Oh look, the Minutemen are behaving themselves properly and doing what they said they would. I thought you said they were all KKK wannabees?

Not wannabes.

OJ, that's uncalled for.

There is no indication from either behavior or rhetoric that the Minutemen, however silly and quixotic their aims might be, are racist. Many of them are Hispanics who either are from Arizona or are legals. They are engaged in a plaintive scream about the abject failure of the government in DC to do its job of protecting the border. The problems along la Frontera are staggering, whether it is the off-the-moon crime rates(buy car insurance in El Paso and you'll see) or the human tragedy of dead illegals led into the desert by their coyotes to die of thirst.

People in the area don't want the border closed. They merely want it managed. They want economic and social intercourse with the Mexicans. They want legal Mexican immigration. For many, it reunites families. What they don't want is some Caravan of the Saints flooding social services, schools and ballooning the already insanely high taxes people pay in places like New Mexico and Arizona.

Bush has been played for a patsy by Fox on this one.

The Klan were noble defenders of a way of life too...just ask Wodrow Wilson.

It takes an Aztlan-like obtuseness to equate the Klan and the Minutemen.

Yes, as your comment demonstrates, it's just about race.

My comment points out just the opposite. The Hispanic population on our side of the border is just as angry as the Anglos about the illegal invasion. People who consume services and don't pay taxes are an enormous problem and the illegals are precisely that.

But then, I guess it's easy to call people 'racist' when you can flee Newark, NJ to move to one of America's Whitest states. In California, they at least have the integrity to call what you did 'the Flight to Valhalla.'

bart:

Yes, I'm a racist. Who isn't?

Most people aren't. There is nothing in anyone's genetic makeup that makes him impervious to civilization. There are however intellectually stifling and moribund cultures that are unworthy of our respect and we should feel free to wipe them out as needed(not the people, only the cultures) and we should certainly not shed any tears when they are wiped out. The culture of Arab Islam and that of Himalayan Buddhism come to mind as pretty obvious examples. Pre-Peary Japan was another, as were those of the Plains Indians.

The problem along the border is different. The reality is that we cannot have open borders and a social safety net. It simply becomes impossible to afford. The people along both sides of the border share a common ethnicity, faith and cultural heritage, however those on our side have benefitted from a century or more of exposure to the culture of Protestant Europe rather than that of the Counter-Reformation grafted on to the bestial excesses of the Aztecs.

This is a remediable problem, given time and a willingness to confront it directly. A liberalizing Mexico would go a long way towards its solution. But I'm not optimistic.

Denying racism as you spout it is amusing at least.

OJ's just mad because the Minutemen refused to behave as he anticipated.

OJ,

Saying there are such things as inferior cultures is not the same thing as saying there are such things as inferior races. Spend a month in France and you'll understand.

Slider:

Exactly as anticipated.

bart:

Yeah, the French aren't racist....

The French are cultural imperialists, not racist in the American sense. An African can become French, like Leopold Senghor. In America, a Black man remains Black. There is a big difference.

Yup, as they loaded the trains to the East they assured the huddled Jews it was just cultural, not racial. It was quite comforting.

The same French Catholic government that shuttled Jews to the East forcibly booted all Protestants out of the military and civil service. The fact that many were from the Cevennes, the heartland of Vercingetorix, made no nevermind. The Vichy had convinced themselves that to be French one had to be Roman Catholic. Thus, Pierre Laval could have a wife who had been a Jewish convert to Catholicism and still be Petain's PM.

Arguments among French today concerning Muslims relate to whether or not they can become French. There is no question that an Arab who immigrates to France, speaks fluent French and behaves like a Frenchman is a Frenchman. France has had a Lebanese PM, Balladur. The debate today concerns what exactly is 'behaving like a Frenchman.' LePen would insist on being a Catholic, which puts him out of the French mainstream today. One could plausibly argue that being a religious anything is not being French, as the lesson French people drew from the internal strife from 1789-1945 was that religion is itself an evil. Thus, a non-observant Protestant like Jospin or Rocard or a non-observant Jew like Fabius or Strauss-Kahn, can be PM without any problem. And when JPII visited France, he generally drew small crowds made up mostly of Slavic immigrants and guest workers.

To be French is a matter of blood. They're racist pure and simple. Unfortunately for them, they're an inferior race.

OJ,

Stuff and nonsense, as French behavior over centuries shows.

Inferior? Hardly. But they are clumsy, egocentric, disorganized, and not nearly as smart or charming as they think they are. I have an extreme love/hate relationship with the place and its people.

Yes, look at they types they attract.

Pretty much the world's best educated and most affluent, even folks as far afield as Japan and India, are attracted to it and have been for about 4 centuries. The $800/night hotel rooms and the $200/person restaurants are booked as solid as ever. Even when their government or their behavior just disgusts you, they can do something which is just staggeringly sublime. They are a source of endless fascination, if not admiration.

It takes someone with the disposition of a really sour kosher pickle, or merely an uber-censorious neo-Puritan, not to get it.

Intellectuals, the dregs of every society.