Only AFTER the Iraq War became an unpopular clusterfuck did Greenwald begin to back away from Bush

[geek tragedy]

14. He was also a Tom Tancredo- style xenophobe.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/yelling-racist-as-argument-in.html?m=

So, there’s Willis' self-satisfied decree, in its vapid entirety. According to Willis (and many of Drum's commentators, if not Drum himself), anyone who believes that it’s important for a nation to be comprised of citizens who have at least some joint national allegiance and a minimal common foundation -- never mind a common language in which they can communicate with one another -- is a White Supremacist bigot.

Leave aside the political stupidity of labeling as bigots and racists a huge portion of the electorate which is becoming increasingly concerned about illegal immigration and which agrees with Tancredo’s sentiments. More important than the political self-destruction, Willis’ cheap name-calling -- a crude tactic wielded by many like him -- is substantively vacuous.

...



Current illegal immigration – whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate – renders impossible the preservation of any national identity. That is so for reasons having nothing whatever to do with the skin color or origin of the immigrants and everything to do with the fact that what we end up with are segregated groups of people with allegiences to their enclaves, an inability to communicate, cultural perspectives incompatible with prevailing American culture, and absolutely nothing to bind them in any way to what we know as the United States.

There are ways to have the debate about what to do about this growing problem, and there are even reasonable grounds for disagreeing with the view that illegal immigration is a serious problem – either generally or in terms of its impact on a common "national identity."

But if the approach of pro-illegal-immigration advocates is going to be to follow the example of people like Willis and Drum's commentators and simply scream "racist" at anyone who expresses concerns about the impact of the vast numbers of illegal immigrants pouring into the United States, then their loss in this debate will be as inevitable as it will be well-deserved.