November 16, 2008

VDARE: We Still Have Karl Rove to Kick Around Some More

Here's an excerpt in which I uncharacteristically show some sympathy for Karl Rove and George Bush from my new VDARE.com column:

It’s important to fully understand why the lessons the two Texans, Rove and Bush, learned in their home state didn’t apply in other heavily Hispanic states.

So far, the mortgage meltdown hasn’t been as bad in Texas as in the four Sand States(as they were known on Wall Street during the Bubble): California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. These are home to half of the foreclosures and a large majority of the defaulted mortgage money.

Partly this is due to the Oil Bubble, which now appears to be ending. Oil prices over $100 per barrel kept the Texas economy strong in 2008, allowing debtors to avoid foreclosure.

Also, the enormous amount of land and the lack of environmental restrictions on home development in Texas means that when the federal government stimulates demand, the supply of housing increases quickly as well, keeping housing prices reasonable.

Finally, what Rove and Bush missed was how different was Texas's economic and immigration history over the last three decades relative to the seemingly similar Sand States. Due to OPEC’s oil price increases in the 1970s, Texas experienced a huge construction boom thirty years ago. That mostly attracted construction workers from the rest of the U.S. rather than from Mexico, because Mexico was simultaneously experiencing its own oil boom following massive new discoveries.

When oil prices collapsed in 1982, the economies of Texas and Mexico slumped simultaneously. The big wave of post-1982 unemployed illegal aliens therefore headed for California rather than for Texas.

That’s why San Antonio had "surprisingly low levels" of immigration from 1965 to 2000, according to the important new book quantitatively comparing Mexican-Americans in San Antonio and Los Angeles in 1965 and 2000, Generations of Exclusion, by sociologists associated with the UCLA Chicano Studies Program.

The 2000 Census found that California’s foreign-born population (26 percent of all residents) was almost twice as large as Texas’s (14 percent).

As Texans, Rove and Bush apparently just couldn’t understand the quantity and quality of the immigration situation in the other heavily Hispanic states. In 2000, Texas had a large but fairly well-rooted, stable, and assimilated Mexican-American population that had a reasonable potential to make enough money in resource-extraction or other blue-collar jobs to afford to buy Texas’s cheap houses.

In sharp contrast, California had a huge and mostly new, ill-educated, and unassimilated Mexican-American population that didn’t have even a chance of making enough money in Silicon Valley or Hollywood to afford California’s already expensive houses.

And Nevada, Arizona, and Florida were more like California than they were like Texas. [More]

So, who are the bad guys here: Texans or Californians? That's what people always want to know: who's the bad guy and who is the good guy?

The point is that our country's two biggest states are just very different, and much of that has its roots in their very different terrain.

For example, everybody in California would prefer to live near the Pacific because the climate and scenery are so nice. In contrast, in Texas (and the other Gulf of Mexico coastal states), the threat of hurricanes means people tend to prefer to live inland. Galveston used to be the dominant port of Texas's coast, until the hurricane of 1900 drowned 6000 people, after which Houston (45 miles inland and 45 feet above sea level) became the main metropolis. So, Affordable Family Formation works better in Texas than in California.

This doesn't make Texans or Californians good or evil, it just makes them different. And because the two states between them account for 60 million people, it's crucial that Americans get a better grip on the differences between the two states.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

49 comments:

non de guerre said...

"Due to OPEC’s oil price increases in the 1970s, Texas experienced a huge construction boom thirty years ago. That mostly attracted construction workers from the rest of the U.S. rather than from Mexico, because Mexico was simultaneously experiencing its own oil boom following massive new discoveries."

I do have to take you to task over that claim. I was living in Plano, Texas in 1978, and I can assure you the Dallas area was indeed being overrun with Mexicans at that time. You couldn't go into a taco joint or a movie theatre around there without bumping into one, and they almost never spoke English. A lot of construction workers from other parts of the country were turned off by the extreme heat of Texas back then (I can remember it being 117F one day in Dallas).

Antioco Dascalon said...

I'm sure you posted on this before (heck, maybe it's in the VDARE article) but in case it's not, one also has to consider that California's high tax/high services government created a great deal of resentment towards immigrants, especially illegals. When government subsidizes poverty, the fact that millions of foreign poor are coming in is of intense concern. In Texas, with its history if rugged individualism, if millions of poor move in, well, that's all right, it won't raise taxes.

Anonymous said...

And let's not forget the majority of Texan Hispanics voted for Bush. Republicans still have a chance to assimilate and take the majority of Hispanics.

Anonymous said...

"And let's not forget the majority of Texan Hispanics voted for Bush. Republicans still have a chance to assimilate and take the majority of Hispanics."

Where have I heard that before?

Anonymous said...

anonymous said, "And let's not forget the majority of Texan Hispanics voted for Bush. Republicans still have a chance to assimilate and take the majority of Hispanics."

Haha, very funny. Just because your facts are wrong, it doesn't invalidate your conclusion. Bush got 49% of Texas Hispanics in 2004 and 43% in 2000 according to this article. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/11/29/correction_texas_exit_poll_glance/

Anonymous said...

Interesting analysis. The Republicans lost this election largely due to a utopian naivete? You make a good case.

I would add that the Rove/Bush anti-intellectualism lost it's steam thanks to the Iraq war, the deficit, the bailout, the fact that Republicans are on the long term losing side of the abortion and gay marriage debates, etc.

After all that, being a born again, reformed alcoholic running against some pointy head 'liberal', well, it just isn't enough anymore.

It'll be a hoot to see what happens to the Republican party next election. Just for entertainment purposes I'm rooting for Sarah Palin, gosh darn it!

Anonymous said...

Oil prices over $100 per barrel kept the Texas economy strong in 2008, allowing debtors to avoid foreclosure.

Perhaps this needs to be fleshed out a bit, since as consumers -- and not particularly high-earning consumers at that -- you'd expect the effect of high oil prices would be predominantly the same on people in Texas as it was in the rest of the country, i.e. the high cost of gas and general inflation would pressure them in the same way and so make it more difficult for them to cover the mortgage.

Anonymous said...

...Republicans are on the long term losing side of the abortion and gay marriage debates... --anonymous (and understandably so)

No, Republicans are on the long-term losing side of demography. But, then, abortion and gay marriage are, by definition, even more so.

The most rapidly growing political demographic can be described as the benifits-not-buggery Democrats. Those fresh-faced lotus-eating idealistic white kids supporting Obortion and gay marriage will be swept away with the rest of their race.

Anonymous said...

the fact that Republicans are on the long term losing side of the abortion and gay marriage debates, etc

Hey, you're a funny guy, I like that!

So what happened in California then? The Democrats take most of whats for the taking but somehow those sneaky conservatives slipped through the guards and killed gay marriage.

Anonymous said...

"Bush got 49% of Texas Hispanics in 2004 and 43% in 2000 according to this article."

That proves there is an assimilation dividend at work in Texas.

Anonymous said...

The idea that a majority of Hispanics in Texas voted for Bush is not seen in the data of the majority Hispanic counties in TExas.

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000951.php

Anonymous said...

A Question for Texans,

Do whites and MexAmericans get along better in TX than CA? If so, why?

Are there cultural differences between Texas Mexicans and the California types?

Anonymous said...

"Those fresh-faced lotus-eating idealistic white kids supporting Obortion and gay marriage will be swept away with the rest of their race."

Nah, elite whites will still be in charge, even in 2042.

Look at Brazil, a nation that is 40-49% white where the white minority still pretty much runs the place lock stock and barrel. The economy over there isn't too bad either - if you are white.

Also, Mestizos are much more docile and less problematic when compared to Brazil's amazingly violent black-mullatto population is.

Steve Sailer said...

"Are there cultural differences between Texas Mexicans and the California types?"

Yes, there's more cultural-political overlap -- the Monterrey area south of Texas is the heart of the more business-oriented PAN party, whereas California is separated by desert from the more populated parts of Mexico. California draws more from regions that support the center and left parties in Mexico.

Also, there's a sizable cultural difference between white Texans and white Californians that helps white Texans feel more at home with Mexicans than white Californians do. George W. Bush, for example, is a Tex-Mex kind of guy.

Anonymous said...

"Bush got 49% of Texas Hispanics in 2004 and 43% in 2000 according to this article."

That proves there is an assimilation dividend at work in Texas.


A resounding success when he managed to get more than half of them not to vote for him!

A few more assimilation derived victories like that and the Republicans can safely look forward to not winning any elections ever.

Anonymous said...

About Mexican Texans, I used to live in Houston and there are a lot of Mexicans there who are not exactly assimilated with whites, but are definitely American in some way. They're patriotic towards America, not Mexico, and they're often evangelical Christians. One guy in particular was dead set against abortion, homosexuality and things like that, but also had 5 kids on CHIP.

I think that social conservatism + economic redistribution would be popular with this sort of voter. They'll probably vote their pocketbook, in other words, for Democrats who will redistribute wealth to them, when it comes down to it, but socially they really have more in common with white conservatives and may vote that way.

BTW, this points to a huge mistake made by white analysts of all stripes - they think that anyone who votes Democrat is a liberal. Really, essentially only whites are liberal. Democrats are the party of non-whites and redistribution, but whites liberals are still the most powerful members of the Democratic coalition, so blacks and Hispanics end up voting for liberals. But when given the choice to pick and choose issues at the ballot box, like Prop 8, they're more conservative than whites.

Anonymous said...

Spot on. Hispanics are much better assimilated here in Texas. Social mobility is quite easy. Intermarriage with whites is common and unremarkable. Gang activity is minimal compared to LA and Hispanic neighborhoods are (prepare to cringe) ethnically "vibrant" in the best sense of that term. Where I work (big-city fire dept.) Hispanics have attained the highest ranks without affirmative action. Much the same, I think, in most of Texas, which accounts for W and Rove's more positive view toward immigration. And my own.

Slampo said...

"When oil prices collapsed in 1982, the economies of Texas and Mexico slumped simultaneously. The big wave of post-1982 unemployed illegal aliens therefore headed for California rather than for Texas."

Nah, the fact of the matter is that, in Houaton at least, the influx of illegals accelerated in tandem with the oil bust. Thousands and thousands of dirt-cheap apartment units built for migrating (mostly) white workers from the North who flooded the town in the 70s in the 80s shifted, gradually and then all at once, to all-Hispanic, and the obvious change in the public schools can also be traced to the mid-80s. The cheap housing was an added attraction to the city's historic reliance on cheap labor.

Anonymous said...

Having moved between liberal CA (Bay Area) and liberal TX (Austin) several times over several decades, the differences between hispanics is obvious.

Texas hispanics are more integrated into white society and appear throughout all levels of society usually without much comment. Californian hispanics exist largely in ghettos for the newly arrived. More established Californian hispanics often self-segregate due to larger educational/economic gaps with whites and vocal grevience-based identity politics that are popular in California.

White Californian are usually outspokenly PC although they usually only interact with hispanics as immigrant maids, gardners and nannies. Californians is a far more accomplished, competitive and materialistic place which only aggrevates class and race separation.

It's troublesome that America is moving towards the California rather than Texas model of hispanic integration.

Anonymous said...

If Clinton was America's first black president then Bush was its first Hispanic president.

The problem is that Rove was looking at the numbers every day and knew the GOP was doomed. They got a reprieve with 9/11 but have been losing seats every cycle since 1994, which was the last gasp of the Reagan Revolution.

One thing all of you are forgetting is all of those big families are in a much worse position to deal with the coming world economic collapse. When Citibank- who just bought out all of the other big banks- gets ready to cut 75,000 jobs that's a sign that things are much, much worse than we are being led to believe.

I wouldn't want to be living in a McMansion in an exurb working a service job with a 90 minute commute and 5 or 6 kids at home to feed. Especially in a Sun Belt area that needs to be air conditioned 9 months out of the year. Neither would I want to be an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn when the New York economy collapses and I find my neighborhood ringed with jobless blacks who respond to the Depression by converting to Islam en masse.

The last person I would want to be is your average Scotch-Irish Southerner with a 90 IQ, a devastated blue collar economy, a leaky, drafty mobile home, a retirement dependent on a Social Security pension and a hostile Congress in Washington.

Anonymous said...

A Texas Congressman once told a mutual friend that he ran as a Democrat instead of Republican because Mexican immigrants identified the Republicans as the gringo arm of the long-dominant PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Revolutionary_Party

Michael Lind's Made In Texas, purportedly a political biography of W. but actually a history of Texas (and Southern) politics makes plain that those Mexican-American voters were probably right. Its no coincidence Bush and his cronies are fans of Mexico's caudillo style government.

"Lind's argument is this: Southern elites have relentlessly worked to preserve the economy and social order of the Confederate South. The interests of resource-rich landowners have been pursued regardless of their cost to the common good..."

"So when the White House proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants from Mexico in 2001, Lind argues, it was to ensure that service-sector wages would remain low... And global free trade is pursued to perpetuate the South's economy of "exporting agricultural commodities and raw materials while importing manufactured goods in return."
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/books/made_in_texas

Mark Presco said...

Quite frankly, the point of this post escapes me, or at least its significance. The responders seem to draw their own conclusions. So allow me to comment on a comment. I find this response incredibly sanguine:

“Nah, elite whites will still be in charge, even in 2042.”

I believe there is a more apropos example. In Venezuela the majority race, the indigenous population, voted one of their own, Hugo Chavez, into power for two reasons. First, because everyone is a racist; and wants their own race in power (proven by black support for Obama). Second, because he promised them he would redistribute the wealth. This is exactly what he is doing. Latin American countries have a history of taking sharp turns to the left, especially those with large tribal populations. When the Hispanic race becomes the majority race they will vote themselves into power and will probably want to redistribute the wealth because they have shown little ability to create their own wealth anywhere in the world. That is why they are here in the first place.

Also the non-white vote was incredibly anti-white:

Race: Obama/McCain
White Americans: 43/55
Black Americans: 95/4
Latino Americans: 67/31
Asian Americans: 62/35
Other Americans: 66/31

This is our reward for the ’65 immigration act.

Anonymous said...

"Are there cultural differences between Texas Mexicans and the California types?"

There likewise appears to be with the immigrants who end up in Georgia. The Mexicans in the metro Atlanta area are damned industrious.

Of course, as I drive around town and see tags popping up all over the place and finding myself unable to answer my daughter's questions as to what they are and their meaning, I begin to wonder if such a drastic social experiment was justified. But then I quickly strike my forehead with an iron skillet and assure myself that all will be well.

--Senor Doug

Anonymous said...

When on vacation in San Antonio a couple months ago I noticed many Hispanics who spoke only slightly accented English and who on balance looked more Caucasian than Amerindian.

Anonymous said...

Steve, please explain why Karl Rove is considered a genius.

My theory is that the left couldn't figure out why they weren't winning elections and invented the deux ex machina of Karl Rove the Machiavellian genius.

Can you name something he's done that demonstrates Machiavellian genius? He just seems to be a dopy neocon type.

Anonymous said...

This doesn't make Texans or Californians good or evil, it just makes them different.

Well I never. A person who refuses to call his political opponents evil is just evil...

Just because your facts are wrong, it doesn't invalidate your conclusion. Bush got 49% of Texas Hispanics in 2004 and 43% in 2000 according to this article.

43% and 29% - those are both majorities, right. And as Steve already pointed out, Hispanics in Texas don't feel poor because they can afford a decent house. The more poor people feel, the more inclined they are to vote for big government handouts. And Hispanics, always will feel disproportionately poor relative to whites.

I would add that the Rove/Bush anti-intellectualism lost it's steam thanks to the Iraq war, the deficit, the bailout, the fact that Republicans are on the long term losing side of the abortion and gay marriage debates, etc.

The l"long-term losing side" of gay marriage? WTF? Anti-gay marriage won in every state, including one of the most liberal of all. And the support for gay marriage varies indirectly with gay misbehavior. When judges start imposing it and gays through hissy fits, support tanks. It fell dramatically when San Francisco's mayor started weddign gays against state law.


After all that, being a born again, reformed alcoholic running against some pointy head 'liberal', well, it just isn't enough anymore.

Good.

It'll be a hoot to see what happens to the Republican party next election. Just for entertainment purposes I'm rooting for Sarah Palin, gosh darn it!

Lots of liberals are. Remember, next time it's the Democrats who will be held to account for the economic situation. (Hell, they should've been held accountable for it this time.)

I'm betting on Romney.

Anonymous said...

"The check is in the mail"

"I'll pull out in time"

"Republicans still have a chance to assimilate and take the majority of Hispanics."

Anonymous said...

Neither would I want to be an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn when the New York economy collapses and I find my neighborhood ringed with jobless blacks who respond to the Depression by converting to Islam en masse.

The last person I would want to be is your average Scotch-Irish Southerner with a 90 IQ, a devastated blue collar economy, a leaky, drafty mobile home, a retirement dependent on a Social Security pension and a hostile Congress in Washington.


Southerners have seen worse and survived. Jews are kind of pesky, as well. I think your concern is misplaced.

Anonymous said...

Oops,sorry;one more thing. Anybody know Illinois' former guv Jim Edgar? he was well likied by all when heleft office,and supposedly his dear wife frets about his heart (he had an attack years ago) so he cant run anymore,and he spends his time runing around accepting praise from various people and prob making money doing something political---but he had the stupidest cooments on election nite,saying the GOP will NOT win til they "reach out" to the Hispanix,and get more "moderate". How much more moderate can they be???Reminds me of Woody Allens old joke about the Reform Rabbi who performed his marriage;He was very,very Reformed...he was a Nazi. Mexicans will never be Republicans;that ship has sailed. The GOP never learns,they went thru the same stuff with the "black Republicans"!!

Anonymous said...

"Look at Brazil, a nation that is 40-49% white "

By the Brazilian definition of "white," America is 90% white.

By the American definition of "white," Brazil is roughly 10-20% white.

Anonymous said...

Also the non-white vote was incredibly anti-white:

Race: Obama/McCain
White Americans: 43/55
Black Americans: 95/4
Latino Americans: 67/31
Asian Americans: 62/35
Other Americans: 66/31


The non-white vote is always an anti-white vote. Somewhere on-line you can find breakdowns of Presidential elections going back to '72. The non-white vote is always a Democrat vote. By that I mean Hispanics, Blacks Asian and Jews too.

They didn't seem to bother counting the Asian vote before the early '90s, too small I suppose, back then it was a Republican bloc, thats gone now. As Democrat as all the other non-whites now.

After 36 years (at least!) the Republicans are not going to mobilize Hispanic votes, its not going to happen.

Understand?

Anybody propagating that idea is either hopelessly blinkered by PC or doing it deliberately out of anti-white or at least anti-Republican sentiment.

Anonymous said...

If geography (in this case) is destiny, why would Arizona and Nevada more resemble California than Texas?

And how does New Mexico fit in?

Anonymous said...

Mark Pressco said:First, because everyone is a racist; and wants their own race in power (proven by black support for Obama). Second, because he promised them he would redistribute the wealth. This is exactly what he is doing.
Mark, 96% of blks voted for Obama in 2008. In 04, 88% of blks voted for Kerry. Do you see a pattern. If blks are so racist why didn't they vote for Allen Keys in large number in the 04 election? Allen Keys could of been the "Obama of 04".
Blks voted for democrats period!


Anyone have numbers for blks voting for Clinton?

Anonymous said...

"If geography (in this case) is destiny, why would Arizona and Nevada more resemble California than Texas?"

I can speak for Nevada or New Mexico, but as someone who's spent brief amounts of time in Arizona, let me try to answer:
Just as California housing is expensive because nearly everyone is jockeying for housing along the Pacific coast, in Arizona home development is somewhat restricted by political or environmental barriers.
Arizona is a rather large state (maybe 112,000 sq.mi.) but like many Western states the federal government owns large portions of the state. Indian reservations occupy other areas of the state. In fact, I think the further development of Phoenix in one direction isn't possible because the city is now up against a reservation. It's also a desert state, so water access can be a problem if you want to live in a rural area.
While AZ certainly doesn't have California or New England home prices, I don't think there is as much land on the market as its large size would suggest. My .02

-Vanilla Thunder

Anonymous said...

The point is that our country's two biggest states are just very different, and much of that has its roots in their very different terrain.

Can you imagine Bill Kristol or David Brooks making this point in the NYT? I can't either. It's one of the most basic conservative concepts which cosmopolitan elites either can't seem to grasp or willfully ignore.

Perhaps it's a concept best conveyed by a novelist. Cormac McCarthy's work from Blood Meridian through the Border triology to No Country for Old Men is one long brilliant examination of the intersection of terrain, wild life, and human beings along the Texas/Mexico border from the 1830's to 1980.

Anonymous said...

I've lived in CA & TX. CA has had a huge influx of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Panamanians, in addition to the Mexican immigrants. Many of these Central Americans are either pure Indian or part black. In contrast, many of the Northern Mexicans who move to Texas have a lot of white blood, some of them have blue eyes, etc.

TX has horrible welfare benefits, CA has incredibly generous benefits (dental care, etc.) There is less temptation for the US-born children of immigrants to TX to live on welfare, as they can earn enough to buy a house, rise into the middle class, etc., if they work hard, while Texas welfare benefits will barely keep them alive. In contrast, housing costs are so high in CA that the temptation for a girl to have an out-of-wedlock baby in order to get a HUD housing voucher is substantial. (The boyfriend can quietly move in later.) The immigrants in CA are MUCH more militant, much more likely to spout off about Aztlan and their stolen land, etc.

Some of the harder working immigrants to CA and their US born adult children are now relocating all over the place (Kentucky, Arkansas, etc.) as even they can see that California is flooded with cheap labor and high living costs. Even if you get a HUD housing voucher in CA, your children are probably going to go to majority Hispanic schools and never learn to speak proper English. So the more ambitious ones are moving to what were previously all-white areas.

This is part of why CA is so screwed up. It is both the natural point of entry for the Central Americans and many of the Mexicans, but it is an absolute magnet for the ones who are natural-born freeloaders. Sort of like the nastiest blacks from all over the country moving to Iowa (I think?) because Iowa had the most generous welfare benefits. So even though Iowa has few blacks, the blacks that it has are the pits.

I also think that a lot of the US citizens of Latin American descent in CA are both collecting generous welfare benefits AND working under the table.

Mark Presco said...

Chic N

You can’t ignore how Obama got the nomination. Here are some numbers from the primaries:

Mississippi: 90% of the black vote 33% of the white vote.
North Carolina: 91% of the black vote.
South Carolina: 78% of the black vote 24% of the white vote.
Wisconsin: 91% of the black vote.
Ohio: 87% of the black vote.
Pennsylvania: 90% of the black vote

Black women voted race rather than gender and Clinton didn’t get the loyalty the black community is said to have for them. Race trumped all, despite vociferous misgivings as to whether he was “appropriately black”.

Anonymous said...

The last person I would want to be is your average Scotch-Irish Southerner with a 90 IQ, a devastated blue collar economy, a leaky, drafty mobile home, a retirement dependent on a Social Security pension and a hostile Congress in Washington.

Sorry - Scotch-Irish Southerners may not comprise a huge portion of Nobel laureates, but your "average Scotch-Irish Southerner" has an IQ closer to 100 than to 90. The black average IQ is around 85, and SI's in the South do far better than the blacks.

By the Brazilian definition of "white," America is 90% white.

My sense is that Brazil's current economy is being driven mostly by natural resources, with a few exceptions like aircraft. Brazil certainly has a lot of pure Europeans and Asians, but its early European settlers almost invariably had to marry natives - according to Fischer's Albion's Seed, the gender ratio of early immigrants was 100 to 1 male. Tidewater Virginia was 4 to 1 male, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was nearly 1 to 1.

Steve, please explain why Karl Rove is considered a genius.

Karl Rove is certainly smart. Even his enemies here in Utah, where he went to school, acknowledge that. What I don't understand is how a guy as smart as he is can look at the Hispanic voting data and see a group that's just waiting to flip to majority GOP. There's just no support for that conclusion under even the best of circumstances.

I know you shouldn't assign bad motives to people who disagree with you (a lesson gays could learn...), but I really don't see any other reason for Rove's position except some sort of ulterior motive.

Aside from the roundly disproven "Hispanics are natural conservatives" bunk, the only other thing I can think of to explain his reasoning is something I've said before: Rove is a brilliant tactician but a poor logistician. His only goal was to get Bush elected and re-elected (which of course doesn't explain the post-2004 amnesty putsch). There's an old military saying wich goes, roughly, that in war "amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics." The Bush/Rove Corps may have taken the field, but they've left their troops cut off from their supply lines.

Can you imagine Bill Kristol or David Brooks making this point in the NYT? I can't either.

Has Bill Kristol ever been anywhere outside of the DC/NY corridor besides maybe Malibu and Tel Aviv?

Anonymous said...

Ok, I exaggerated a bit about Nevada. Here's a conceptual percentage map.

Amit

Anonymous said...

"Brazil certainly has a lot of pure Europeans and Asians"

There aren't many pure Asians in Brazil and they have little to do with the economic success the country has had.

why do some people on this blog feel the need to kiss asians' asses in every conceivable context? is this because they think that to ever say anything good about white people without throwing in "and asians" is racist?

Anonymous said...

Wow. This is a revelation. All the illegals in Texas are the "good" ones; all those in California, the "bad" ones. Gee, why was I fighting amnesty. I don't care if California goes under because of decisions made by wingnuts like Jerry Brown.

So all the fuss a few summers ago was manipulated by a few Californians too lazy to leave their crappy state and migrate like those smart, ambitious illegals to states with less welfare and lower home prices.

We've been duped. I think those of us who have allowed Steve Sailer and his ilk to trick us into believe illegal immigrants were bad for all of us should spread the word: Illegal immigration only hurts California so let it destroy that state that has been the source of so much misery for the rest of us.

Thanks illegals, you are tanking California while not causing any trouble elsewhere. Instead you're model citizens doing all those jobs Americans just won't do.

BTW, those European looking Mexicans are the former elites looking to escape the violence and instability of feuding drug cartels. They were not the group that migrated to Texas legally in previous decades. No, earlier waves of migrants were definitely mestizos who assimilated readily because there were more of us than them. That era is over for Ca, Tx, Az, Fl and probably Wy too which is a state you don't think about but is very much experiencing an influx of illegal South Americans.

Anonymous said...

Karl Rove is a super-genius, just like Wile E. Coyote is a super-genius. And like Wile E. Coyote, Rove's political future should only involve a cannon, an anvil, and a cliff - not a soapbox at the WSJ and Newsweek.

Anonymous said...

Nah, elite whites will still be in charge, even in 2042.


Holy cow, all the way to 2042! Wow man, that's like forever -- not!

Anonymous said...

A lot of people on the left consider Karl Rove to be satan himself. He is considered cynical and imoral for his attempt to use the war as a popularity device.

Ironically none of my leftist friends and buddies seem the least bit bothered by Rove's disgusting immigration stratgy. In fact most of them don't even utter a peep. The left is so willfully blind and in denial about illegal immigration that they are willing to give him a pass. Imagine that.

Anonymous said...

The left is so willfully blind and in denial about illegal immigration... --anonymous

The hell they are! What the left is, is utterly cynical.

There's an old saying, probably from the Arabs (who else?): When your enemy is committing suicide, do not interfere.

Anonymous said...

Reg Ceasar:

Let me qualify my last posting. Most of the liberals I know are white, educated, and have money like me. They have no real yen to live around minorities or hang out with them. In theory they like everyone albeit they only associate with other white liberals unless absolutely necessary.

Most of these folks I am referring to are relativly high on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. They are big on quality of life issues such as the environment, traffic, nice neighborhoods.

They realize that immigration and a preponderance of minorities ultimately diminishes all they hold dear, they simply cannot directly criticise anyone other than white men for their plight. Perhaps it is fear of political correctness and being outed or simply living in a bubble.

Anonymous said...

Karl Rove's latest in Newsweek has, along with various statements made by Sen. Lindsey Graham and others.

Rove said in Newsweek that 'winning the War on Terror is crucial' and that 'the GOP must continue to attract new voting groups [i.e., Hispanics]' with "comeprehensive immigration reform."

Graham told WaPo that "If the administration wants to move forward with immigration again, I stand ready to do that."

I have finally come to realize that we have been here before. Not in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was defeated; nor in 1974, after the Nixon disaster; but during the trench warfare of the Great War, when the armies of Europe saw tens of thousands of their men mowed down in battle though the lines didn't move an inch.

That's the GOP today. We've suffered one miserable defeat after another in the last 2 elections and we've spent the last several years fighting bitterly over immigration and countless other issues.

All the losses, yet no one has moved. The neocons aren't budging, the business cons aren't budging, the evangelicons aren't budging, the paleocons aren't budging and the libertarians aren't budging.

It led me to realize that the GOP leadership is not changing one bit. It's not interested in altering the balance of power within the GOP, with the neocon/business wings holding the high ground and the rest getting scraps from the table.

There will be no real change - they're just waiting for the next gimmick, for the next time the Democrats slip up, and then it will be the same old thing.

Truth said...

"There aren't many pure Asians in Brazil and they have little to do with the economic success the country has had."

Brazil has the world's second largest Japanese community outside of Japan.

Anonymous said...

Brazil has the world's second largest Japanese community outside of Japan.

Maybe, but they are still a tiny percentage of Brazil's vibrant beautiful communities.