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For over two decades, Hank Williams Jr.’s variation of his hit All My Rowdy Friends had opened up Monday Night Football.  But that all changed on October 3, when Williams appeared on Fox and Friends to promote a new CD featuring songs written by his father.  He was asked what he thought about current affairs.  Williams said that Boehner playing Golf with Obama was like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu, and described Joe Biden and Barack Obama as “the enemy.”

The predictable outrage ensued.   ESPN took no time to cancel Williams’ song that night. And depending on whose story you believe they either fired him or he quit in protest within a few days. 

Of course, the outrage from the Left over both of Williams’ statements is hypocritical. He was not arguing that Obama was Hitler, merely that he saw Boehner and Obama as polarized enemies whose playing golf together was anomalous.  This analogy may have been clumsy. But the Left has no problem smearing opposition to mass immigration, affirmative action and even high taxes as stemming from the Third Reich.

As for calling Obama “the enemy”, the Great Transcender has already called majority of Americans who oppose amnesty “enemies” whom Hispanics needed to “punish.”

With Hank Jr.’s politics in the spotlight, the usual suspects are trying to dig up as much dirt as possible, not merely to prove that he is a racist, but more generally that White Southerners and country music fans should somehow be seen as unAmerican and accordingly marginalized by society.   Thus David Zirin, the sports columnist of The Nation (yes, they have sports columnist), points to Williams’ 1988 hit If the South Woulda Won, and quotes the lyrics,  

“We'd put Florida on the right track,

'cause we'd take Miami back"

Zirin asks: “From who? Jews? Cubans? Haitians? Or will Hank go for the trifecta?” 

But Zirin conveniently cuts that line short: Williams goes on to answers his question with “and put all them pushers in the slammer.” 

(That being said, those pushers are predominantly Haitians, Cubans, and other Latino immigrants, but I’m sure Zirin thinks that should not be mentioned.)

And, of course, why would Southerners want one of their cities to proudly bill itself as the Capital of Latin America?

Zirin goes on to chide ESPN for hiring Hank Jr. in the first place, knowing that he was a proud Southerner.  He argues that the NFL cannot try to

“…unite racists and anti-racists; neo-confederates and people who are ready to put the Stars and Bars in our national rear view mirror…If the NFL really wants to cater to the demographic that loves Hank Williams, Jr. and Rush Limbaugh, they’d be better ordering the Broncos to just start Tim Tebow.”

[If the South Would Have Won: The NFL and Hank Williams, Jr., October 5, 2011]

(Zirin here confuses the Stars and Bars with the Confederate Battle Flag, which is featured in the artwork decorating his piece. But why would we expect him to know any American history?)

The transcript of last night's debate makes the extraordinary exchange between Romney and Bachmann that I complained about look even extraordinarier:

"ROMNEY: ...Let me turn to Congresswoman Bachmann and just—just as you, Congresswoman. As—as we've spoken this evening, we're all concerned about getting Americans back to work. And you've laid out some pretty bold ideas with regards to taxation and cutting back the scale of the federal government. And there's no question that's a very important element of getting people back to work.

And I'd like to ask you to expand on your other ideas. What do you do to help the American people get back to work, be able to make ends meet? You've got families that are sitting around the kitchen table wondering how they're going to make—make it to the end of the month. You've got—you've got young people coming out of college, maybe not here at Dartmouth, but a lot of colleges across the country wondering where they can get a job.

What—what would you do—beyond the tax policies you describe—to get people back to work?"

Brian Motopoli at CBS News agrees that this was a "softball" question but argues it was

"...a show of strength in light of Bachmann's long odds at winning the nomination. Romney would be all too happy to see Bachmann stick around at least until to the Iowa caucuses, where she can split the conservative vote with Cain and Perry and give Romney the opening he needs to win the state."

[Republican Debate, Winners And Losers, October 11, 2010]

But I think there's more to it than that. Romney literally bared his throat to Bachmann by mentioning unemployed college graduates. She could have said:

"I'm surprised to learn that you're aware of unemployed college graduates, because this is exactly the group that will be most hurt by your repeated proposals to "staple a green card" to the diplomas of foreign tech graduuates from U.S. colleges. And in the economic plan I proposed yesterday, I made the point that we should tighten up the labor market by enforcing the law against the estimated eight million illegal aliens who have stolen jobs that Americans desperately need (to say nothing of their children who are stealing our tax dollars for welfare and education).

I know your big donors, your clients at Bain, won't like that. But we Republicans have to be careful about being seduced by Big Business. It's hard enough to make the case for capitalism. We don't want to be drawn into defending crony capitalism. We want to defend the American people."

She could have—but she didn't.

Yet a Washington Post poll yesterday showed that Romney's plan is intensely unpopular, especially (63%-27%) among Republican-leaning voters. Bachmann could have burst Romney's bubble just as Rick Perry burst his own bubble by saying opponents of his Texas DREAM Act had "no heart".

And Bachmann would not even have had to mention a legal immigration moratorium or birthright citizenship reform. She would have been well within her apparent comfort zone.

Yet she did not strike—nor did she even mention enforcing the law against illegal aliens, although it figured in her own "jobs plan" released the same day.

(Instead what she said was this:

"BACHMANN: Well, I do understand that. I'm—I'm a mother of 28 kids, 22 foster kids, 5 biological kids. I get how difficult it is for young people right now to get jobs right out of college. It's very, very tough.

And the solutions that I'm offering in my plan, which if I can give a commercial, are at michelebachmann.com. The solutions that I'm offering aren't just a silver bullet. It's not just the tax code. It's also dealing with the regulatory burden, because businesses—my husband and I started our own successful business. I'm 55. I spent my whole life in the private sector. I get job creation, too. And the business world is looking at 1.8 trillion every year in compliance costs with government regulations.

That has to go. So I want to get rid of that, it's the mother of all repeal bills. But the number one reason that employer say that they are not hiring today is "Obama-care." And I was the leading critic for President Obama in Washington, D.C., against "Obama-care." That is why I was the first member of Congress to introduce that bill to repeal "Obama-care." I understand that is what is inhibiting job creation and job growth.

We have to repeal that. I also introduced and I fought on Barney Frank's committee against Dodd-Frank, which is the "housing and jobs destruction act." That's why I was the chief author of that bill as well. There is much more to my solutions, go to michelebachmann.com and you can find out."

Yawn.)

I suppose stupidity, or lack of imagination, is a possible explanation for this entire exchange. Thus Bachmann directed her own question to Perry, who is competing for the same social conservative/ Religious Right vote and whom she certainly wanted to hurt—but her question was just boilerplate about government spending instead of an attack on his awful immigration record (which exends far beyond in-state tuition). This may reflect her dependence on conventional GOP consultants, of whom Dick Morris memorably said in his 1997 Behind The Oval Office:

"I had studied the Republican Party from within as one of their consultants. If you are in their field of fire, they are deadly. Raise taxes, go soft on crime, oppose work for welfare, weaken the military? They’re all over you yelling “liberal”. If you wander into their line of fire, they’re going to kill you every time. But they have no other game plan, no other way to win. If you come around behind them or alongside and don’t raise taxes, if you’re tough on crime and want to reform welfare, use the military effectively, and cut spending, they can’t hit you. A tank can rotate its turret—a Republican can’t."

But Romney's consultants must have read that morning's Washington Post with its headline pointing to devastating poll on one of their candidate's pet Big Business panders. I cannot believe they would have exposed him to this risk—unless there was already an agreement between the Romney and Bachmann camps.

The result for Bachmann is well summarized by CBS' Motopoli in his final dismissive paragraph:

"Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann: Perhaps it's unfair to put these three candidates in the "losers" column, since their performances met the (low) expectations that existed coming into Tuesday night. But all three need to do something to get out of the single digits in national polls - to offer up a performance or generate a moment that will resonate enough to get GOP primary voters to give them a second look. None did."

Is this another example of the mysterious force that prevents GOP candidates (and for that matter MainStream Media Bigfeet) from mentioning immigration?

Or does Bachmann really think that, by sparing Romney, she may get his Veep nod? (Dick Morris today suggests Treasury Secretary.)

Bachmann would certainly balance the ticket, with her putative appeal to Tea Partiers, social conservatives and the religious right.

But there's a subtext to both the Bachmann and Ron Paul campaigns. Both have excited the enmity of small but deadly interest groups—respectively, gays and Zionists.

Paul at least hasn't outright attacked our Israeli connection, and his implicit criticism wins him surprising under-the-radar friends as well as enemies. However, I don't know that there's any untapped force to balance the notorious ruthlessness of the gay lobby—and I strongly doubt that Romney, who will have his own problems as a Mormon, is the man to stand up to it.

Bachmann could have caught the Cain thermal. Now maybe the best she can hope for is to replace Janet Napolitano as DHS Secretary.`

Payrolls swelled by 103,000 in September, about twice what economists were expecting. Yet their pessimism was still vindicated, for even the higher number failed to bring down the unemployment rate, which remained stuck at 9.1% for the third straight month.

In our last jobs report we estimated that immigration policy brings about 100,000 new workers into the U.S. each month. This includes green cards issued for working age arrivals plus visas issued for “temporary” workers, who often attain permanent resident status.

Job creation must exceed the 100,000 mark just to keep the unemployment rate stable. September barely managed that.

We can’t resist shouting: WE TOLD YOU SO.

(Note that

Last week, I critiqued Ron Unz's recent article in The American Conservative, which argued that what we at VDARE.com call “The Sailer Strategy”—that the Republican Party should and can only win, not through “outreach”/minority pandering, but by “inreach”/mobilizing its own (white) base—wouldn’t really work and that a better way to prevent immigration overload would be to raise the minimum wage.

It reminded me that it’s time to post an update of my thinking on how the GOP—or, more accurately, the GAP, Generic American Party, a party representing the historic American nation, which currently votes overwhelmingly Republican—can survive.

The basic concept behind a long-term Sailer Strategy for Republicans: You want more of the kind of people likely to vote for your party in the country and fewer of the kind of people likely to vote for the other party.

This may sound a shocking thing for any Republican to say. But there’s a flagrant double standard here: the Democrats get to implement this logic quite unashamedly. They have long boasted that their policy of bringing in foreigners to vote for them will eventually give them a Chicago-like one-party hegemony over the United States.

And they may be right.

Of course, mass immigration also drives down the salaries and raises the housing and education costs of Americans, and thus makes them less likely to marry and establish families. The Democrats don’t brag about that as much.

Yet really, from a Democratic perspective, that’s not a bug, that's a feature. People who vote Republican tend to be relatively successful in life. The harder it is for Americans to attain the basics of a successful life, such as marriage and children, the better for Democrats.

Democrats frequently offer Republicans advice on what to do about demographic change. It basically boils down to: "Lie back and

Carissa Horton & Ethan Nichols: Young, White, Christian Couple Visits Public Park in Tulsa, OK, Gets Slaughtered

Murder victims Carissa Horton, 18, and Ethan Nichols, 21 are seen here during an event at Rhema Bible Church in Broken Arrow.

They were young and in love, and went for a walk in the park at 9:30 p.m., on Sunday, September 18.

And that was the last time anyone besides their killers saw them alive.

Carissa Horton and Ethan Nichols had never known each other in Keokuk, Iowa, where they’d both grown up, but their parents knew each other, and put their kids in touch with each other. Ethan’s family had already moved out to Tulsa when work dried up in Iowa. Carissa then went to Tulsa to attend Oral Roberts University.

Both kids came from devoutly Christian families.

They started Facebook messaging each other, then texting each other, talking on the phone about sermons they’d watched on podcast, and next thing you knew, they were praying together every night over the phone. They attended church functions together.

But apparently no one ever warned them about walking in East Tulsa’s Hicks Park after dark.

Ethan had attended community college, and aspired to be a graphic designer, but was working in a creamery. Carissa was studying music, but had to frequently go jogging, for her Phys Ed requirement. (Some reports said they had gone jogging in the park.)

Racist confessed murderers, Darren Price (L), and Jerard Davis (R).

Enter Darren Price, 19, and Jerard Davis, 21. The two black men had initially decided to rob the couple, but during the robbery figured that they might as well kill them while they were at it. So Price and Davis had Horton and Nichols kneel on the ground—and blew their brains out, execution-style.

Two hours later, the killers decided to go back to steal