices.

A Somali immigrant was sentenced to 10 years in prison Tuesday for plotting to blow up an Ohio shopping mall with a man later convicted of being an al-Qaida terrorist.

Nuradin Abdi, a cell phone salesman before his arrest, pleaded guilty in July to conspiring to provide material support for terrorists. He will be deported to Somalia after serving the federal sentence.

In a 20-minute statement to the court, Abdi’s attorney Mahir Sherif said his client apologized to the people of the United States, the people of Ohio and the Muslim community. He said Abdi regretted that his conviction might lead to problems for other Muslims.
[Somali Gets 10 Years in Ohio Bomb Plot, San Francisco Chronicle, November 27, 2007]

You may have heard about the new French riots–which aren’t actually French riots, but riots taking place in France. The rioters, same as in 2005, seem to be Muslims, most black Muslims from North Africa. The BBC story below refers to them as “youths” and speaks of resentment, but doesn’t actually say what race or religon the rioters belong to, which, if we didn’t know the secret, would make this one section of the article puzzling:

The BBC’s Alasdair Sandford says there is a lot of anger in Villiers-le-Bel that an initial results of an internal police enquiry suggest officers were not to blame for the crash.

He adds that although plenty of money has been poured into areas like Villiers le Bel - an equal opportunities law was passed designed to combat discrimination and to boost job opportunities for young people - that seems irrelevant when resentment between young people and the police seems worse than ever.

Correspondents say a third of the 26,000 inhabitants in Villiers-le-Bel are under 24 and jobs are hard to come by.[BBC NEWS | Europe | Paris rioters 'criminals' says PM]

Yes, but the discrimination they’re claiming isn’t age discrimination, nor are they rioting because of youthful high spirits.These are crime-ridden black and Muslim suburbs, which are a result of years of bad immigration policy in France. And the BBC is just omitting that. The only mention is in the  very last paragraph mentions that the two teenagers who died in a stupid motorcyle accident were “of Algerian origin.”

The Washington Post writes approvingly on the front page about Alonzo Cantu, “a self-made millionaire who once picked grapes on the migratory farm labor circuit.” Cantu has risen from such humble, presumably Mexican (though the Post won’t specify), origins to become the power-broker of McAllen, Texas. The Post article details developer Cantu’s (his building signature is “Southwestern stucco and Spanish tile”) interests in the new local hospital, the town bank and other businesses, as well as his past and present fund-raising efforts on behalf of Democrats, most recently Hillary Clinton.[How Big Man In McAllen Bundles Big For Clinton. By Matthew Mosk,November 25, 2007]

The Post calls Cantu a “Big Man” in McAllen. That’s no doubt true, but doesn’t give the full flavor of what Cantu is and what he represents for America. In time-honored Mexican fashion, Cantu is McAllen’s cacique, the local grandee who–in return for favors such as political contributions when he demands them–is the intermediary between the town’s little people–his clients–and the political powers-that-be. Caciquismo is a very common social and political arrangement in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, with well-documented roots back to the earliest Spanish colonial period. As the name implies, caciquismo doubtless echoes pre-Columbian Indian arrangements as well.

Thanks to America’s British roots, American social and political arrangements have generally been quite different–until now. Now, wholesale Latin American invasion, legal and illegal, means not only that caciques move north, but their clientèle does too. In a short article, the Post mentions five McAllen clients and cronies of Cantu, excluding the cacique himself but including the local congressman: all have Mexican names. As of the 2000 Census, over 80% of McAllen’s population was of Hispanic origin and over 76% of people over age five spoke a language other than English at home. The city’s population had increased by over 24% since 1990, while almost 28% was foreign-born (which, obviously, does not include anchor babies), strongly implying both that all population growth is attributable to illegal entry and immigration, while Americans are leaving. In 2003, the Census Bureau estimated McAllen’s population had grown over 10% just since the 2000 Census. The Census data for the city of McAllen, of course, entirely omit the entirely Mexican populations of the colonias that have sprouted all around the city limits.

Not so long ago, McAllen was a Texas town. As was typical of the Rio Grande Valley, the population was a mix of white Americans and Mexican-Americans, most with fairly deep roots north of the Rio Grande. Today, however, the Post reports:

Cantu credits his support for the Clintons and members of Congress, especially local Democratic Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, for the positive changes that have happened in the area. A Washington Post review of 15 years of campaign contributions by Cantu and the 339 donors whose checks he has bundled found more than $1.4 million in contributions to federal candidates and party committees, most of it to Democrats.

The Clinton administration set up a $40 million rural empowerment zone near McAllen that helped encourage business investment. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the population has nearly doubled, and nearly 100 Fortune 500 companies have set up operations to help import goods manufactured in Mexico. That has meant jobs and an improved standard of living. [Emphasis added.]

Not surprisingly, the Post says nothing about where the new inhabitants have come from, nor to what extent the new influx–certain to be overwhelmingly from south of the border and illegal–is displacing McAllen’s previous residents. Equally unsurprisingly, cacique Cantu is a vocal lobbying opponent of even the feeble Bush administration’s insincere attempts to fence the border.

Stories like this one tell us what is becoming of America, even though that is not what their writers intend. Perhaps McAllen, Texas was never a Model American City–I don’t know. But what it has become is a Typical Mexican Village writ large, even in its buildings, with all the corruption and patronage that implies. McAllen’s Wikipedia entry lists 13 “sister cities” for McAllen–10 of them are in Mexico. Let’s give the last word to one of cacique Cantu’s clients:

“When Alonzo comes through the door, you want to give to him,” said Gerardo J. Reyna, Cantu’s brother-in-law. Reyna owns McAllen Carpet & Interiors, a company that provides close to 90 percent of the floor coverings in Cantu-built homes and offices. “The last thing you want to do is get on Alonzo’s bad side,” he said with a smile. Reyna donated $1,000 to Clinton.

Former English professor Shelby Steele has a book coming out on another fellow with a white mother and a black father, Barack Obama. John Rosenberg’s Discriminations blog reports on Steele’s recent visit to Toronto:

“… he believes Barack Obama will not win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, in large part because he is caught between pleasing blacks and whites and can never please all Americans at once….

“He needs a self. There’s no self there. I think it comes from a lifetime of being bound up and playing one side, and another side, and never feeling that he had the right to be his own man,” Mr. Steele said in a hotel bar this week. “This is the tragedy, certainly, of the black intellectual class in America. They don’t think they have the right to be individuals, so they’re all just predictable, victim-focused, old line. It’s a generation that’s failed to really take us further. Obama is a part of that. There’s nobody there.”
….
He argues blacks in America typically wear one of two “masks”: They are either challengers or bargainers. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are challengers: Such blacks assume whites are racist until they prove otherwise. Bargainers, on the other hand, make a deal with whites by not rubbing their faces in a history of racism — think of Louis Armstrong or Oprah, he says.
Mr. Obama is an archetypal bargainer, says Mr. Steele, whose forthcoming book on the Democratic contender, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, will be released in time for the primaries.

“The question that hovers over Obama to this day: Is he really black enough? If white people like you, it’s very likely you’re not black enough. Black people are very suspicious of that. To prove himself to black people, he has to be a challenger,” Mr. Steele says.

“White America loves him because they think he’s a bargainer. And so if he goes with whites, blacks don’t like him and say he’s not black enough. If he goes with blacks, whites say, ‘He’s not the guy we thought he was.’ So he’s a bound man.

David Broder says:

Steele writes that “the Sixties stigmatized white Americans with the racial sins of the past — with the bigotry and hypocrisy that countenanced slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Now, to win back moral authority, whites — and especially American institutions — must prove the negative: that they are not racist. In other words, white America has become a keen market for racial innocence.”

Steele likens Obama’s success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the earliest of the crossover heroes he calls “iconic Negroes” was Sidney Poitier.

And it reminded me that in his political biography of Obama, author David Mendell reported the reaction of a focus group of liberal, North Shore (Chicago area) female voters, middle-aged and elderly, when shown a videotape of Obama speaking in his 2004 Senate campaign. Asked whom Obama reminded them of, the answer was “Sidney Poitier.” No wonder Hillary Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, is worried by The Post’s report that Obama has tied Clinton among female voters in Iowa.

But while all of the others mentioned by Steele were entertainers of one kind or another, Obama is the first to carry the “masking” technique of the “iconic Negro” into the realm of politics.

Steele contrasts Obama with “challenger” types such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whose appeal was strictly within the black community and who were seen as threats to the Democratic establishment.Steele, who shares with Obama the lineage of having a white mother and a black father, writes sympathetically of the pressures that drove both sons to choose to live their lives as blacks while operating in largely white institutions.

“The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead,” Steele writes. “To ‘be black,’ he has to exaggerate black victimization in America. . . . Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties — achievement gaps, high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, family collapse, and so on — in the old framework of racial oppression.”

Theoretically, being black ought to free him to take the opposite stands without being denounced with the R-word, just as it has for Shelby Steele.

But, as Obama explained at tireless length in his 1995 autobiography, the preppie from paradise had obsessed his whole life over being black enough, so I doubt if he will do more than make pro forma gestures and do something serious, like dump the Afrocentrist radical Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual adviser.

I’ve read countless articles mulling over whether he is black enough, but I’ve never seen one that asked why in the world the 7/8ths of the electorate who isn’t black would want Obama to be black enough.

I mean, Mitt Romney, who is the second generation quintessence of mainstream corporate Republicanism (his father George Romney was CEO of a car company, a governor, and cabinet secretary), has to jump through hoops to prove that being Mormon doesn’t mean he’ll do something weird if he somehow gets elected, while Obama’s racial religion gets a free pass. Most of the coverage of Obama assumes that everybody hopes he proves he’s black enough, which strikes me as about 179 degrees the opposite of the truth.

Perhaps Obama’s humiliating loss at the hands of black voters in the 2000 Congressional primary helped him grow up and get over his obsession with his missing Kenyan father, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever directly and asked him about whether he’s stopped obsessing over being black enough.

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong claims:

“If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings–say $200,000 a year–to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.”

To justify this claim, he cites a Rube Goldberg formula from a multiple regression study that I’ll leave to you to ponder.

This is a good example of how complex model-building can wind up in the ditch without the authors or readers noticing where things went wrong.

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