The LATimes broke this story today, that the U.S. military has gone all Armstrong Williams on the poor, unsuspecting Iraqis, that is to say, PAYING newspapers to print fake "news" about how well everything's going for the U.S. against the insurgency. (Thanks to Carl for the link.)
It's a good lesson in American "freedom and democracy," no doubt. Truth is what you can pay for.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
"I Broke the Law & Disgraced My Office"
The guilty plea of Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham yesterday is just another collapsing domino in a long line.
For the record, Cunningham pled guilty to one count of tax evasion and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, tax evasion, wire fraud, and mail fraud. None of the bribes he received was reported to the Internal Revenue Service or on the congressman's financial disclosure forms.
Still pending:
1. Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the majority leader, is under scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the timing of his trades in the stock of his family's health care company.
2. Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the majority leader, was forced to step down as majority leader after he was indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges.
3. Michael Scanlon, a former spokesman for Mr. DeLay, pleaded guilty last week to bribery. Prosecutors said Mr. Scanlon was part of a conspiracy to defraud Indian tribes and win legislative favors from lawmakers in return for campaign donations, meals, entertainment and other benefits. A former White House aide has also been indicted in that investigation, which is centered on Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist and an ally of Mr. DeLay who worked with Mr. Scanlon. As part of his plea, Mr. Scanlon agreed to cooperate in the investigation. Several members of Congress are said to be under investigation for accepting bribes from Scanlon on behalf of Abramoff.
4. I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted last month on charges of perjury and false statements in the investigation of the leaking of the name of a C.I.A. operative. Other White House officials, including the senior political adviser Karl Rove, remain under investigation in that case.
For the record, Cunningham pled guilty to one count of tax evasion and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, tax evasion, wire fraud, and mail fraud. None of the bribes he received was reported to the Internal Revenue Service or on the congressman's financial disclosure forms.
Still pending:
1. Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the majority leader, is under scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the timing of his trades in the stock of his family's health care company.
2. Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the majority leader, was forced to step down as majority leader after he was indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges.
3. Michael Scanlon, a former spokesman for Mr. DeLay, pleaded guilty last week to bribery. Prosecutors said Mr. Scanlon was part of a conspiracy to defraud Indian tribes and win legislative favors from lawmakers in return for campaign donations, meals, entertainment and other benefits. A former White House aide has also been indicted in that investigation, which is centered on Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist and an ally of Mr. DeLay who worked with Mr. Scanlon. As part of his plea, Mr. Scanlon agreed to cooperate in the investigation. Several members of Congress are said to be under investigation for accepting bribes from Scanlon on behalf of Abramoff.
4. I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted last month on charges of perjury and false statements in the investigation of the leaking of the name of a C.I.A. operative. Other White House officials, including the senior political adviser Karl Rove, remain under investigation in that case.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Waaay Too Divinely Inspired
Seymour Hersh, reporting in The New Yorker:
"Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President's religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that 'God put me here' to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that 'he's the man,' the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose."
Where's my Bible? Ah. "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Proverbs 16:18.
Hersh again: "The President is more determined than ever to stay the course," [a] former defense official said. "He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.' " He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. "They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway," the former defense official said.
We're being led by a man so self-deluded he feels no pain.
"Whom God would destroy, he first makes mad."
"Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President's religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that 'God put me here' to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that 'he's the man,' the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose."
Where's my Bible? Ah. "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Proverbs 16:18.
Hersh again: "The President is more determined than ever to stay the course," [a] former defense official said. "He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.' " He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. "They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway," the former defense official said.
We're being led by a man so self-deluded he feels no pain.
"Whom God would destroy, he first makes mad."
Saturday, November 26, 2005
President Oxymoron
President George W. Bush "is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent."
That brilliant series of contradictory truths is Sidney Blumenthal's summation of El Presidente's strange character traits ... by way of explaining how come Vice President Dick Cheney is REALLY in charge of this administration. (Salon requires you to watch an ad before reading its articles.)
Blumenthal, who knows a thing or two about the backstairs at the White House, follows Cheney's whole history in government, which goes back to Nixon and Gerald Ford. A key paragraph:
"The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly energy plan has required secrecy, deception and subordination of government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to an end. Even projecting a 'war on terror' as total war, trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is a device to invest absolute power in the executive [the office of the president]."
As threats to our Constitution go, this is nothing to sneeze at.
That brilliant series of contradictory truths is Sidney Blumenthal's summation of El Presidente's strange character traits ... by way of explaining how come Vice President Dick Cheney is REALLY in charge of this administration. (Salon requires you to watch an ad before reading its articles.)
Blumenthal, who knows a thing or two about the backstairs at the White House, follows Cheney's whole history in government, which goes back to Nixon and Gerald Ford. A key paragraph:
"The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly energy plan has required secrecy, deception and subordination of government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to an end. Even projecting a 'war on terror' as total war, trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is a device to invest absolute power in the executive [the office of the president]."
As threats to our Constitution go, this is nothing to sneeze at.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
What Republican Power-Brokers Really Think of Christians
"We plan to use three forms of communications to mobilize and win these battles .... Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees."
--Michael Scanlon, former aide to Sen. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), strategizing on how to get conservative Christians to protect existing gambling interests by getting them to oppose competition from riverboat gambling. Scanlon plead guilty this week to conspiring to bribe a congressman and other public officials. Source here.
--Michael Scanlon, former aide to Sen. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), strategizing on how to get conservative Christians to protect existing gambling interests by getting them to oppose competition from riverboat gambling. Scanlon plead guilty this week to conspiring to bribe a congressman and other public officials. Source here.
North Carolina ... On the Torture Trail?
International attention on the U.S. torture policy of smuggling suspects into friendly countries ("rendition") that routinely practice what El Presidente says we DON'T practice has come to center on the Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, N.C. See this article in the Toronto Star.
Curiouser and curiouser. An enterprising reporter for the Lexington Dispatch has looked into the plane's owner, Devon Holding & Leasing. The N.C. Secretary of State's office lists the principal business offices of Devon Holding & Leasing at an address in Lexington, N.C., and its registered agent is Davidson County Superior Court Judge Mark E. Klass.
What's a sitting superior court judge in Davidson County doing as chief agent for a company strongly rumored to be doing dirty work for the C.I.A.?
Another of Devon Holding and Leasing's planes, bearing the registration number N168D, passed through Danish airspace on October 3 on route from Iceland to Budapest. See this article about an investigation by the Swedish government, and note that Devon Holding and Leasing "reportedly regularly leases planes to the CIA."
Google the company name for yourself, and see all the attention it's attracted recently.
ADDENDUM: Okay, okay, we admit it! We were just plain out to lunch on this whole story, which (turns out) has been known for quite some time. Check out Chris Kromm on Facing South. Hell, there's already been a protest at the Johnston County airport!
Curiouser and curiouser. An enterprising reporter for the Lexington Dispatch has looked into the plane's owner, Devon Holding & Leasing. The N.C. Secretary of State's office lists the principal business offices of Devon Holding & Leasing at an address in Lexington, N.C., and its registered agent is Davidson County Superior Court Judge Mark E. Klass.
What's a sitting superior court judge in Davidson County doing as chief agent for a company strongly rumored to be doing dirty work for the C.I.A.?
Another of Devon Holding and Leasing's planes, bearing the registration number N168D, passed through Danish airspace on October 3 on route from Iceland to Budapest. See this article about an investigation by the Swedish government, and note that Devon Holding and Leasing "reportedly regularly leases planes to the CIA."
Google the company name for yourself, and see all the attention it's attracted recently.
ADDENDUM: Okay, okay, we admit it! We were just plain out to lunch on this whole story, which (turns out) has been known for quite some time. Check out Chris Kromm on Facing South. Hell, there's already been a protest at the Johnston County airport!
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
What's That Smell?
A new Elon University Poll that "Bush's troubles are trickling down to other members of his party." That is to say, "While 46 percent of those polled said they had voted for Bush in the 2004 election, only 26 percent said they would back Republicans in next year's congressional election."
Madame Virginia Foxx might want to think about giving back that Tom DeLay money about now.
Jack Abramoff's lobbying partner Michael Scanlon, a former press secretary to DeLay, has signed a plea agreement wherein he promises to provide additional information about "any matter" the federal prosecutors decide to pursue.
Gosh. Wonder what else Scanlon might know about?
Madame Virginia Foxx might want to think about giving back that Tom DeLay money about now.
Jack Abramoff's lobbying partner Michael Scanlon, a former press secretary to DeLay, has signed a plea agreement wherein he promises to provide additional information about "any matter" the federal prosecutors decide to pursue.
Gosh. Wonder what else Scanlon might know about?
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Virginia Foxx, Playing With Fire
On Wednesday, November 9th, N.C. congresswoman Sue Myrick introduced legislation (HR 4280) that would deny $870 million in federal highway dollars to North Carolina. Why? Because of our state's easy access to driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Virginia Foxx and several other North Carolina congressmen signed on as co-sponsors.
Congresswoman Myrick, not coincidentally, wants to be governor. She thinks she's found the issue, and she's finding her crowd. A supporter crowed on SteinReport.com, "You go, Sue! It is about time someone in government starts doing something to control illegal immigration that is draining their states and us all. Punishment and legislation is the only way to start to get a handle on this -- 300,000 illegals in one state is way too many" (Posted by: Born American on November 10, 2005, 12:53 PM).
Myrick's "Punish North Carolina By Crippling the Roads Act" also attracted as co-sponsors, in addition to Foxx, Patrick McHenry of the 10th District, Charlie Taylor of the 11th, and Walter Jones of the 3rd. So far no legislator of any of the other states affected by Myrick's bill -- West Virginia, Illinois, Utah, New Mexico, and Kentucky -- have stepped onto this particular bandwagon to deprive their own states of highway maintenance and development money.
It's a drastic move. Especially considering that the N.C. Senate has already passed a bill reforming DMV procedures, a bill that the NC House will take up come May and which Gov. Easley has promised to sign. That's not fast enough for Myrick, Foxx, McHenry, Taylor, and Jones, and after all, there's a gubernatorial campaign starting in February 2006, and a conservative base to rile up quick. State polls suggest that illegal immigration is as hot a topic among voters as gay marriage ... and for precisely the same reasons.
Classic "populism," as practiced in the Old South and even by New South Republicans like Myrick and Foxx, is pro-nationalist and often racist. We conveniently happen to have a war on against "evil Islamic radicalism, militant Jihadism, or Islamo-fascism" -- let's get the language right, please. But when you get real jumpy like that about a brown-skinned enemy, you're already deep into profiling territory, profiling as government policy (overt or covert), and the actions that logically follow profiling ... along with all the other sweet blossoms on the tree of a greening racism. Remember the "white hands" TV spot Jesse Helms ran against Harvey Gantt in 1990? Not for nothing did Congresswoman Myrick sit at Jesse Helms's table, where she sumptuously supped. Stir up alarm and anger about those others coming in here. Stir it up, and ride to victory on a rural/suburban backlash. Classic wedge strategy.
But you've got to be awfully careful playing these politics, as Myrick and Foxx certainly know. So after introducing her bill, Myrick held a press conference in the Capitol with Virginia Foxx (of Banner Elk and The Bronx) and wet-behind-the-ears Patrick McHenry of Cherryville standing there with her, delivering the "Transportation Revenue Ultimatum Enforcement ID Act of 2005," demanding that North Carolina stem a brown tide, and covering the essential ugliness of that by claiming national security as the sole motive.
So Myrick said, "This is a critical issue today. I mean, they just arrested, down on the border -- what? a couple of weeks ago? -- three Al Qaida members who came across from Mexico into the United States. That's a given fact. They were holding them in the jail down there."
Congressman McHenry added, "In fact, some of the 9-11 terrorists had North Carolina driver's licenses."
Both Myrick and McHenry were making it up.
According to Tim Funk, of the Charlotte Observer Washington bureau, there were no Al Qaida members arrested down in Mexico a la Myrick. Not one. Myrick's "given fact" turns out to be an unproven fiction taken under torture from a captured Al Qaida operative. (He supposedly said that Al Qaida had considered getting agents into this country via Mexico.) Myrick turned that hint into three Al Qaida -- count 'em! -- arrested on the border and held in an American jail. "That's a given fact," she said, even if we have to invent it for the occasion. McHenry's claim of 9-11 terrorists carrying North Carolina driver's licenses also turns out to be bogus. McHenry embroidered that piece of whole cloth out of something he heard about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who earned an engineering degree in North Carolina in the 1980s and who may have possessed a state driver's license at that time but who was in any event attending college here on a student visa and was therefore not an illegal immigrant.
So what's the score so far on "national security" as the pretext for launching a crack-down on Mexicans in North Carolina?
There's only one reason under God's bright sun to stretch the truth like that, past its natural tensile strength. Despite how much Myrick and McHenry later claimed their prejudicial fictions were honest mistakes of memory, they fabricated those little horrors to stampede the voters past the normal threshold of skepticism about "stories" told by politicians. The menacing presence of "them," whoever they are, has always been sufficient in the South to jog us past the Christian admonition to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Morality gets mugged by racist fear.
But if you're going to make stuff up, it's better not to get caught at it.
At Myrick's press conference, Foxx didn't say much of anything. At least she isn't reported making up any additional "facts" about the threat of terrorism coming out of Mexico. But it's not as though Foxx doesn't already have a deep history of anti-immigration initiatives, first in the North Carolina Senate, and just since last January when she first took her seat in Washington, she's listed as a co-sponsor or supporter of a long list of new anti-immigration legislation ... like H.R. 3938, which would eliminate provisions for a random drawing of 55,000 visas annually (the "visa lottery") and end the alloting of 65,000 other visas to the siblings of adult U.S. citizens; H.R. 698, the Citizenship Reform Act of 2005, legislation that would end the process of granting automatic citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens; H.J. Res 41, a proposal that would amend the Constitution of the United States so that no person born in the United States would be a United States citizen unless a parent is a United States citizen, is lawfully in the United States, or has a lawful immigration status at the time of the birth. Etc.
Foxx wants a Constitutional Amendment, no less, to keep certain people from achieving citizenship in this country.
Not so many years ago, Virginia Foxx was known as something of a Republican moderate. She subtly sent the message to mountain "progressives" that she welcomed the candidacy of Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms in 1990, and she complained privately about the overt racism of her fellow Watauga legislator Gene Wilson. Foxx was president of a small mountain community college at the time and had supported "liberal" causes like the Equal Rights Amendment and adoption by gay couples. That's why a pro-choice group, 100 Women of Watauga County, endorsed Foxx for State Senate in 1994 and gave her money, because she told the Endorsement Committee that she was pro-choice and anti-racist.
What a difference a few years make, not to mention a few Republican primaries involving higher office. Vernon Robinson beat up on Foxx unmercifully last year as some sort of closet flamer for lesbian sex. Ironically, considering Foxx's own similar stands, illegal immigration furnished one of Robinson's cudgels. Robinson ran a radio spot in 2004 which opened with the theme music from "The Twilight Zone." An announcer said, darkly, "The aliens are here, but they didn't come in a spaceship. They've filled our criminal courtrooms and clogged our schools .... They sponge off the American taxpayer ... they've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes ... You walk into a McDonald's restaurant to order a Big Mac, and find to your horror that the employees don't speak English." Robinson even put a nasty spin on the required "paid for by" tagline. It was said in Spanish: "Yo, gringo. Robinson por congreso."
Foxx would never have associated herself with that language -- she was the Un-Robinson of 2004 -- but now she's very pleased to associate herself with resentment against sponging aliens. The net outcome remains the same: "These people all have homes. We need to help them go home." It didn't ultimately matter whether we got Robinson or Foxx. It's the same old racism, a sell-out of Christian values, and it's done with a sterling-silver cynicism that has become Congresswoman Foxx's hallmark.
Rob Christensen recently wrote with historical perspective in the Raleigh News & Observer, "it seems clear as I travel around the state that some North Carolinians find the new wave of immigrants -- with their different language and culture -- a bit unsettling. And some politicians are trying to tap into that unease. Unlike many other states, North Carolina is not used to large-scale immigration. When it industrialized, it filled its factories with white sharecroppers from the mountains and countryside, not Polish, Italian or Irish immigrants. For much of its history, North Carolina exported people -- whites in the 19th century westward and blacks in the 20th century to the Northern cities. Even so, nativist politics occasionally surfaced in criticism of Catholics, Jews and immigrants."
And so it goes now, for Mexicans specifically and Hispanics generally.
It's an ugly populism that grows more obtuse and prouder of itself every day. Recently, a student columnist at the Daily Tar Heel in Chapel Hill felt free to publish the following opening sentence to an editorial in the student newspaper: "I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport." The uproar that followed caused her firing off the paper, and she became a one-day sensation on talk radio as the victim -- mind you -- of liberal intolerance. She thought she was being funny, she said, even cute, and it was other people who caused the problem. (The Weld County, Colorado, commission recently introduced a resolution calling for the forced removal of all illegal immigrants from the county. BYO pitchforks and torches. Examples multiply like mushrooms in horse manure.)
These are the pilot fish who swim with the big sharks in North Carolina, just waiting to thrash the water over the chunks of easy prey. Virginia Foxx has obviously carefully considered who she's swimming with.
But she's also trying to serve another master not so hot to end illegal immigration. While Foxx is bluffing North Carolina about losing one-quarter of its highway budget, she's also taking money from the same big business interests who actually depend on illegal immigrants to swell their laboring ranks at the lowest pay. They're the ones who've convinced President Bush, too, to go slow on closing the borders. Very powerful business interests need "guest workers" in the worst way: the construction industry, the hospitality industry (lodging and restaurants), big agriculture including Christmas trees.
It's the essence of her hypocrisy on the illegal immigrant issue. She stirs up incipient racism against illegals and simultaneously gives aid and comfort to big business that depends on those workers on a daily basis.
Congresswoman Myrick, not coincidentally, wants to be governor. She thinks she's found the issue, and she's finding her crowd. A supporter crowed on SteinReport.com, "You go, Sue! It is about time someone in government starts doing something to control illegal immigration that is draining their states and us all. Punishment and legislation is the only way to start to get a handle on this -- 300,000 illegals in one state is way too many" (Posted by: Born American on November 10, 2005, 12:53 PM).
Myrick's "Punish North Carolina By Crippling the Roads Act" also attracted as co-sponsors, in addition to Foxx, Patrick McHenry of the 10th District, Charlie Taylor of the 11th, and Walter Jones of the 3rd. So far no legislator of any of the other states affected by Myrick's bill -- West Virginia, Illinois, Utah, New Mexico, and Kentucky -- have stepped onto this particular bandwagon to deprive their own states of highway maintenance and development money.
It's a drastic move. Especially considering that the N.C. Senate has already passed a bill reforming DMV procedures, a bill that the NC House will take up come May and which Gov. Easley has promised to sign. That's not fast enough for Myrick, Foxx, McHenry, Taylor, and Jones, and after all, there's a gubernatorial campaign starting in February 2006, and a conservative base to rile up quick. State polls suggest that illegal immigration is as hot a topic among voters as gay marriage ... and for precisely the same reasons.
Classic "populism," as practiced in the Old South and even by New South Republicans like Myrick and Foxx, is pro-nationalist and often racist. We conveniently happen to have a war on against "evil Islamic radicalism, militant Jihadism, or Islamo-fascism" -- let's get the language right, please. But when you get real jumpy like that about a brown-skinned enemy, you're already deep into profiling territory, profiling as government policy (overt or covert), and the actions that logically follow profiling ... along with all the other sweet blossoms on the tree of a greening racism. Remember the "white hands" TV spot Jesse Helms ran against Harvey Gantt in 1990? Not for nothing did Congresswoman Myrick sit at Jesse Helms's table, where she sumptuously supped. Stir up alarm and anger about those others coming in here. Stir it up, and ride to victory on a rural/suburban backlash. Classic wedge strategy.
But you've got to be awfully careful playing these politics, as Myrick and Foxx certainly know. So after introducing her bill, Myrick held a press conference in the Capitol with Virginia Foxx (of Banner Elk and The Bronx) and wet-behind-the-ears Patrick McHenry of Cherryville standing there with her, delivering the "Transportation Revenue Ultimatum Enforcement ID Act of 2005," demanding that North Carolina stem a brown tide, and covering the essential ugliness of that by claiming national security as the sole motive.
So Myrick said, "This is a critical issue today. I mean, they just arrested, down on the border -- what? a couple of weeks ago? -- three Al Qaida members who came across from Mexico into the United States. That's a given fact. They were holding them in the jail down there."
Congressman McHenry added, "In fact, some of the 9-11 terrorists had North Carolina driver's licenses."
Both Myrick and McHenry were making it up.
According to Tim Funk, of the Charlotte Observer Washington bureau, there were no Al Qaida members arrested down in Mexico a la Myrick. Not one. Myrick's "given fact" turns out to be an unproven fiction taken under torture from a captured Al Qaida operative. (He supposedly said that Al Qaida had considered getting agents into this country via Mexico.) Myrick turned that hint into three Al Qaida -- count 'em! -- arrested on the border and held in an American jail. "That's a given fact," she said, even if we have to invent it for the occasion. McHenry's claim of 9-11 terrorists carrying North Carolina driver's licenses also turns out to be bogus. McHenry embroidered that piece of whole cloth out of something he heard about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who earned an engineering degree in North Carolina in the 1980s and who may have possessed a state driver's license at that time but who was in any event attending college here on a student visa and was therefore not an illegal immigrant.
So what's the score so far on "national security" as the pretext for launching a crack-down on Mexicans in North Carolina?
There's only one reason under God's bright sun to stretch the truth like that, past its natural tensile strength. Despite how much Myrick and McHenry later claimed their prejudicial fictions were honest mistakes of memory, they fabricated those little horrors to stampede the voters past the normal threshold of skepticism about "stories" told by politicians. The menacing presence of "them," whoever they are, has always been sufficient in the South to jog us past the Christian admonition to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Morality gets mugged by racist fear.
But if you're going to make stuff up, it's better not to get caught at it.
At Myrick's press conference, Foxx didn't say much of anything. At least she isn't reported making up any additional "facts" about the threat of terrorism coming out of Mexico. But it's not as though Foxx doesn't already have a deep history of anti-immigration initiatives, first in the North Carolina Senate, and just since last January when she first took her seat in Washington, she's listed as a co-sponsor or supporter of a long list of new anti-immigration legislation ... like H.R. 3938, which would eliminate provisions for a random drawing of 55,000 visas annually (the "visa lottery") and end the alloting of 65,000 other visas to the siblings of adult U.S. citizens; H.R. 698, the Citizenship Reform Act of 2005, legislation that would end the process of granting automatic citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens; H.J. Res 41, a proposal that would amend the Constitution of the United States so that no person born in the United States would be a United States citizen unless a parent is a United States citizen, is lawfully in the United States, or has a lawful immigration status at the time of the birth. Etc.
Foxx wants a Constitutional Amendment, no less, to keep certain people from achieving citizenship in this country.
Not so many years ago, Virginia Foxx was known as something of a Republican moderate. She subtly sent the message to mountain "progressives" that she welcomed the candidacy of Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms in 1990, and she complained privately about the overt racism of her fellow Watauga legislator Gene Wilson. Foxx was president of a small mountain community college at the time and had supported "liberal" causes like the Equal Rights Amendment and adoption by gay couples. That's why a pro-choice group, 100 Women of Watauga County, endorsed Foxx for State Senate in 1994 and gave her money, because she told the Endorsement Committee that she was pro-choice and anti-racist.
What a difference a few years make, not to mention a few Republican primaries involving higher office. Vernon Robinson beat up on Foxx unmercifully last year as some sort of closet flamer for lesbian sex. Ironically, considering Foxx's own similar stands, illegal immigration furnished one of Robinson's cudgels. Robinson ran a radio spot in 2004 which opened with the theme music from "The Twilight Zone." An announcer said, darkly, "The aliens are here, but they didn't come in a spaceship. They've filled our criminal courtrooms and clogged our schools .... They sponge off the American taxpayer ... they've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes ... You walk into a McDonald's restaurant to order a Big Mac, and find to your horror that the employees don't speak English." Robinson even put a nasty spin on the required "paid for by" tagline. It was said in Spanish: "Yo, gringo. Robinson por congreso."
Foxx would never have associated herself with that language -- she was the Un-Robinson of 2004 -- but now she's very pleased to associate herself with resentment against sponging aliens. The net outcome remains the same: "These people all have homes. We need to help them go home." It didn't ultimately matter whether we got Robinson or Foxx. It's the same old racism, a sell-out of Christian values, and it's done with a sterling-silver cynicism that has become Congresswoman Foxx's hallmark.
Rob Christensen recently wrote with historical perspective in the Raleigh News & Observer, "it seems clear as I travel around the state that some North Carolinians find the new wave of immigrants -- with their different language and culture -- a bit unsettling. And some politicians are trying to tap into that unease. Unlike many other states, North Carolina is not used to large-scale immigration. When it industrialized, it filled its factories with white sharecroppers from the mountains and countryside, not Polish, Italian or Irish immigrants. For much of its history, North Carolina exported people -- whites in the 19th century westward and blacks in the 20th century to the Northern cities. Even so, nativist politics occasionally surfaced in criticism of Catholics, Jews and immigrants."
And so it goes now, for Mexicans specifically and Hispanics generally.
It's an ugly populism that grows more obtuse and prouder of itself every day. Recently, a student columnist at the Daily Tar Heel in Chapel Hill felt free to publish the following opening sentence to an editorial in the student newspaper: "I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport." The uproar that followed caused her firing off the paper, and she became a one-day sensation on talk radio as the victim -- mind you -- of liberal intolerance. She thought she was being funny, she said, even cute, and it was other people who caused the problem. (The Weld County, Colorado, commission recently introduced a resolution calling for the forced removal of all illegal immigrants from the county. BYO pitchforks and torches. Examples multiply like mushrooms in horse manure.)
These are the pilot fish who swim with the big sharks in North Carolina, just waiting to thrash the water over the chunks of easy prey. Virginia Foxx has obviously carefully considered who she's swimming with.
But she's also trying to serve another master not so hot to end illegal immigration. While Foxx is bluffing North Carolina about losing one-quarter of its highway budget, she's also taking money from the same big business interests who actually depend on illegal immigrants to swell their laboring ranks at the lowest pay. They're the ones who've convinced President Bush, too, to go slow on closing the borders. Very powerful business interests need "guest workers" in the worst way: the construction industry, the hospitality industry (lodging and restaurants), big agriculture including Christmas trees.
It's the essence of her hypocrisy on the illegal immigrant issue. She stirs up incipient racism against illegals and simultaneously gives aid and comfort to big business that depends on those workers on a daily basis.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
"Ouch" Is Right
Rep. John Murtha, former Marine, decorated Vietnam veteran and influential Democratic hawk, to Cheney: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."
By way of the Daou Report.
By way of the Daou Report.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)