Among the most insufferable do-gooders are those in the healthcare profession, who believe their high social status enables them to redesignate their extreme liberal views as medical ethics. One serious area of disengagement from normal morality is their belief that criminals (including prisoners and illegal aliens) should receive organ transplants. Not only are these procedures very expensive, there are never enough donated organs to supply the need, so every organ given to a criminal means a law-abiding person does not get one.

One recent example was a 21-year-old illegal alien about to receive her fourth liver transplant: Million-Dollar Mexican Medical Moocher. In 2003, illegal alien teen Jesica Santillan received two sets of heart-lung transplants after her parents smuggled her into this country for free medical care. The surgeon at Duke University Hospital inserted a heart and lungs with the wrong blood type, and she died after the second set failed to remedy the mistake. (Interestingly, the parents refused to donate the salvageable organs they had received.)

A couple days ago, the LA Times reported scandalous organ transplants for known foreign criminals: Four Japanese gang figures received livers at UCLA. The article noted that in each year between 2000 and 2004, “more than 100 patients died awaiting liver transplants in the greater Los Angeles region.”

Here is today’s update about the surgery done for yakuza criminal Tadamasa Goto:

A powerful Japanese gang boss who received a liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center donated $100,000 to the Westwood hospital shortly after the surgery, The Times has learned.

A plaque dated November 2001 at the entryway to a seventh-floor surgery office reads, “In grateful recognition of the Goto Research Fund established through the generosity of Mr. Tadamasa Goto.”

UCLA confirmed the amount of the donation Friday. Law enforcement sources say Goto, 65, is the leader of the ruthless Goto-gumi gang. He received a transplant at UCLA in July 2001, The Times reported Thursday. He made his donation less than three months later. [...]

“If you want to destroy public support for organ donation on the part of Americans, you’d be hard pressed to think of a practice that would be better suited,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
[After livers, cash to UCLA, LA Times, May 31, 2008]

Yep, the big fear is that the suckers will quit signing up to donate their organs. It would kill off the golden goose for elite specialists who do transplant operations.

For some PC MD BS, see DukeHealth’s Jesica Santillan: What We Learned. (Of course there is no mention of her immigraton status.)

One of the sad facts of organ transplantation is that there are simply not enough organs available to save everyone who needs a transplant. Because too few Americans become organ donors, 17 people die every day waiting for transplants that never happen.

See, it’s Americans’ fault again!

And if you have an organ donation card in your wallet, give serious thought to tearing it up.

VDARE likes to poke fun of Mark Krikorian and the Center for Immigration Studies for “triangulating” immigration policy somewhere between National Review Online and VDARE.

Their Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration have often been a bit heavy on the NRO side of the triangle and raised a few of our eyebrows. For example, In 2003 they gave the award to Joel Mowbray for his reporting in National Review on the Saudi visas. Mowbray was not there to accept the award, so National Review immigration John Miller accepted it with a note from Mowbray who indicated that he does “not agree on the key question of immigration levels.” Last year Ramesh Ponnuru gave a speech.

I’m happy to say that there is absolutely nothing to criticize about this year’s awards. Both the speaker and the award recipient—William McGowan and Heather Mac Donald respectively—were excellent choices.

MacDonald has done more than anyone to expose the pathologies of the Hispanic underclass with her pieces in City Journal that expose the depth of immigrant gangs, the lack of “Hispanic family values,” as well as issues like Mexico’s meddling in America’s immigration policy and other topics that few conservatives would tread. She spent the majority of his speech going after Open Borders conservatives like Jason Riley and Linda Chavez who believed in the “Myth of the Redemptive Hispanics” who would save America through their Catholic family values. She found it particularly odd that many conservatives are willing to talk about social pathologies among the African Americans, but not Hispanics—a point that I’d like to address at length in a future column.

The opening remarks were made by William McGowan, the author of the invaluable Coloring the News. McGowan has not written much about immigration and I was pleasantly surprised at how hard-hitting some of his speech was. For example, he said that there was a ethnic conflict of interest with the large number of Hispanic journalists. He also made the exact same observation I made at the VDARE blog about the NY Times’ failure to note that virtually all the corrupt border patrol agents were Hispanic.

Most likely unaware of Peter Brimelow’s criticism of CIS’s triangulation, McGowan praised the early anti-immigration progressives for “triangulating” (his word) between the open borders libertarians of the day and the Nativists.

CIS will post the transcript next week on their website. Let’s hope that they continue to lean more towards Heather Mac Donald and further away from Ramesh Ponnuru.

From Science Blogs:

99% Genetic? Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable

[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
Posted on: May 13, 2008 10:54 AM, by Chris Chatham

Your ability to control thought and behavior relative to your peers - a set of capacities known as “executive functions” - is almost entirely genetic in origin, according to a newly in-press paper from Friedman et al. Over 560 twins completed tests to measure fundamental components of these executive functions, and the results were analyzed in terms of how similar identical twins performed to one another relative to fraternal twins (all twins in the study were reared together). Astonishingly, the results show that the variance common to all executive functions is correlated roughly twice as much between identical twins as between fraternal twins, and that individual variance in executive function falls directly in line with what would be expected from a perfectly heritable trait.

(more…)

Dennis Mangan points to a WSJ article on a new behavioral economics study in which college students in 16 cities around the world played a positive sum game in which everybody benefited if nobody freeloaded.

Not surprisingly, players in all countries chose to give up some money to punish freeloaders. The difference was in how the freeloaders reacted to being punished. In prosperous countries, the cheaters tended to respond to punishment by mending their ways. In the more uproarious countries, however, the bad guys just got mad and hit back.

Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone’s benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand. …

Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players–and to give up a token themselves to do it.

“They didn’t believe they did anything wrong,” said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.

Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

“The question is why?” said Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.[Revenge of the Freeloaders Study Finds Culture Influences Reaction To Reward, Rebuke, By Robert Lee Hotz, May 30, 2008 ]

This is not a big surprise. The Swiss, for example, have been playing positive sum games among themselves for centuries–If we all, no matter what language we speak, get together and defend our country from invaders, we can all live in peace and prosperity.

In contrast, lots of people around the world, like Jared Diamond’s pal in New Guinea who got 30 people killed in order to avenge his uncle’s death, seem to enjoy negative sum games–what I call the “I’ll See You in Hell” Syndrome after what movie villains say when, finally thwarted by the good guy, they start the self-destruct timer on their volcano lair.

Really, the only unexpected result here is Seoul. This may be related to a strain of knuckleheadedness visible among the young in South Korea, who engage in possibly the world’s largest and certainly best organized riots. The multitudinous South Korean riot police, dressed in Orc-like uniforms, don’t attempt to prevent riots like other countries’ wussy riot police–their job, instead, is to go out and do battle with the rioters. And a good time is had by all.

The National Football League requires all draft prospects to take the 12-minute Wonderlic IQ test, but it’s not clear how much, if any, predictive value it has.

Here’s a little study of quarterbacks who entered the league from 2000 to 2004 by IQ (21 = 100) versus yards passing, which shows a strong positive relationship.

On the other hand, is yards passing the best dependent variable? And there are some arbitrary cut-offs involved. What do you do with all the quarterbacks who have barely gotten to play at all? There are quite a few drafted quarterbacks in the data table with 120+ IQs who have barely gotten into an NFL game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if teams keep an eye out for Brian Griese-types–smart quarterbacks who aren’t that physically talented–and keep them around in case injuries wipe out the top two quarterbacks and they need to plug in a warm body who has memorized the playbook and won’t throw too many interceptions. In non-emergency situations, you can use them as quasi-assistant coaches in the meantime, having them do clipboard-associated chores. The smarter ones won’t rebel as much at not getting any glory and will be working hard mentally to learn the game so they can become coaches later on. And they’re not likely to go to prison for dog-fighting.

Or maybe the NFL uses the Wonderlic for purposes of negotiating contracts? “This kid got 6 right out of 50 and he’s being represented by his uncle. Nobody in that family will know “net present value” from a hole in the ground, so let’s offer them a $10 million dollar contract with $9 million deferred until 2040. They’ll think they’re going to be rich.” (Dennis Rodman signed that kind of deal with the Chicago Bulls once, where he got $100,000 per year for 30 years–of course, that annual $100k might be what’s keeping Rodman living indoors at present.)

It seems like with all the money involved, somebody should make up a quarterback specific cognitive test rather than rely just on a standard IQ test like the Wonderlic. I’ve played quarterback for a handful of plays in six on six flag football, but I was quickly yanked because I was clearly overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of following four receivers while dodging the pass rusher. Compare quarterbacks to baseball pitchers. The physical demands aren’t that different–a tall guy with a strong arm–but pitchers can concentrate on one thing at a time, with just a little bit of multitasking for checking the baserunner’s lead at first.

The QB brain test would involve things like memorizing plays and tracking multiple receivers and defensive linemen simultaneously–the military probably has a "situational awareness" test for fighter pilot applicants that could be adapted.

You could validate the test at summer camps for elite high school quarterbacks, where you can get a big sample size, and then track them at the camp, in high school, and then in college.

Modern Western culture, dominated as it is by status striving among whites to score points off each other by most fervently embracing “The Other,” has largely become dependent upon a tiny handful of Others to say the things that need to be said.

From the Daily Mail:

Bishop says collapse of Christianity is wrecking British society - and Islam is filling the void

By Sean Poulter and Niall Firth

The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.

It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.

In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.

In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ’scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.

The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ’social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.

He said Church leaders had capitulated to Marxist revolutionary thinking and quoted an academic who blames the loss of ‘faith and piety among women’ for the steep decline in Christian worship.

Dr Nazir-Ali said the ‘ newfangled and insecurely founded’ doctrine of multiculturalism has left immigrant communities ’segregated, living parallel lives’.

Christian values of human dignity, equality and freedom could be lost as the way is left open for the advance of brands of Islam that do not respect Western values.

The Bishopric of Rochester is one of the ten most powerful positions in the Church of England.

Dr Nazir-Ali’s attack on the decline of Christianity appears to put him in the opposite corner to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and many of his fellow bishops.

But he holds some views in common with the Church’s other widely-heard and popular prelate, Ugandan-born Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York.

Over the past six months, Dr Nazir-Ali has made a number of criticisms of Islam and its influence.

Among them have been charges about the spread of no-go areas for non-Muslims and worries over the impact of new mosques.

Last weekend he was one of just three bishops who backed a move in the Church’s parliament, the General Synod, to encourage the conversion of Muslims to Christianity.

His latest attack once again criticises Dr Williams’s backing for sharia law, saying that ‘recognising its jurisdiction in public law is fraught with difficulties, precisely as it arises from a different set of assumptions than the tradition of law here’.

Dr Nazir-Ali detailed his arguments in an article in the newly-launched political magazine Standpoint.

The bishop, himself an immigrant from Pakistan in the mid-1980s, admitted that he might be thought the least qualified person to discuss British identity. But he quoted Kipling: ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’

The bishop said ’something momentous’ had happened in the 1960s. He quoted historians who point to a cultural revolution in which women ceased to uphold or pass on the Christian faith and to the role of Marxist revolutionaries.

Dr Nazir-Ali pointed with approval to a finding that ‘instead of resisting this phenomenon, liberal theologians and church leaders all but capitulated.

He said: ‘It has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we now find ourselves.’ In the place of Christianity there was nothing ‘except perhaps endless self-indulgence’.

The bishop said the consequences were ‘the destruction of the family because of the alleged parity of different forms of life together, the loss of a father figure, especially for boys, because the role of fathers is deemed otiose, the abuse of substances (including alcohol), the loss of respect for the person leading to horrendous and mindless attacks, the increasing communications gap between generations and social classes - the list is very long.’

Another result, he said, was that immigrants had been welcomed, not on the basis of Britain’s Christian heritage, to which they would be welcome to contribute, but by the ‘newfangled and insecurely-founded doctrine of multiculturalism’.

Back in 2005, I wrote a VDARE column about why the white working class in the U.S. has lower crime rates than their distant cousins in the white working class in Britain. Stronger Christianity in America was the first explanation.

On May 15, Knox County (TN) Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner rescheduled the trial of Knoxville Horror defendant George Geovonni “Detroit” Thomas for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, for August 11, the same date it had originally been scheduled for on May 17, 2007. Due to dithering by Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols over whether to seek the death penalty in case of a murder conviction, Thomas’ trial had since been postponed until a date to be determined in 2009, an unconscionable, and arguably unconstitutional delay of over two years after the defendant’s arrest.

The Sixth Amendment states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial…” This amendment was to prevent British-style abuses, where the government throws someone in jail to rot, without a trial. It never occurred to the Framers that the government might delay a trial, in order to avoid exercising its proper powers, rather than to abuse them. Then again, the Framers never anticipated the likes of Randy Nichols.

Last May, Judge Baumgartner scheduled all four state trials for this spring and summer: May 12 for Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins; June 16 for Cobbins’ girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman; and July 14 for Cobbins’ half-brother, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson.

And yet, DAG Nichols did not announce whether he would seek the death penalty in the first case until December 7, and then only under pressure from Judge Baumgartner. Nichols took until March 3 to announce that he would seek the death penalty in all four cases.

The DAG’s office was responsible for other delays, as well. In early March, Nichols’ prosecutors requested and got permission to repeat DNA tests on the defendants that had been completed one year earlier, leading Thomas’ attorneys, Tom Dillard and Steve Johnson, to suggest that the DAG’s office had lost or destroyed evidence. (See the prosecution’s rejection of the defense’s characterization here. ) Already last October, the prosecution requested and got a delay of its duty to share its evidence with the defense. Since the defense must have sufficient time to examine the people’s evidence, the latter move was bound to delay the trial.

In January, Cobbins’ attorney, Kim Parton, responded to the death penalty notice that she lacked sufficient time to mount a competent defense. Tennessee law requires that any defendant on trial for his life be represented by two defense lawyers, one of whom must be certified as qualified to defend capital cases; the aforementioned defendants only had one defense counsel each. Thus did Judge Baumgartner move the first planned trial, of Cobbins, from May 12, 2008 to January 26, 2009.

In April’s federal trial, in which Eric Dewayne Boyd was convicted as an accessory after the fact to the carjacking, TBI serology expert Jennifer Millsaps testified that DNA matches linked (only) Davidson and Cobbins to the rapes of Christian. (Coleman’s statements to federal investigators put her at the murder scene.) DAG Nichols sought to bolster his weak rape case against Thomas via incriminating testimony in the first three state cases.

Three conditions made seeking the death penalty a no-brainer: 1. The murders were committed in conjunction with other felonies; 2. More than one person was murdered; and 3. The killers’ gruesome, hours-long torture of Channon Christian. DAG Nichols ultimately gave eight reasons for seeking the death penalty.

DAG Nichols’ death penalty dithering appears to this observer to have been due to his desire not to offend Knoxville’s black community, and provided a golden opportunity for Thomas, who already had the requisite attorneys, who applied to the court to restore his original trial date.

The change may imperil the Thomas prosecution.

Winston Churchill learned in 1897 while fighting the feuding Pathan tribesmen of what’s now the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

“Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combination of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid… The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…”

Now Jared Diamond has published in The New Yorker an account of a tribal feud among New Guinea highlanders based on his native chauffeur’s old war stories. It’s an interesting description of the logic of violence when there’s no state with a monopoly on force to put an end to squabbling.

The uncle of Diamond’s pal was killed in battle by another tribe in 1992, so honor demanded that his nephew avenge it. The young tribesmen spent three years organizing his revenge, which involved expensive diplomacy with many other tribes to borrow their warriors, six battles, and thirty deaths before vengeance was finally his.

Granted, that just meant the ball was now in the other tribe’s court to get revenge on him, but at least it gives the men something to do with their days while their women are out working in the fields.

These are the people that Diamond theorized in his bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel must have higher intelligence than Westerners because they are under more intense selection pressure by their environment. As Diamond wrote in the Prologue of his Pulitzer Prize-winner:

“My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

After this introduction, Jared spends hundreds of pages explaining how it’s totally racist to think that there could possibly be IQ differences! The distribution of power and accomplishment in the modern world is all due to geographical differences between the continents! But, as I gently chided in my review of his book in National Review in 1997,

“Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it’s hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection.”

But exactly what kind of Darwinian selection pressure does constant feuding impose? Diamond’s buddy, as the survivor of the feud, is presumably good at feuding, but he’s not exactly James Clerk Maxwell. Everybody in Diamond’s story seems content to play the game by the old rules, over and over again, with nobody trying to change the rules by technological or political innovations. Even the European tradition of dueling, which strikes us as pretty stupid today, but which served to isolate feuds among two individuals, allowing honor to be satisfied without the extended families being dragged in, seems to have proved beyond the New Guineans.

I suspect that female farming cultures like New Guinea and Africa, where the men spend their ample leisure hours competing to be Big Men, selects for Big Men traits, Machiavellian skills at manipulating others into fighting your battles. (Of course, Machiavelli was hardly the first Machiavellian. What he brought was the power of abstraction to coherently explain the rules of the game of power that so many Big Men had intuitively grasped before him.)

What these kind of female farming economies where the women do most of the work select for is not the nerd traits that are crucial to technological advancement. Perhaps the need to survive winter selects for nerdish genes that are good at technology, which can then be used for creating better weapons.

It’s not exactly clear from Diamond’s account what kind of battles took place. There seem to be “public” battles where young men show off in front of their fans just barely in range of the other side’s arrows, and more serious “stealth” battles, which sound more like Mafioso rub-outs–ambushes and massacres–than the Battle of Gettysburg. The idea of the Waterloo-like “decisive battle,” where armies line up and march shoulder to shoulder toward each other strikes most peoples down through history as nuts. Indeed, the whole idea of a “fair fight” strikes most peoples as nuts.

David Axelrod has built Barack Obama’s campaign around the old 1968 Nixon slogan of “Bring Us Together,” rhetorically running against Karl Rove’s central idea that you only need 51 percent to win.

The funny thing is, of course, that Obama will likely wind up winning with just 51% over Hillary Clinton. In Presidential primary campaigns, the leader normally pulls away due to the bandwagon effect, but Obama has been content to eke out the narrowest victory in recent primary history. He hasn’t done a thing to reach out substantively to white voters worried about his long track record as a racial activist.

Obama tried to lie and bloviate his way out of his first Rev. Wright jam, so Wright went on his little media tour to set the record straight, finally getting Obama to defriend him by saying Obama’s “a politician.” Moreover, Obama has refused to compromise on any race-related issue. So, he’s stuck at 51%.

But, guess what? Karl Rove was right. You only need 51%.

And Axelrod/Obama know it’s really not hard to get 51% with these opponents. It’s not like Germany in 1914, where they’ve got to beat France and Russia (plus any of their friends who tag along). Obama isn’t running against FDR and Reagan, he’s running against a proven screw-up in HillaryCare and the elderly Arizona Jones.

The fine reporter Ralph Z. Hallow has an interesting interview with Tom Tancredo in the Washington Times. Tancredo remains perhaps the most modest of all the politicians who have had an important impact on the country in recent years.

Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado donned his bulletproof vest last year and hit the campaign trail expressly to get his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination - and the voters - to make illegal immigration a real, rather than rhetorical, priority.

He says he failed.

And he doesn’t trust Democratic Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton or even presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain to do the right thing on immigration once one of them moves into the Oval Office.

“Nobody’s going to enter the White House in January of ‘09 who is committed to securing the border and ending the disaster of illegal immigration,” said Mr. Tancredo, who wears the vest when he feels insecure about the enemies he has made over the years while touting his anti-illegals stance.

“Therefore, the next stage in the battle is going to be in the states,” he said.

So, Mr. Tancredo is leaving the halls of Congress to join the front lines, possibly with either a new or established advocacy group, and promote court-tested efforts states and localities have adopted to address the strain illegal immigration has put on the educational systems, social services and law enforcement.

“We will have to see if we can replicate Arizona and Oklahoma in other states because that’s what states and localities do whenever the federal government walks away from its responsibility,” said Mr. Tancredo, who is not seeking a sixth term.

Mr. Tancredo’s distrust of Mr. McCain on questions such as amnesty for illegal immigrants - which each man interprets differently - is so deep that he is not sure he will vote for the presumptive Republican nominee in November.

“Maybe I’ll write me in - who knows?” he said. “When I’m in the voting booth, I’m going to just be tussling with this in my own heart.” …

Mr. Tancredo said Mr. McCain is the last of 10 Republican presidential candidates standing because he and the other eight didn’t provide the leadership voters desired.

“Frankly, I don’t see myself as this great leader, as capable as Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I know I’m not. So I can’t ask people to see something in me that I don’t see in myself.” ….

Opponents who thought he had too much power over immigration policy were snarling “Nazi” and “racist” at him well before entered the Republican nomination battle.

By the Columbus Day Parade in Denver three years ago, epithets were the least of his worries.

He recalled a Denver plainclothes police officer saying, “Congressman, are you aware of the threats on your life here today?”

” ‘More than usual?’ ” Mr. Tancredo asked.

The officer read aloud from his notebook what people were overhead saying about “whacking” Mr. Tancredo that day. More alarming, a parade-route sweep had turned up high-powered rifle ammo taped inside a trash can.

The officer suggested that Mr. Tancredo not ride atop a float but walk the parade route surrounded by eight policemen instead. Along the route, however, he recalled seeing a young woman holding up her baby’s hand “and she has the baby flip me off.”

After that day, the Capitol Police, whose job is to protect members of Congress while in Washington, began showing up now and then at Tancredo speeches across the country.

Eventually he bought a “really good” bulletproof vest on the Internet and wears it when he thinks he needs it.

Mr. Tancredo’s decision to quit the presidential nomination race seemed right at the time.

He was in his hotel room at 11 p.m. on Dec. 20 when he saw former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a one-time advocate of giving sanctuary to illegals and the last of the candidates to adopt a border-security-first approach to the issue, promise in a spot commercial to secure the border and build a fence.

Mr. Tancredo immediately phoned campaign manager Bay Buchanan and said, “You can pull the plug on my campaign. The last domino just fell. Everybody’s come the distance.”

Since then, however, it is not clear whether the impact of Mr. Tancredo’s 11-month presidential nomination campaign has left him as an immigration hero or zero.

“The issue has been elevated to a place it hadn’t been before, but I will also be the first to admit, it has now begun to fall,” he said. “I’m sorry if that’s the result of my getting out of the race.”

“I don’t know that I have that much power over the issue,” Mr. Tancredo said. “I don’t know whether, if I had stayed in the race, it would still be up there at one or two, which is where it was. Now it’s down to three or four. I just don’t know.”

Allow me to predict that the actual assassination threats against Tancredo (as opposed to the much fondled hypothetical ones against Obama) will generate very little interest. Similarly, the 2002 assassination of potential Dutch prime minister Pym Fortuyn by a Stuff White People Like pro-multiculturalist lawyer was greeted by the Great and Good with expressions boiling down to “He had it coming.“