Uno If By Land, Dos If By Sea

If Paul Revere were alive and a member of the Constitution Party...

IMAGE: Lukas Ketner

BY BETH SLOVIC

As the investigation continues into last week's deadly bridge collapse in Minnesota, the chairman of Oregon's Constitution Party has already identified what he says is a conceivable culprit: NAFTA.

Sound crazy? Worldnetdaily.com, a politically conservative website that wrote last year about hormones in soy milk making children gay, recently spelled out a NAFTA connection to the bridge disaster.

And the details gave pause to state Constitution Party chairman Jack Brown of Grants Pass. Here they are: The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement eased the flow of goods among Canada, the United States and Mexico. A lot of those products are delivered by trucks.

The bridge that collapsed Aug. 1 was part of Interstate 35, which runs from Laredo, Texas, just a stone's throw from the Mexican border, to Duluth, Minn., about 200 miles from Canada. A lot of trucks use it, and heavy trucks wear out bridges.

"The article gave some convincing arguments," Brown says of worldnetdaily's thesis. "I'm not an engineer.... It sounds plausible at least."

The bridge collapse, however, could be the tip of a broader problem, say Brown and other Oregonians, including members of the state's 3,100-member Constitution Party. They see a new NAFTA-style menace on the horizon.

Following Worldnetdaily's lead, they warn that Americans are on the verge of losing more rights and privileges as President Bush pushes adoption of what they call the North American Union, a threat they say dwarfs road fatalities from NAFTA.

The goal, under that model, would be to unite Canada, the United States and Mexico in a way that more or less resembles the European Union, critics say. That's bad, Brown says, because "inevitably the worst comes out on top."

Nonetheless, the creation of a North American supernation is now basically a done deal, according to The New American, a magazine published by the ultra-conservative John Birch Society.

"We're dealing with powers that are above and beyond what we can counteract," says Keith Humphrey, an Oregon Constitution Party member from Gervais. "Some of the people on Capitol Hill aren't even aware that it's going on."

Both Humphrey and Brown point to Bush's North American Security and Prosperity Partnership, forged in 2005 to promote "cooperation and information sharing," as evidence that groundwork is already in place to establish a North American Union. Apparently, however, Bush isn't ready to unveil this "union," since the website for the initiative, spp.gov, has a full page devoted to debunking "myths" about the partnership.

"The SPP in no way, shape or form considers the creation of a European Union-like structure or a common currency," the website says.

But websites can't always be trusted. A year-old poll on the Oregon Constitution Party's website (constitutionpartyoregon.net) asks respondents to predict the next American crisis. Nuclear terrorist attack? War with China over Taiwan?

Nearly 42 percent of the 205 voters picked the Hispanic Reconquista, the idea that Mexicans will forcefully take over a broad swath of the U.S. Southwest. The Constitution Party can't vouch for who voted. And both Humphrey, who runs the website, and Brown distanced themselves and the party from the results.

"Those polls are for entertainment purposes only," Humphrey says. "It could be our detractors trying to make us look bad."