Tako Sushi

It's getting monotonous. Every day, another example of the statist, business friendly "elites" of the party, screaming "It's aliiiiive," as yet another monster of their making begin to get up off the operating table.

Dean Allen, a plump and friendly fellow sporting an American-flag tie, told me that he runs something called Spirit of Liberty; he’s also helping Witherspoon’s campaign. “Some of these people may be coming in here to get jobs washing dishes, but some of them are coming in here to hijack airplanes,” he explained. “If you’re down there trying to look at the people coming across the border, maybe a lot of them are just motivated by economics, and they want a job washing dishes or cutting grass. But I can’t tell Jose Cuervo from the Al Qaeda operatives by looking at them, because they cut their beard off. It’s like trying to get fly manure out of pepper without your glasses on, you know? I mean, not a racist thing, but they’re all brown with black hair and they don’t speak English and I don’t speak Arabic or Spanish, so if they don’t belong here and they don’t come here legally, I want to know who’s here.” He echoed McCain’s observation that the anti-immigrant feeling is strongest in states with new Hispanic populations. “The illegal Hispanic population, it’s definitely growing,” he said. “I can tell you just from how many you see when you walk in Wal-Mart, and you drive down the street and you see buildings now with writing in Spanish that says ‘tienda,’ which is Mexican for ‘store.’ You didn’t see that even a year or two ago.”

After speaking for forty-five minutes, Witherspoon walked across the street with me to Tako Sushi and we sat outside, where heat lamps warmed us. Witherspoon is tall and bald, and he spoke quickly, like a man full of opinions he’s been eager to vent. In his speech, he had run through many of the issues that have been festering on the right: the Law of the Sea treaty; an alleged plan to combine Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a super-state; the Patriot Act. But he was most exercised about immigration and about Lindsey Graham’s betrayal on that issue. “There’s a lot of unrest in South Carolina,” he told me gravely. “And people are concerned that the Senator no longer represents the views of mainstream South Carolinians in a lot of ways. Immigration is the No. 1 issue, no question there. We’re concerned about illegal immigrants coming in here and—well, under the Bush Administration, it’s now seven years into his term, and he hasn’t done a lot about it.” He was not impressed by Bush’s big-tent philosophy of courting Hispanics as the future of the Republican Party. “The big tent is great. But that doesn’t mean ’cause it’s a big tent you should include everything under the tent.”

The GOP is reaping what they've sown. For liberals of the past 50 or so years, it's been a matter of waiting -- sometimes patiently, sometimes not so much -- for the Democratic party leadership to "come around." Civil rights, environmental protections, wage fairness -- wacky ideas that were untenable to the party's "elites" at the time, but of which they would eventually come to see the political advantages. For the Republican leadership, it's different. It's never been about policy, beyond tax cuts and deregulation. It was only about power. So they fed a constituency of the aggrieved, the spittle-flecked, the xenophobes, the...um...obsessed. The Republicans encouraged the burgeoning stardom of phony fanatics, never seriously distancing themselves from their hateful speech. The Republicans, with the uneasy support of their corporate donors, empowered the crazies and the phony tough -- or at least made the idiots feel empowered. And now they aren't proving so patient.