Black Box Report

Se sanseacabó (trans. "it's over").

They called him the Tanc. They also called him a demogogic bigot and one-note wonder who tried to drag his party to the far-right on immigration, and credit where credit's due, he succeeded:

Before Tancredo, the GOP presidential candidates didn't take the anti-immigration sentiment they heard on talk radio all that seriously. After Tancredo, it sometimes seems as if it's the only they issue they do take seriously. They scramble to out-Tancredo each other; any hint of sympathy for the undocumented worker is now verboten.

Of course, the Tanc's exit is a bad day for unhinged immigration opponents everywhere. Michelle Malkin offers her salute and promises the Guardians Against ¡Reconquista! will continue the struggle:

Tancredo (will) continue to play an important role in American life, perhaps in the U.S. Senate. Because of his relentless crusading for secure borders and restoration of the rule of law, immigration will not disappear from the presidential race's radar screen after his exit-despite the GOP elite's fervent desire that the issue die down and noisy activists go away.

And of course, by "GOP elite," Ms Malkin means "the majority of Republican voters":

As all of us try to make sense of the current immigration debate and how Tancredo's total rejection by Republican primary voters fits in let's consider these two figures: 1% and 62%. 1% is the share of the Republican vote Tancredo has been receiving. 62% is the share of Republicans who support an earned path to citizenship, according to a new LA Times poll taken two weeks ago. Taken together it appears that Tancredo's approach to immigration, "Deport Those Who Don't Belong, Make Sure They Never Come Back" has been overwhelmingly rejected by even Republican voters, and is just one more example of how the GOP's investment in the immigration issue has failed time and again to produce the results they had hoped for.

But it's not just the jingo-loving nativists that will miss the Tanc. Some of us will miss that certain CUCKOO! CUCKOO! that he brought to the campaign:

He was always fun to watch; kind of like the whacky neighbor on a sitcom who's always good for comic relief when the plot bogs down. I guess that means that Alan Keyes gets to have the lunatic fringe all to himself.

Now we're talking. With Tancredo done sucking all the crazy out of the room, my man Alan Keyes can show us what crazy really looks like!

In the last week we've seen three school bus crashes where, through dumb luck, no children were seriously injured. But how much longer do you think we should play Russian roulette with our kids’ safety?

Any rational person has to objectively call school bus safety an oxymoron. With all the attention, effort and taxpayer expense to educate drivers to buckle up - explain to me how officials argue seat belts for children ought to be optional at best? You can't because you know down deep what this really boils down to is the almighty buck. School districts want Albany to pick up the tab for new belts, Albany wants Washington to write the check. In the end children as young as kindergarteners go from being buckled up in moms car seat to an unsupervised, unsecured romper room that qualifies as school sponsored transportation.

I don't blame the bus drivers, lord knows they have enough to worry about - but I do blame the absence of leadership anywhere in the chain of command to do, let alone say, what’s right.

I promise you this issue is not going away anytime soon.

Fun Fact! It was 105 years ago today that segregationist icon Sen. Strom Thurmond was born. It was Thurmond's original Southern Strategy of splintering the Dixiecrats off from the Democratic Party - and his eventual defection to the GOP in 1964 - that was most emblematic of the shift in the racial attitudes of the two national parties, thus forever making the GOP's nickname, "the party of Lincoln" an ironic joke. And while "celebrate" is not a word that comes to mind when acknowledging the birthday of a racist like Thurmond, it's important to recognize that while HE may be dead, the racism he represented lives on in today's conservative movement.

Take Pat Buchanan, for example, claiming that diversity - specifically Teh Hispanics - is destroying American culture:

Buchanan made it clear that it’s not just illegal immigration he believes is a threat to this country, it’s the Hispanic element. “You’ve got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country,”

Guardians Against ¡Reconquista!, to your posts! Pat is pining away for those early halcyon days of American history when we were all white, European Christians - after we took care of all the redskin savages, of course. So what Pat is lamenting the loss of is not American culture per se, but the top-dog status of HIS culture:

What can Americans say is uniquely our own? Maybe NASCAR and obesity, but not much else. But Mr. Buchanan must mean...WASP culture.

It is views like Mr. Buchanan's that caused the fracturing of societies across the globe. Should Jews have to stop being Jews because they majority of Americans are Christian? Should we ban Muslims from building mosques? Should we burn books because they challenge the idea of the WASP ideal? It is not a far jump to go from xenophobia to racism to hatred to genocide. Americans committed genocide once against the Native Americans because they were different; are we so deluded that we think this can't happen again?

I'd say Pat's that delusional, but I don't think he'd have a problem if some enterprising Americans started passing out smallpox-infected blankets in "Sanctuary Cities." Of course, it's not just the Mexicans. Muslims have brown-hued skin as well, AND worship a different God (!!!), so you know rightwing radio host Michael Savage doesn't like them. He's called the Koran a book of hate, called for the building of mosques to be outlawed and advocated the killing of 100 million muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is now calling on advertisers to drop his show:

CAIR went after his advertisers and has launched a netroots campaign...designed to rip out his intestines and feed it to him. Advertisers are sent the audio feed of his commentary and then asked if they would like to continue supporting him, and of course, who would want to support the above audio sounds bites?

Needless to say, he’s already lost some big advertisers - he’s lost Citrix Systems (you may not know who they are, but in the IT world, trust me, they’re pretty big), and he’s just lost OfficeMax*. More advertisers are on their way out...Like all other hosts, once the money starts walking, his bosses will muzzle him. They don’t care about his views, after all. They simply care about the money his rants bring in, and when they stop bringing in money, his rants are no longer needed.

(*UPDATE: Add AutoZone, TrustedID, JC Penny, Wal-Mart and AT&T to the list.)

But despite Buchanan and Savage's following, they are but small fish in the scum-lined pond of American racism. Tom Tancredo, on the other hand, is a US Representative and presidential candidate, and his new ad doesn't just warn of the threat to white American culture, but that illegal immigrants are coming to sell drugs to your children, rape them, kill them AND DESTROY YOUR LIVES!!!

Think I'm exaggerating?

Tom Tancredo is a barking loon...And I say that only because someone needs to say it. Even Michelle Malkin's money-losing media venture (a.k.a. Hot Air) thinks it's too much:

He turns the issue into a hamfisted "red scare"-era newsreel about barbarians coming to burn and/or pillage America...Gang violence is a component of having open borders. But it's only a component, and the more he tries to inflate it the more sensationalistic and less convincing it becomes.

Even money says his next ad is about illegals importing exotic diseases.

Can't imagine why the Tanc is only polling at 1%.

I have an idea. Let's set aside a nice desert island for Tancredo, Savage, Buchanan and all their paranoid racist followers and deport THEM, so they can live their lives in WASP-y, lilly-white peace and quiet.

The rest of us will get along just fine without them.

Being a former Bush administration official can make finding a gig in the private sector pretty tough, as businesses are hesitant to hire people who have the reverse Midas touch. On the paid lecture circuit, Alberto Gonzales has been getting heckled constantly and having his appearances cancelled:

Students at Pomona College were considering bringing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to speak on campus, but have now rejected that idea. “It was a combination of not having the funding and the impression that students would not attend this event,” said Kelly Schwartz, the chairperson of the Speakers Committee of the Associated Students of Pomona College. According to Pomona’s Student Life newspaper, Gonzales “asked the school to pay him $35,000 in addition to first-class accommodations.”

Based upon his administrative competence and legal acumen, I can't imagine anyone paying Gonzo $35K to do anything. Then again, maybe he knows this, because he's been slashing his prices lately:

'Berto's fee would have been a deeply discounted $35,000. You might remember that he charged $40,000 for appearing at the University of Florida last month. (In a few months you might be able to get Al on the dollar menu at Burger King)

If he can't get work giving speeches, I'm sure there are some county fairs that would take him for their dunk tank. And speaking of which, the other former Bush AG John Ashcroft has been having his own rocky speaking engagements and got some well-deserved ridicule recently for telling one Colorado crowd he'd be willing to be waterboarded if necessary, because it wouldn't kill him:

Ah, but talk is cheap. If waterboarding really isn’t torture - really isn’t a big deal - then Ashcroft and the others who advocate it should put their money where their mouths are. On national TV, maybe; then we could all see how the issue has been overblown, as Ashcroft begs for mercy.

It’s telling that one of the few Republicans who has actually been waterboarded - John McCain - has been opposed to it. Because he did undergo it - and he knows it’s torture.

While that does sound like Must-See TV, Ashcroft (or any other supporters of the technique) actually allowing himself to be waterboarded misses the point entirely. He knows the people waterboarding him will eventaully stop. The luxury of this knowledge is not afforded to those people who we have been torturing waterboarding torturing.

Meanwhile Paul Wolfowitz, who got just about everything wrong on Iraq and was forced out of his appointment as head of the World Bank on corruption charges, is skipping the private sector altogether. He knows the Bush administration rewards incompetence, and he's now Condi Rice's advisor on WMD's. Just another example of falling upwards as Wolfie takes advantage of some of that sweet, sweet Republican-style welfare:

It doesn't matter how badly you mess up, how badly you get things wrong, how dangerous your views are, how corrupt you may be -- in the end, as long as you remain loyal, as long as you remain ideologically friendly, there'll be a place for you somewhere in the lofty echelons of Bushworld.

The previous chairman of the ISAB was, of all people, Fred Thompson, current Republican presidential snoozer -- hardly a Bush loyalist, even more hardly a great mind. One suspects that Wolfowitz will bring a tad more vigour to the job, much to the detriment of, well, the whole damn world.

And while not one of the President's men* (and no, I will not address rumors to the contrary), arch-conservative Ann Coulter wants to follow Wolfowitz's footstaps and climb aboard the sinking ship as well:

Ann Coulter is many things — author, pundit, speaker, provocateur — but “diplomatic” is not one of them.

Yet she told a crowd gathered at the National Press Club for the National Journalism Center’s 30th anniversary that she deserves to have a job in which finesse is essential: White House press secretary. Coulter said that she would take the job for the last six months of the Bush administration. Of course, that’d be perfect timing: The final six months of any president’s second term is lame-duck time, when there’s little pressure to perform.

Ann Coulter. White House press secretary.

Heh. Heh-heh. (snicker)

BWA-hahahahahahahahaha!!!!