Medved dismisses fears about North American Super Corridor

Michael Medved has unleashed a string of fact-free, ad hominem attacks on those, unnamed by Medved, who have been warning about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and the planned SuperCorridor connecting Mexico and Canada, which VFR has dubbed the Nation Crusher. Jerome Corsi, the leading critic of the project, responds to Medved at Human Events.

With the possible exception of Ralph Peters’s attack on the Islam critics as Nazi-style exterminatist bigots, this article has the highest proportion of contentless vitriol to facts and arguments that I’ve ever seen in a mainstream opinion article. Does Medved think this kind of thing will persuade anyone? Read Medved’s unceasing outpouring of invective, then read Corsi’s response, and ask yourself who is speaking responsibly here, and who is the nutcase.

Gintas writes:

In fact, Medved’s screed looks a lot like the typical raving blog commenter just about anywhere, only longer, while his commenters start to look like a formal British debate society by comparison.

LA replies:

Yes. Have any of the supposed ranting conspiracy mongers whom Medved is attacking ever wrtten anything a fraction as unhinged as Medved has done here?

My theory: For Medved, the Super Corridor is a stand-in for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, of which he is also a passionate supporter, automatically dismissing all critics. The common theme: people who detect a concrete threat to American cultural unity, nationhood, and sovereignty are kooks, and it’s Medved’s job to expose them. Medved tells us he’s been a “conservative Republican” for 26 years.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, Medved is the guy who when asked in a C-SPAN interview in the 1990s why he had not moved to Israel when his father did, did not give the answer you would expect a person to give to such a question: “Because I’m an American, America is my country, I’m part of it, I belong here.” Instead, Medved gave this quintessential neocon answer: “Because America is the country that has the greatest effect on the world.” Neocons don’t love America as a country, as their country. They love it as a slayer of foreign dragons and as the carrier of a universal ideology. Which leads me to think: With Bush’s Democratize the Muslims Project that we’ve had for the last few years, Medved must be one happy and fulfilled “American.”

Gary M. writes:

Medved likes to present himself as a reasonable, intelligent guy, but at least on immigration he seldom, if ever takes calls on his radio show from people who might actually expose the weaknesses in his point of view. He will put on calls from listeners that are inarticulate, to say the least, and let the caller go on and on, flailing and floundering without an apparent point being made, until he interrupts to triumphantly bellow “you can’t deport 12 million people” as if the choice was either completely open borders or mass roundups of illegals. This of course is a typical straw man argument not just from Medved, but from the Maldef, La Raza, and ACLU types as well.

As for the SPP, I am no conspiracy theorist, but no one has explained to my satisfaction why we need any such thing. If it’s free trade the Medveds of the world want, NAFTA already exists, and it can be fine tuned if need be (I am not here to argue about whether NAFTA is a good or bad thing—the point is that the free traders already have the infrastructure in place they wanted). But we do not need a parallel bureaucracy or “working group” or whatever you want to call it. Any type of government agency, once it is in place and is generating jobs and cash flow, is almost impossible to kill. On that basis alone, being in favor of (or at least not bothered by) the SPP is a very strange position for any conservative to have … presuming the individual in question is truly a conservative.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2007 03:53 PM | Send