Be the first on your server to get on the Lone Wacko Enemies’ List!

I wonder what took the New York Times so damned long, but David Leonhart’s Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobb is a turd in the punchbowl for the frat-party of nativism that’s been infecting any sober discourse on Latin America (especially about Mexico and the Mexicans) over the last few years.

Lou Dobbs is, frankly, a fuckin’ moron, but the New York Times is much too polite to say that. Instead, Leonhart writes:

Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”

The political writers who don’t see immigration as a “pet issue” have started picking up on this. Somebody named “Dave” has done a bang-up job at Orcinus, writing:

Dobbs has a history of citing … white supremacists as credible, while failing to explain to the audience their background. Among such Dobbs guests is Glenn Spencer, the head of the racist American Patrol, whose theories on immigration — including a conspiracy theory about a Mexican “invasion” and a plot to return the Southwest to an “Aztlan” — Dobbs has reported on as credible.

Perhaps the most notorious of these instances involved Dobbs running a map of “Aztlan” taken from the Web site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. Dobbs apologized for using the CofCC as a source — but never retracted or corrected the substance of the story itself, which was not just factually bogus but outrageously inflammatory as well.

I’m hoping the political bloggers out there hit on this, and hit it hard. One of my “favorite” nativist sites, which based on a Los Angeles lawyer who contributes to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s work for a website that was sponsored by a human rights group that — among other coalition members — included a quasi-governmental agency in Mexico, concluded that the SPLC has “indirect ties to the Mexican government.” is Lone Wacko. Lone Wacko is going ballistic about the Leonhard piece, and promising to “a list of those who helped retransmit Leonhardt’s smears.”

Free PR is good PR, and my hit count is down, so what the hell. Besides, without going into a lot of details, I had to change my would-be net server and web designer for my soon to start commercial site. It seems the guy I was going to hire to handle the page design and servers was NOT, as he told me, handing data for the federal government, but is running a “turn in an illegal alien” site, with links to the Minutemen.

I’ve had to pull out of the deal, which has bollixed up some financing, so am still looking for donations and or pre-paid advertising (write me at triotimes@excite.com for details)

He sent me an e-mail suggesting I tell the truth about immigration, so I will. Morons like Lou Dobbs and his nativist supporters and cheerleaders don’t know their ass from a hole in the border fence.

And, if this doesn’t get me “Lone Wacko’s Enemies’ List,” I’ll be very very disappointed.