Scattershooting and web-surfing and came across a website with these commands of action.

Mantengamos la esperanza! Mantengamos la unidad! Estamos unidos!

Holy Tom Tancredo, Batman, are these words of inspiration from a lefty organization expressing pride in Latino culture, or maybe from a farm worker’s organization expressing solidarity, or maybe some ethnic-based group that gives right wingers the creeps because maybe they’re out to return to the Southwest to Mexico?

No, boys and girls, those words of action are to be found on the following website: http://espanol.johnmccain.com.

Yep, the Republican Party’s nominee for president has gone Spanish. We’re shocked! Absolutely shocked! I wonder. What gives Repubican far righties the creeps more: John McCain talking about global warming or John McCain going Spanish? I’d say the later, for the simple reason that while most far righties think global warm is a hoax hatched up by Al Gore and other like-minded idiots, at least it’s relatively harmless. I mean, a global warming hoax isn’t subverting our national culture or identity, or filling up our emergency rooms and classrooms.

Also, you can’t sick a police officer on a depleting ozone, but boy howdy, you sure can send a black-and-white to pull over a Mexican-looking driver and ask him if he’s an `Merican. McCain obviously knows how much the right-wing talk radio nation hates for him to like Hispanics, but heck, he’s going to do it anyway, what with over 30 million of `em in the U.S. and it being an election year and all.

Also, a bunch of `em live in some criticial swing states that could decide the `08 election. We’re talking Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and McCain thinks he has a shot at California with Gov. Arnold helping him out. McCain isn’t faking it either. As an Arizona senator, he has historically had a good feel for the Latino community and demonstrated sincere respect and interest in America’s fastest growing demographic.

You might also recall that comprehensive immigration bill McCain sponsored a few years back, the one that called for tougher law enforcement on the border as well as a path to legalization for many undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. The talk show crowd and southern Republicans in the Senate went nuts over that one, with some calling the Arizona senator “Juan McCain,” for his support of the bill.

Such creative and intelligent name calling is being summoned again now that McCain has gone Spanish. Good manners and civility dictate that I not report some of the most unkind things some good Americans are saying about McCain’s Hispanic strategy, but here’s a boiled-down translation: What part of illegal don’t you understand? Oh sorry, got off the track there. That’s about something else.

To add insult to right-wing misery, McCain launched his official Spanish-language website on Cinco de Mayo. Just great, go Spanish on a major Mexican holiday and then brag about the link, which is what McCain incredibly did. And he didn’t stop there.

“I am confident that I will do very well,” McCain said of seeking Hispanic support for the general election. “I know their patriotism. I know the respect for the family, the advocacy for pro-life. I know the small business aspect of our Hispanic voters.”

McCain has some work to do on the account of Republicans going anti-Hispanic in recent years. A recent Pew Hispanic Center study found that just 23 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. considered themselves Republicans. That’s a huge drop from the roughly 40 percent of Hispanics voters in 2006 who supported President W. McCain does have an election opening. He has a generally good image among Latinos, his views on immigration aren’t to the right of a Fox News talk show host, and he has this bad habit of always saying that immigrants are God’s children, too.

Still, it’s great to get my news fix fed by the “En Las Noticias” bit on McCain’s espanol.com website. And if I want anaylsis and commentary, I can go to “Discursos, Temas y Analisis,” and I get everything I need.

You go Juan!

- By Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger Y Columnista

  

In the 1850s, as Abraham Lincoln steadily moved toward an anti-slavery position that would come to define much of his legacy, he developed a theory of the Declaration of Independence that would become a guiding principle.

Lincoln became increasingly troubled by the spread of slavery into what were then new western territories of a growing nation. He saw this development as a threat to basic American principles where men and women ought to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Slavery, Lincoln believed, robbed many Americans of their basic liberties and freedoms and allowed “some people to eat while others did all the work,” wrote James Oakes, a Lincoln biographer.

Oakes writes in his book about Lincoln, “The Radical and the Republican,” that Lincoln developed his own interpretation of American history to buttress his point about slavery. It began with the Declaration of Independence. The country’s founders, Lincoln believed, “did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects,” Oakes notes.

In words that still ring true today and I believe apply to the 2008 presidential race, Oakes writes that Lincoln believed that the Declaration “set a standard maxim for a free society” that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading…to people of all colors.”

In other words, a perfect union would never quite be perfect, but what America has attained and can still achieve is worth the fight while appreciating what has been gained.

In 2008, Americans have been witnessed to something that would have been unimaginable to generations past - and one need not go into the distant past to comprehend the utter unlikelihood that an African-American man now stands on the cusp of being the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have seen that while America is far from being a perfect union - and its racial divides continue to trouble the nation - it has nonetheless made the candidacy of Barack Obama not only possible, but a very successful venture. For even if Obama goes on to lose the general election, he has already won in many respects, and more importantly, the nation has gained a victory as well.

There will be more Barack Obamas in America’s political future, but there had to be a first, and the face of this particular pioneer is one born from a father of Kenya and a mother of Kansas, raised by white grandparents, and who left the Hawaiian islands, where he came of age, to come to the mainland and eventually make his significant mark on American history.

For those of us old enough to go through presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, it is quite incredible to grasp that an exotic politician named Barack Obama will soon be the presidential nominee of one of America’s two major politicial parties. For the kids of today who are in a tizzy about Obama, getting on the Internet and connecting to their social networks in talking about their candidate, it may be no big deal.

But then they don’t have that personal perspective of recalling a presidential candidate like George Wallace, who ran as an independent in 1968 to represent the resentment of white Southerners to the civil rights movement of that era, and to push back against even the modest gains of African-Americans of those times. To the Wallace voters of 1968, a Barack Obama is something they could not have even conceived or remotely accepted - a black-looking man who is the son of a biracial marriage, and who has the audacity to believe he can be president.

It’s still a long road to November victory for Obama. And given the fact that we live in a great but still imperfect nation, the first African-American candidate with a serious chance of being elected president of the United States is sure to face a slew of racial resentments and stereotypes - both real and imagined.

Still, for Obama just to get to this point, proves we’re long past the days of George Wallace and the segregationists and the institutionalized racism so long ingrained into American life and society. The Declaration of Independence and its ideals , as Lincoln rightly said, are to be “constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained.” The 2008 presidential campaign has already been a long tussle, but given its results thus far, worth laboring for in our grand but imperfect union.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger y Columnista

   

I was going to send xenophobic congressman Tom Tancredo a Cinco de mayo greeting card, but then I thought, “Nah, why make his day when he has so many other things to feel chipper about?”

You know, stuff like the U.S. is now home to over 30 million Hispanics, and that a state like Texas will be majority Latino by 2040, if not sooner, or maybe how kids named Mallory Hernandez are getting into UT-Austin with such frequency that the university recently opened an office in Harlingen to attract even more youngsters from the border.

There’s lots of good news around here. That’s why we need the border wall. See, when a border region that has had its share of knocks gets some momentum going, why not stick a 15-foot wall up to blight the scenery, alientate the local populace that never asked for the thing, and bring the added benefit of making right-wingers in Iowa feel better about border security?

It’s a three-fer.

A congressional panel headed by Democrats hostile to the building of the famed wall came to Brownsville last week. They put on a good show. The local bishop said the wall was no good for various reasons, such as throwing off the spirtuality and karma of our border communities. Some lefty representing some lefty group of some sort said we are all one, we are the world, we are the children, open borders, baby.

But mostly, it was common sense stuff. El Paso congressman Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol sector chief, (what does he know, right?), said border fencing will only work in concentrated stretches and not over the expanse of spaces advocated by the seal-the-border crowd. UT-Brownsville President Juliet Garcia spoke of her institution’s longstanding opposition to the fence for various reasons, including the small detail of how the original fed plan would have cut her campus in two, (is that all?).

Tancredo and his fellow right-wing fence builder in Congress, Duncan Hunter, smirked through the whole thing and were likely thinking, “Dang, there’s lots of Mexicans here!” Terrible Tommy sneered at the good bishop and suggested that the scholarly religious leader of the Brownsville Diocese didn’t really believe in having borders at all. No, no, the bishop said, he did believe in borders, but Terrible Tommy cut him off before he could complete his answer.

Hunter, meanwhile, crowed about how well a border fence had worked in the So Cal/San Diego district he’s from. Any objection to having such a thing here was met by Hunter bragging about how his border fence south of San Diego had cured many ills, and heck, building a border wall is the humane thing to do, Duncan said.

Hunter’s constant mentions of So Cal were so frequent that I kept waiting for a blond skater kid to roll in and tell him, “Dude, this isn’t San Diego. It’s totally different here, like, we have Charro Days here, and everything.”

But, alas, leave it to Tancredo to provide the headline for the day. All the carping about building a border fence finally got to Terrible Tommy. Maybe, he sneered, the feds ought to build a border fence north of Brownsville. Get it? That way Brownsville can be on the Mexican side of the fence where it belongs.

Nice touch, Tom, but I’m wondering. Did you get a chance to stop at Taco Palenque on your way out of town? Good eats, bud, and they might even speak a word of English or two, too, always an added bonus.