Apparently, John Edwards reads Time magazine because he's trying to craft a response to the border disaster. Of course, while he got the story half right—the President is "completely irresponsible" about border security—the other half of his idea is fundamentally silly.
C.J. Karamargin reported in the Arizona Daily Star [Edwards: Bush fails on Mexico, September 14, 2004]:
In a stinging critique, John Edwards accused President Bush of failing to win Mexico's cooperation to secure America's borders. The Democratic vice presidential candidate, speaking to reporters after a rally at the Tucson Convention Center on Monday, said U.S.-Mexican relations are in "tatters" because of policies the president has pursued over the past 3 1/2 years.
"The president has done an abysmal job," Edwards said. "He came into office calling President (Vicente) Fox 'my amigo.' The deterioration of the relationship has been extraordinary." Edwards called the president "completely irresponsible" for not working more closely with Mexico to forge a border policy that could reduce the number of illegal entrants who die as they try to enter the United States through Arizona's deserts.
"What John Kerry and I believe is our borders have to be secure." Edwards said. "It's important to the safety of people in Arizona and people across this country. We need to be stronger than we are now. We need to have stronger relationships with the Mexican government to accomplish that."
The vice-presidential nominee's notion that Presidente Fox wants the American border to be secure is laughable. America's border problem is his border solution to Mexico's problem of too many poor people. Edwards can choose to make Fox happy or make Arizona's citizens happy, but he can't do both.
The rest of Edwards' statements were more of the usual:
Edwards did not mention border policy during a 20-minute speech to thousands of enthusiastic supporters at the TCC, his first campaign appearance in Arizona since becoming the vice presidential nominee. But in a series of interviews after the event, the North Carolina senator said more needs to be done for illegal immigrants already living and working in the country. These people, he said, should have the chance "to live the American dream."
Kerry has promised to send immigration reform legislation to Congress within the first 100 days of his presidency. Speaking to Hispanic leaders in Phoenix in June, he proposed offering undocumented migrants "a path to equal citizenship" as part of his commitment to "celebrating immigration."
Facing an election, the Australian Government has moved to restrict the importation of Indian computer programmers, after their opponents began to make an issue of it. Democracy in action! How come it doesn't happen here?
The Department of Homeland Security has its own on-line DHStore with plenty of trinkets for sale. My personal favorite to commemorate the newly reconstituted federal immigration bureaucracy would be the handsome taxpayer-funded DHS paperweight.
There's more than enough of them already in Washington, D.C. Career on the skids??…then why not give yourself a beautifully-framed Homeland Security award.
Or be a hit on the links while securing the homeland with some new DHS golf balls! You can also impress your friends with a new DHS baseball cap. Put it on backwards, have a beer and rationalize that illegal aliens have only come here for a better life . . . to do the jobs that Americans won't do.
(cross-posted from Isteve.com)
Here are some readers' additions to the list in my new VDARE column of curious categories potentially eligible for affirmative action as Hispanics:
(cross-posted from Isteve.com)
Joel Achenbach pens an often hilarious article in the Washington Post entitled: "Taking Off the Color Blinders: Geneticists and Historians Grapple With the Gray Areas of Race"
"[Race] doesn't exist biologically, but it does exist socially," said Alan Goodman, incoming president of the American Anthropological Association, which sponsored the meeting at the Holiday Inn in Old Town.
The event served as a brainstorming session for a $4 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, to create a traveling museum exhibit on race. If all goes well, the exhibit will debut in two years at the Science Museum of Minnesota, in St. Paul. The working title is "Understanding Race and Human Variation."
Beyond that, things get fuzzy.
It will take a long time for people to grasp the illusory nature of race at the biological level, Goodman said. ...
He identifies himself, incidentally, as a white person.
"Culturally I'm white-ified," he said. "People see me as white. That has something to do with how I look, but it has nothing to do with biological variation."
In terms of biological variation, Dr. Goodman is actually chartreuse, but he periodically dips himself in a vat of Sherwin-Williams Antique White latex paint, which is why people see him as white-ified, culturally speaking.
But seriously, folks, allow me to de-fuzz the meaning of race and ethnicity:
A racial group is a partly-inbred extended family. (See my essay, "It's All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective" for a full explanation of this sentence.)
An ethnic group is a group of people who share cultural traits that are often, but not exclusively, passed down within biological families such as language, religion, surnames, fraternal feelings, and cuisine.
UPDATE: John Derbyshire responds:
It seems to me that the official dogma on race — promulgated by all media outlets, academia, schools, etc — is as follows.
"Race does not exist. DOESN'T EXIST! Well, it kind of exists, but you shouldn't notice it. DON'T NOTICE IT! OK, you can't help noticing it once in a while; but you mustn't find it interesting. IT'S NOT INTERESTING!"
