A thing I get asked a lot:

“Derb–As I do every week, I enjoyed Radio Derb. This week, it is quite jarring to transition from your earnest appeal to listeners to do something to oppose McKennedy’s immigration disaster to your statement ‘I’m a Rudy guy.’ “I know that you know Rudy’s views on immigration, legal and illegal. He’s indistinguishable from McCain. “Hello??!!! “How can you care about immigration as much as you obviously do and then support Rudy? Please explain yourself.”

[Derb] I’ll do my best. As I said a couple weeks ago: “My heart says Tom [Tancredo] but my head says Rudy.”

We’re not going to get President Tom, or anyone like him. There is no-one in the field, or likely to be in it, who is (a) fully aware of, and outspoken about, the immigration issue, and (b) at all likely to win.

So what do we do? How about: Support a tough-minded patriot who

(a) shows no signs of a deep ideological commitment to unrestricted immigration,

(b) is not in political hock to any of the invite-the-world business, race, guilt (Guilt? Rudy? Ha!), or Mexican-influence lobbies (although his consulting firm has, or had, Mexico City as a client),

(c) has never, in his extensive chief-executive experience, had to put immigration issues at the front of his mind, and so has a “position” on immigration like I have a position on the blocking rule in ice hockey,

(d) has a personality and intellect not the least, NOT THE LEAST, inclined towards the sappy-sentimentalist kumbaya view of humanity at large, or of immigrant humanity in particular (here, at least, his family background will have been informative),

(e) is going to have to go through some learning/repositioning exercises on several topics if he’s going to get conservative Republican voters out in sufficient numbers,

(f) understands very, very well the cluelessness and incompetency of unionized civil-service bureaucracies (you don’t survive 8 years as mayor of New York without learning that!) and so will be properly contemptuous of any scheme or legislation that calls for a tripling of the workload of the federal immigration bureaucracy–the most clueless and incompetent of them all,

(g) can make things happen,

(h) is Rudy Giuliani.

’Nuff said?