This is from the May, 2000 issue of Liberty Magazine, via archive.org. In a sign that I’m getting older, I read this the first time it was published. It’s by Gene Healy, and as we go into the 2008 election cycle, it’s worth asking if McCain has changed:

The littlest megalomaniac

A friend of mine, who once worked for an Arizona congressman, told me a joke that Arizonans on the Hill like to tell about John McCain. When the Senator’s name came up in conversation, someone would occasionally deadpan: “He was a war hero, you know.”

Yes, John McCain was a war hero, and neither he nor his media fan club would let you forget it during McCain’s presidential bid. John McCain’s a real hard guy, he doesn’t mind telling you, and his war record proves it. McCain’s tough enough to take on the Jesus-squeezers of the Christian Right, as well as those timid libertarian types who would let the First Amendment stand in the way of a good campaign finance bill. When Michigan Governor John Engler complained about McCain using Democrats to hijack the G.O.P. primary in that state, the senator snarled: “My advice to Governor Engler: be a man.” You could almost hear the rest of this diatribe, as it echoed in McCain’s head (along with the whirring of helicopter blades and Jim Morrison singing “The End”): “Shut it, fat boy. How long do you think you’d last in the Hanoi Hilton without your nightly box of Dove Bars?”

McCain’s tough-guy posturing and gratuitous trumpeting of his war record resonated particularly well with neoconservatives. Bill Kristol, David Brooks, et al, swooned over the candidate like preteens at a Ricky Martin concert. But in a February 25, column in the Washington Post, neocon Charles Krauthammer outdid them all. Krauthammer explained the Significance of the McCain Moment, and in the process descended into self-satire. John McCain, you see, is Jesus Christ. Of McCain’s war experiences, Krauthammer wrote: “He suffered for our sins. He did not die for them, though he came very close. At a subliminal level, this suffering has become in the public imagination a kind of expiation for the war itself.” Oh, Jesus. As Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com likes to say: “Are we to be spared nothing?” Even state-worshipping leftists have enough good taste to wait until a president is assassinated or at least elected before they start to deify him. And since when did a Beltway hawk like Krauthammer think we had any sins to expiate from Vietnam, anyway? What is he referring to, our shameful failure to nuke Hanoi?

However disappointed we might find ourselves with the two major party candidates, we ought to be thankful that the McCain bubble has burst. At best, the man is a loudmouthed thug who inspires hysterical adulation among people who confuse boorishness with “straight talk.” At worst, he’s dangerous. February 27th’s New York Times tells us that McCain’s childhood hero was Napoleon Bonaparte. McCain shares many qualities with his childhood idol: he is arrogant, impetuous, power-hungry, short-tempered and short (5’7”). It was bad enough having an overgrown, incontinent child like Clinton in command of the most powerful army in the world. The last thing this country needs is a president with an authoritarian personality and a Bonaparte complex. —Gene Healy

[Reflections, Liberty Magazine, May 2000]

Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell nearly always gets to the heart of the matter. This includes, over the years, immigration. (See, for example, this 1997 essay from Forbes, reprinted in The Social Contract.)

Today Bill Steigerwald interviews Sowell at FrontPageMagazine about Sowell’s new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Apparently, there’s nothing about immigration in the book, but Steigerwald and Sowell get onto our subject, anyway. I’ll just point you to highlight quotes from Sowell:

I’m amazed when they talk about the guest-worker program in Europe. No one even asks, “What has happened with guest-worker programs in Europe?” What has happened is that they’ve brought in people who hate their guts. This is why you have terrorism in London and Madrid and riots in Paris and other French cities by people who have absolutely no desire to assimilate and who in fact hate the very ideas of the country in which they live.

[snip]

There is the second-generation phenomenon. You have people who move in from some poor country — the Middle East, Mexico, whatever. Those people may be very glad to be in the United States or Britain or wherever they may be. But then they have children. And their children have never seen those other places; they’ve never lived that poorer life. All they know is that the population around them is a hell of a lot more prosperous than they are. And there are all sorts of ideologues and hustlers ready to tell them that it’s society’s fault that they don’t have what other people have. This then gives you the people who hate the country in which they live.

[snip]

[People] love to say things like, “They thought the Irish and the Jews were unassimilable but look at them now, etc.” Well, the circumstances of the Irish and the Jews were radically different from the circumstances of the people who are coming here from Central America.

First of all, the times were different. First of all, the Irish, the Jews and blacks as well, who were moving out of the South, had leaders and organizations that were doing their damnedest to get them assimilated to the norms and the society to which they were moving.

Today, you have just the direct opposite. You not only have groups within in these societies that are trying to keep them unassimilable and full of resentment. But you also have people from outside the group, including politicians but also ideologues and intellectuals, who say one culture is as good as another and why should we expect them to assimilate to our culture. Well, that’s wonderful. You should try to go to China and live without speaking Chinese.

Would you like a bit more from Sowell? Then please read his brief essay “Multicultural Education,” written in the early 1990s. The essay contains nothing specifically about immigration. But it is probably the most potent and condensed defense of Western civilization you will ever encounter.

Ron Paul has signed the NumbersUSA Immigration Enforcement Pledge, the same pledge signed earlier, (and much less credibly) by Mike Huckabee. The pledge says

“I pledge to oppose amnesty or any other special path to citizenship for the millions of foreign nationals unlawfully present in the United States. As President, I will fully implement enforcement measures that, over time, will lead to the attrition of our illegal immigrant population. I also pledge to make security of our borders a top priority of my administration.”

There’s more, and as we’ve said, Ron Paul is more credible in terms of meaning what he says than Mike Huckabee is.

Over at “Redstate” website, a ruling has been laid down to regulate the use of nicknames for open borders zealots such as John McCain and George W. Bush.

In an edict entitled “And Now a Word for our Commenters” (subtitled “Racism is not Welcome at Redstate”),Leon H. Wolf solemnly pontificates:

Here’s the deal: we know that many of you are upset with McCain and/or Bush, and that many of you are/were upset about immigration. That’s fine. We also know that many of you are fond of using what you consider to be clever variations on McCain’s name: McAmnesty, McPain, McInsane, etc. We think that’s extraordinarily lame, but within the bounds of the rules.

OK, so they will permit some nicknames. But not others:

What is not fine, okay, or within the bounds of the rules, is to use Latino names as an insult. We are speaking, specifically, of “Jorge Arbusto” and “Juan McCain,” although it’s certainly possible that others are floating out there or may yet be invented.

And why is that, exactly?

Allow me to clue anyone who thinks these names are funny or clever in to something: racism isn’t clever or funny. If you think you’ve really zinged someone by calling them (sic) by a Latino name, that’s a pretty reliable (nearly infallible, in fact) indicator that you don’t like Latino people.

I disagree that the use of such names is an indicator of being “anti-Latino”.
Frankly, I find the designation “Jorge Arbusto” funny, clever, and quite appropriate, given our president’s open intention to Mexicanize the United States.
You could also object to the use of “McPain” which could be offensive to those in chronic pain, or “McInsane”, which could be offensive to the mentally ill.
But Redstate will have none of the bad behavior permitted on other, less enlightened websites:

I know that many of you may come from other corners of the internets where this sort of thing is everyday fare, but be advised, it will not fly at RedState. If you want to complain vociferously about McCain, Bush, or anyone else’s position on immigration, you may certainly do so, but if you can’t do it in a way that doesn’t indicate your disdain for Latino people, then you should probably do it elsewhere. Because you will just get banned for doing it here.

The Redstate edict closes with this:

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

A reader in Toronto, Canada, Bruce J. Wellington (contact him ) has written a book featuring immigration. Wellington is an economist who specializes in the impact of immigration on employment.

Wellington writes:

My book is 90 percent is about the reaction of people to the economic duress we are experiencing. The other 10 percent is about the economics of immigration. How the people react to immigration is the book’s central theme.

As an economist I have worked out the financial impact of immigration better than the professionals. My findings have generated a controversy in Canada.

The plot focuses on how a grass roots resistance to immigration and how mass immigration negatively impacts the social and economic progress of the country. This is familiar territory for VDARE.COM readers and applies as well to Americans as Canadians.

The working title is “Quiet Revolt” and portions of it can be read here:

You know you’re getting the best of your opponents when they begin hitting below the belt, picking up a handful of sand and throwing it into your eyes, giving you “noogies” when they have you in a head lock, etc.The latest example of such tactics aimed at our side comes from a Feb. 7 program scheduled by the Chicago-based Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR): “Learning From Past Targets of the Politics of Hate: The Internment of Americans of Japanese Descent.”

The “politics of hate.” Hmmmmm. Get the picture here, you mean-spirited, round ‘em up and ship ‘em out fanatics?

The noon-to 1:30 p.m. event, which will be held in the ICIRR’s headquarters and sponsored by the Citizens League, Asian American Institute, Equal Voices Campaign and Albany Park Neighborhood Council, notes that during World War II, 120,000 people of Japanese descent, more than half of them U.S. citizens, were interned in these camps.

Speakers will include two former internees of these camps.

“Bring your lunch and come learn from past struggles!” reads the online flyer.

Now, I don’t care where you stand on whether these internment camps were the result of legitimate national security concerns or blatant racism, I’d like to suggest that the following question is a fair one to put before this program’s sponsors, especially the Asian American Institute: Are you at all bothered that the ICIRR is using the two former internees, i.e., attempting to compare what happened to them more than 60 years ago to the removal of people in this country illegally through strict enforcement of our immigration laws?

Via Commonreader, who describes it as “Doing the Jobs Mexicans Are Too Far Away to Do” here’s a story about the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where they’re working on a “robot suit” which

they hope will dramatically ease the burden on agricultural field workers as well as other manual labor intensive jobs.

Developed at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology graduate school, with support from the Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, the new robot suit attempts to address the challenges faced by Japan’s aging, and difficult to replace, rural farm population.

It’s amazing how the American agricultural sector doesn’t think that rural Americans are difficult to replace–they’re importing replacements by the million. We’ve done stuff about Japanese robots before–see here for a roundup.

An Amber alert was issued today for missing 3-year-old Seth Guerrero, whose mother and infant sister were found killed this morning in their Kansas City, Kansas home. (Amber Alert Issued For Toddler After KCK Deaths, www.myfoxkc.com, 02/03/08)

He is assumed to be with his father, Andrew Anthony Guerrero, who, it is reported, is fleeing to Mexico.

The media so far has described Andrew Guerrero as Hispanic, 23 years old, with brown hair and brown eyes, weighing 170 pounds and standing 5′9.”

No word yet on his citizenship.

Feel like you’ve heard gruesome stories just like this before? You have. Here. And here. And here. And here. And here.