MICKEY KAUS notes that the Cruz Bustamante / MEChA story has depth, links to this piece on Bustamante by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, and asks:

Rutten notes that other California Latino pols (Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa) have no problem renouncing MEChA’s offensive slogans. Why can’t Bustamante?

Meanwhile, Rutten observes:

There are few rules in life that admit no exceptions. Here is one: The pursuit of identity politics ends in an intellectual swamp that inevitably drains into a moral sewer.

That’s why Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is wrong not to speak more clearly to the issues raised by his one-time membership in a Chicano student organization whose founding credo is a mind-numbing amalgam of quaint revolutionary rhetoric and pseudo-mystical racialism. It’s also why the mainstream media’s off-handed treatment of this issue is one of the avoidable shortcomings in their coverage of the recall campaign. . . .

Ideas matter, and words have consequences. No matter how inclusive California’s political vocabulary becomes, it should not accommodate the language of identity politics.

I agree. And I think it’s odd — and embarrassing — that so many people in Bustamante’s media camp have chosen to deny the problem, or to try to explain it away in fashions that they would heap scorn on if employed by the defenders of a Pat Buchanan or a David Duke.

UPDATE: Brian Linse still says that the MEChA slogan is badly translated (and via email notes that it got a minor, but misleading, revision in Rutten’s column). I took several years of Spanish, but I’m far too rusty, even if I did serve as Faculty Advisor to the Hispanic Law Students Association on campus some years ago. If MEChA is harmless, though, then why are these other Latino politicians — some, I think, to the left of Bustamante — so willing to renounce it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thomas Williams emails:

Mr Linse is just wrong. ‘Por’ and ‘para’ are both translated often translated ‘for’, and indeed one of the standard lessons for English-speakers learning Spanish is when to translate ‘for’ with ‘para’ and when with ‘por’. ‘Fuera de’ is perfectly good Spanish for the preposition ‘outside’; ‘afuera de’ is a Latin American variant. The standard translation being given in the media is in fact the correct one, as a look at any decent Spanish dictionary would show.

Beats me — it’s been too long since I did that stuff. My Spanish is now as bad as my French, both of which are worse than my Latin, which itself would get me caned and sent to stand in the corner wearing a “dunce” cap if I presumed to speak it in Dr. Weevil’s presence.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more from Roger Simon.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: And now we’re seeing Hispanic counterorganizing. Or something like that.