Kathy Shaidle writes

Everyone is upset over Donny Deutsch calling Rubio a "coconut," and it IS incredibly stupid. But how much more fun is it that Deutsch had to catch himself before using the old school expression "great white hope" — and trying and failing to do the mental gymnastics needed to make that phrase work under the circumstances. Between the "you know" and the "hope," you can just about hear his brain going "oh, wait..."

Newsbusters reported "MSNBC and CNBC contributor " and professed Charlie Crist admirer "Donny Deutsch used racially charged language blah blah blah "—sorry, dozed off there for moment. Look, "Coconut" is a smear like Oreo, Apple, or Banana indicating that someone is one color on the outside, but white on the inside. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This "Whiteness on the inside" frequently consists of loyalty to the United States of America, support for law and order, and not supporting socialism. Michelle Malkin has been getting that kind of smear for years, and years, and years.

In fact, Rubio is a Hispanic Republican who is a Cuban-American. And he is the great white hope of Hispanic Republicans. Look at pictures of him. (One is above right.) In Pondering Patterson [II]: OK, How White Are Hispanics?, Steve Sailer wrote

In fact, the only white Latin American population that has immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers are the Cubans. (Click here for a page of pictures of leading Miami Cuban citizens if you don't believe that they are overwhelmingly white.) And that would never have happened except that a Communist dictator threw them out. Indeed, Miami's Cubans have claimed vociferously that they can't wait to get back to Cuba and take up the life they used to live. (Whether, post-Castro, the current inmates of Cuba will want their old masters back, is, however, very much unknown.)

Cubans aren't Spanish speaking members of ethnic minorities—they're Spanish. The white Cubans tend to be Republicans, and anti-Communists. They were the productive class in Cuba—that's why they had to leave.

Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, on they other hand, are either Indians, or mestizos. They were the not-very-productive-class in Mexico—that's why they had to leave. The GOP and National Review keep hoping the Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants will turn into Cubans. This is a delusion.

In 2009, NR did a couple of articles about Ted Cruz, a Hispanic Republican in Texas. See Cruz Control | A Republican star rises in Texas by Mark Hemingway. May 4, 2009 [Subscriber link] and A Great Reaganite Hope, &c., by Jay Nordlinger, May 12, 2009.

I'm willing to accept that Ted Cruz is a great American, genuine conservative, great communicator, and so on. But he's also a white Cuban-American, son of a white refugee from Batista. And it says something that the GOP's Hispanic outreach in Texas has produced not a patriotic Tejano, but a Great White Hispanic.