Wonderful, a lengthy GQ profile of Lou Dobbs. The millionaire Harvard-educated television celebrity and populist champion on the middle-class is totally not as bad as you think! (Also: he is maybe running for president!)

Jeanne Marie Laskas hung out with Lou for a couple days, at home and at work, and surprise: Lou Dobbs is affable, charming, intelligent, reasonable, kind, and unpredictable. Until he gets on the radio, where millions of people listen to him angrily repeat the exact same misleading talking points and idiotic smears that you get from Rush.

He also refuses to take responsibility for his own demagoguery, blaming "elite" others for his popular image as an anti-immigration zealot.

"Politically, you do get lumped in with the wackos," I point out.

"Who's doing the lumping?" he says. "Is it The New York Times? Is it The Washington Post? The L.A. Times? Look, I've sat down with those editors. I'm an inconvenience. Well, first I was an inconvenience. Then I became an obstacle."

Now he even supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants, no longer refers to them as "illegals" or "illegal aliens," and actually blames the drug war for violence at the borders and corporations for the exploitation of workers. In other words, he is a libertarian-leaning liberal on the issue. Which makes no fucking difference, because he spent literally years telling, again, millions of people that illegal hordes of Mexicans were spreading leprosy and wanted to actually reclaim the southwest and turn it into Aztlan.

It doesn't matter if on a personal level the guy loves his Mexican-American wife and believes, accurately, that both middle-class (when he says this he seems to actually mean "working-class" but that is a bit socialistic I guess, to say that) families and immigrants themselves are being "devastated by public policy, by default, by business practices." It makes no difference that he tells a liberal reporter at a diner that he considers it a tragedy that "the power structure in this country" doesn't give a shit about "Hispanic kids, black kids, dropping out of high school," because they're too busy waging "a thirty- or forty-year war on drugs in which the poor, the minorities, are the victims."

Because if that is what he actually believes, why is he mocking Eliot Spitzer for calling for drivers' licenses for undocumented workers? Why is he going on the radio to blast "Barack H. Obama" for using the first-person too often in his speeches instead of demanding that Republican senators actually fucking sign on to a comprehensive immigration reform package that actually helps these people he's gotten rich demonizing? Harry Reid would like to introduce one! This could happen this summer if people like Lou Dobbs actually helped drum up popular support! But no, it's easier to go on the radio every single goddamn day and say "haw haw haw Al Gore is a fat retard because it's snowing."

Why the fuck should anyone care what Lou Dobbs actually thinks about anything if he's actually unwilling to tell his listeners the truth about what he believes?