About a year ago, I reported after a daring visit to Empire Central the then-dramatic news that the McCain/ Bush/ Kennedy Amnesty/ Immigration surge bill was in trouble—to the surprise of Beltway Treason Lobbyists and Beltway Immigration Reform Patriots alike. (That this kind of Stockholm syndrome affects even good people inside the Beltway is why it’s worth risking ambassadors from America to D.C. from time to time.

Last week, I found nothing quite so heartening, but there were a few encouraging straws in the wind:

• Intense discontent among patriotic immigration reformers and Republicans generally with McCain’s gerrymandered primary victory and his (Steve Sailer-predicted) Establishment me-tooism (click here for a devastating Tom Sowell critique of McCain’s Martin Luther King groveling). It’s not yet reached Dole-1996 proportions, but it still might.
• Surprisingly widespread resigned acceptance among Beltway Republicans that McCain’s much-touted POW record will boomerang, just like John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, because of allegations, widespread on the internet, that he eventually collaborated with his captors. I don’t know what the truth is. But I do know that, nearly twenty years ago, William Stevenson, author of the huge spy best-seller A Man Called Intrepid, and his co-author and wife Monika Jensen, were privately expressing puzzlement at finding in their research for their Kiss the Boys Goodbye: The Shocking Story of Abandoned U.S. Prisoners of War in Vietnam, that McCain had emerged as an opponent of efforts to solve the MIA conundrum.
• But neither Clinton nor Obama can easily raise this—which is why the idea of nominating an unimpeachable war hero, Jim Webb (D-VA) is visibly gaining ground.