[snip]Activists for Latino and immigrant rights – and supporters of sane governance – are vowing to do everything they can to overturn it. But where was the tea party crowd? Isn’t the whole premise of the tea party movement that overreaching government poses a grave threat to individual freedom?It seems to me that a law allowing individuals to be detained and interrogated on a whim – and requiring legal residents to carry identification documents, as in a police state – would send the tea partiers into apoplexy. Or is there some kind of exception if the people whose freedoms are being taken away happen to have brown skin and might speak Spanish?And what is the deal with Sen. John McCain? The self-proclaimed practitioner of “straight talk” was once a passionate advocate of sensible, moderate immigration reform. Now, facing a primary challenge from the right, he says he supports the new law, which is as far from sensible and moderate as it could possibly be.Are six more years in the Senate really worth abandoning what seemed like bedrock principles? Or were those principles always situational?
[snip]
[The accompanying political cartoon shows a cop stopping a motorist and saying "I pulled you over for being brown."]
2 comments:
I love Eugene, and thanks for this post. I've been visiting some of the Conservative blog-o-sphere on the emigration / Arizona issues, and I haven't seen much mention of the Americans who are actively breaking our laws by hiring undocumented workers, yet it's the "brown" folk screwing everything up! F'ing insane!
What's happening in AZ is a shamefully classic example of scape-goating. Seems like this kind of thing happens more when times are not good economically. A lot of tea partiers appear to be primarily blue collar folks, the ones who have been the most threatened historically by immigrants who would work for cheap, be they Hispanic, Chinese, Irish, or whatever.
Seeing groups of these semi-literates holding their signs, proudly advertising their limited understanding of English... oh the irony. Makes me think of one really BIG special ed class. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of children were left behind...
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