Connect the Dots Monday 7to 8AM May 3 2001
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Monday morning at 7 on CONNECT THE DOTS Wall Street reform with
John Cavanagh, director of the Progressive think tank, IPS, Institute for
Policy Studies.
And we'll cover the Obama administration's new request for Congress to give
another 33 billion for the war in Afghanistan. According to journalist
David Swanson, this time the money is openly targeted to escalate the war.
Which Congress people will stand up and vote "NO"? Which oppose the war but
lack the courage to vote against the escalation? Which actually support it?
Journalist David Swanson reports.
And the cry to boycott Arizona for its racist new law is rising all over the
country. In Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn lead the charge with a
Resolution for the City Council. She has contacted City Councils all over
the United States to join. She reports on the response and the rising
People's Movement. All Monday morning at 7 on CONNECT THE DOTS
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02rich.html?th&emc=th
If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem
By FRANK RICH
Published: May 1, 2010
DON'T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be
in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its
hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can't be
quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.
If many of Arizona's defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it's
that the new "show me your papers" law is sui generis: it's seen as one
angry border state's response to its outsized share of America's illegal
immigration crisis. But to label this development "Arizona's folly"
trivializes its import and reach. The more you examine the law's provisions
and proponents, the more you realize that it's the latest and (so far) most
vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal
immigrants - and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of
America's two major political parties.
Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about
Washington's protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration
stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to
being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in
a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national "Take
Back America" crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the
accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president
represents.
The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there's a "reasonable
suspicion" of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the
president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any
doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama
criticized Arizona's action. "I can understand Obama being touchy on the
subject of producing your papers," he said. "Maybe he's afraid somebody's
going to ask him for his." Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president
last week: "What has he said that sounds like American?"
To the "Take Back America" right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien
No. 1. It's no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who
voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon
after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to
produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state's 2012
ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that "birther" bill was
abruptly yanked Thursday.
The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were
exclusively Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not
staying in Arizona. Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up
their own new immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan
places like Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the
Department of Homeland Security's 2009 list of the 10 states that contain
three-quarters of America's illegal immigrant population.
Outbreaks of nativist apoplexy are nothing new in American history. The last
derailed George W. Bush's apparently earnest effort to get a bipartisan
immigration compromise through the Senate in 2007. At the time, the more
egregious expressions of anti-immigrant rage - including Arizona's
self-appointed border-patrol militia, the Minutemen - were stigmatized as a
fringe by the White House and much of the G.O.P. establishment. John McCain,
though facing a tough fight for the Republican presidential nomination,
signed on to the Bush reform effort despite being slimed by those in his
party's base who accused him of supporting "amnesty."
What a difference the Tea Party makes. This time McCain endorsed his state's
new immigration law as "a good tool" and "a very important step forward,"
and propagandized in favor of it with his widely ridiculed televised canard
that illegal immigrants were "intentionally causing accidents on the
freeway." McCain, like other mainstream conservative Republicans facing
primaries this year, is now fighting for his political life against a Tea
Party-supported radical. His opponent, the former congressman and radio
shock jock J. D. Hayworth, is an unabashed birther who frames the
immigration debate as an opportunity to "stand up for our culture,"
presumably against all immigrants, legal and illegal alike. In this
political climate, he could well win.
McCain, like Arizona, shouldn't be singled out for censure: He is far from
alone in cowering before his party's extremists. Neither Mitch McConnell,
John Boehner nor Eric Cantor dared say a word against Arizona's law. Mitt
Romney, who was mocked during the 2008 campaign for having employed
undocumented Guatemalan immigrants as landscapers on his Massachusetts
estate, tried to deflect the issue by vacillating (as usual). So did Mike
Huckabee, who told The Dallas Morning News last week that "it's not my place
to agree or disagree" with what happened in Arizona. If it's not the place
of a talk-show host and prospective presidential candidate to take a stand
on an issue of this moment, whose place is it? There are few profiles in
courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. - only a lot of guys hiding under
their desks.
The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the
Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael
Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon
and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove
know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a
century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the
largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many
critical states.
The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative
order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles
as Obama is. Even conservatives as seemingly above reproach as Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina now invite the nastiest of blow-back if
they fail Tea Party purity tests. When Graham had the gall to work with
Chuck Schumer of New York on an immigration reform bill, the hard-line
Americans for Legal Immigration punished him by spreading rumors about his
private life as loudly as possible. Graham has been backing away from
supporting the immigration bill ever since.
It's harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea
Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party's controlling
force - the tail that's wagging the snarling dog. It's also hard to maintain
that the Tea Party's nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The
first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its
kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious
nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying
things like he has "no idea where Obama was born." The Times/CBS poll of the
Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that
the president was born in the United States.
The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing
to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it's
Obama and the "lamestream media" that are responsible for "perpetuating this
myth that racial profiling is a part" of Arizona's law. So how does that
profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a
Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law,
rode to the rescue by suggesting "they will look at the kind of dress you
wear." Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!
In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it's politically incorrect
to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in
what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in
America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a "racist."
Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist." When Obama put
up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last
week - which he defined as "young people, African-Americans, Latinos and
women" - the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race
card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you're a party
boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and
represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of
Confederate History Month.
In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one
visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message
when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that
African-Americans "really don't have a reason" to vote Republican, citing
his party's pursuit of a race-baiting "Southern strategy" since the
Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there
had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would
require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to
mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the
White House in 1988.
The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in
1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in
other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix's convention hotels if
you want to punish Arizona, but don't for a second believe that it will stop
the fire next time.
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