Here's Linda Chavez working overtime to "win friends and influence people":

What is said today of the Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and others was once said of Germans, Swedes, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others. The only difference is that in the past, the xenophobes could speak freely, unconstrained by a veneer of political correctness. Today, they speak more cautiously, so they talk about the rule of law, national security, amnesty, whatever else they think might make their arguments less racially charged.

Where once the xenophobes could advocate forced sterilization and eugenics coupled with virtually shutting off legal immigration from "undesirable" countries, now they must be content with building walls, putting troops on the border, rounding up illegal aliens on the job and deporting them, passing local ordinances to signal their distaste for immigrants' multi-family living arrangements, and doing whatever else they can to drive these people back where they came from...

[W]e need to quit pretending that the "No Amnesty" crowd is anything other than what it is: a tiny group of angry, frightened and prejudiced loudmouths backed by political opportunists who exploit them.

Linda Chavez is a piece of shit, and I don't choose those words lightly. In a time when our emotions are raw, and our social fabric is wearing thin, you've just told people across this country that people with whom they thought they simply had honest disagreements over policy secretly hate them. You've told them, unequivocally, that those immigration discussions they've had with their Anglo friends haven't really been about a concern for America. They've really been about a secret racist hatred harbored not that far below the surface.

I have a very good friend who is an immigrant from Central America. A conversation last year over immigration got to the point where she accused me of being a "racist, just like the rest of those people" at which point I told her she was welcome to call me when she realized she owed me an apology, and I hung up.

We didn't talk again for almost a year--and may have never talked again except for a chance occurence.

Because of the caustic, careless rhetoric of people like George W. Bush and Linda Chavez, my friend had become thoroughly convinced that anyone who opposed Bush's immigration bill could only be motivated by racism and hatred. There was, after all, no other possible explanation for it. The President himself said so! (He is, you remember "a uniter, not a divider.") The careless words of demagogues like Bush and Chavez served to nearly destroy a decade-long friendship--all this so big agriculture can keep down the cost of tomatoes.

Thanks, George. Thanks, Linda.

Posted by: Ragnar at 02:54 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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