The truth is left-wing

I guess I'm a limp-minded, lily livered lefty. Truth itself of course is an "extremist, partisan" position according to John Klein, president of CNN and I'm a lefty for asserting that Barak Obama's passport is legitimate, has been furnished to the press, has been independently verified by the Governor of Hawaii and looks just like every other Hawaiian birth certificate. God knows, I must be Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin rolled into one for stating that I have a valid Florida drivers license and that it really isn't an Indonesian forgery because we just can't know for sure, can we?

As to the turgidity of my brain and the color of my liver, they're both just fine -- if you believe doctors who after all tend to be liberal. I might after all be an android since I haven't provided a birth certificate, even though I actually did. There's always a controversy; there is always the difficulty of telling truth from political propaganda when you're either schizophrenic or so dishonest the difference is moot.

So my IQ and my liver make it OK for Dobbs to continue with his "nudge, wink, you know what I'm saying" program of libelous innuendo and I guess that since all is fair by his lights, I can point out that there is no proof he isn't a charter member of NAMBLA either. He hasn't furnished a shred of evidence so you can't just dimiss the controversy and enquiring minds want to know, after all - even the limp ones.

FAIR and friends

Lou Dobbs is quick to argue that his obsession with illegal immigration centers on the illegality and not the fact of immigration or the ethnicity of the immigrants, although I haven't heard a peep out of him about Canadian immigrants or the need to close the northern border. Indeed, many of the illegal immigration opinion shouters take great pains to tell us that they are only concerned that laws are being broken even though the near hysterical reaction to the very thought of Spanish being spoken within our borders is visible everywhere and calls their dispassionate pose into question. Are we looking at racism carefully cleaned up, shaved and passed off as reason?

Dan Stein, president of FAIR or the Federation For American Immigration Reform has appeared on Lou Dobbs' television show more than a dozen times, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and many times on other news programs. His organization, the largest anti-immigration group in the US, has been called on by Congress to testify about immigration more than 30 times and has been instrumental in shooting down immigration reforms. Are these people voicing reasonable concerns about immigration policies and the effects on the US of immigrant labor or are they something else? Is it fair to look at FAIR and friends a little closer?

Stein has been communicating about immigration policies with a Belgian political party that has been banned from that country by their Supreme Court for their racist views. FAIR's Western Field representative, Joeseph Turner has created and been the head of an anti immigrant group whose rallies were frequented by neo-Nazis; people Turner refused to disassociate with his group.

The founder of FAIR, John Taunton, was an outspoken critic of Latinos and Catholics and a proponent of eugenics, a selective breeding program developed by Adolph Hitler. Stein calls him" a remarkable figure in American politics." FAIR has accepted $1,200,000 from the Pioneer Fund to promote the racial stock of the original colonists (presumably not those from Spain or Africa.) It's for such reasons as this that SPLC has added FAIR to it's list of hate groups.

It's not surprising that people with notions about an ethnically pure United States should try to dignify the enterprises of such people or cover up their slimier aspects. The facade of avuncular sincerity of people like Dobbs is quite convincing, but then it's part of a long American tradition of pretending that slavery and then segregation and religious discrimination were really reasonable policies well thought out by reasonable men. That's not to say that we don't have a problem; it is to say that when you listen to someone's statement of a problem and to the solution he offers, it's a good idea to know who stands behind him and what their real agenda is.

Where's the beef?

We know that we're all in imminent, clear and present danger from dangerous Chinese products. Horrified housewives bleat "will we ever feel safe anywhere?" on TV screens and Lou Dobbs gets so tired from the relentless jawboning about COM-unist China that he has to take a vacation before he pops an aneurysm. Danger danger - there's danger everywhere.

Of course there's another anti-American, freedom hating, Godless entity posing bigger dangers - and not only to our children, but to the troops who stand between us and the chaos Bush created in Iraq. Someone has been trying to poison them and to poison us and as if that weren't enough, they want to do it by using our sacred national meal, our national symbol: the Hamburger.

Of course you know I'm talking about the Topp's ground beef recall of what now appears to be of over 20 million pounds of e-Coli tainted beef. It's being pulled off the shelves of US military commissaries as well as from the shelves at the local supermarket. That's enough to sicken and kill countless people and keep so many troops in the latrine that they can't be deployed. That's enough to constitute a terrorist attack as big or bigger than most.

Of course our last line of defense, the Congress of the United States has the situation well in hand. The 2007 Farm bill passed by the House last July is awaiting the Senate stamp of approval and it protects us by relaxing inspection of meat products. Better we die than place an unnecessary burden on Agri-Business and thus reduce the benefits they supply to Senators. The beef industry does not agree that we need more inspectors and inspections and yes, it is their country not yours, you Left-Leaning, Tofu-eating, Liberal Surrender Monkey.

While I'm picking on Lou Dobbs; even notice how he can't say China without the loudly stressed word COMMUNIST in front of it? Being a conservative, Dobbs probably longs for the day when you could disparage anything with that epithet and without further explanation, but China's problems with corrupt officials, greedy corporate entities and lack of oversight aren't the products of State ownership of the means of production.

Yes, I've said this before, but I'm saying it again: Poison toothpaste and poison dog food result from laissez faire capitalism; poorly regulated and corrupt capitalism in its infancy, not Communism.

Even Lou wouldn't deal with it the way the Chinese Government, used to having its way, is handling it. Their solution is a bullet in the back of the head for Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the regulatory agency that failed. It may be extreme to compare that with the Bush Administration's awarding of kudos, promotions and even medals to those who screw up so badly people die, but I can't resist.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not defending the death penalty, which China applies to many crimes and I'm not defending corruption in China, but you've got to admit they have accountability where we don't. Dealing with China in the near future is going to be a far greater challenge to our future than dealing with Islamic militancy and it's long past time to put away the worn out rhetoric of the 1950's and figure out a way to regain world respect if not our sovereignty itself.

If you're white, you're all right

If you're brown, stick around

Well maybe not. Lou Dobbs seemed irate last night during his regular evening diatribe about illegal immigration. It seems he feels that Bush is pushing the notion that if you're against his immigration bill, you're a racist. He's right to say it's not necessarily so, but racists certainly have made immigration hysteria one of their favorite tools. Rage against Mexicans is not limited to illegals although my southern racist neighbors do assume they all ( with the exception of our Attorney General) are and all need to be deported after a bit of torture.

Northern racists like Bill O'Reilly are a bit more articulate about their concern for the dilution of America's non-existent ethnic, religious and racial purity and political prostitutes like John McCain are happy to back him up. It really isn't illegals that bother these people, it's Mexicans; it's brown people. When Lyin' Bill asked McCain last Wednesday whether immigration could "change -- pardon the pun -- the whole complexion of America." McCain responded, "You're right."

I won't pardon the pun, thank you. If that's not racism, I'm George Wallace. If it's not racist and xenophobic Christianist tribalism to whine about the impending doom of the White Christian power structure, I'm the Easter Bunny.

Dobbs' last stand

At first glance I agreed with Lou Dobbs' commentary on CNN.COM this morning: A Call to the Faithful. He's been ringing the Separation of Church and State bell, proclaiming that the constitutional wall is being breached. Of course I agree that our administration has been promoting their sectarian doctrines over the constitution they are sworn to defend, but Lou's bell sounds a bit tinny and the reader soon recognizes that his real concern is that too many Christian leaders are talking about some form of amnesty or path to legal status for some or all illegal aliens. By insisting that Churches shouldn't take a stand on the question of aliens and their treatment, he's insisting that the subject of how we treat our fellow men is not the province of religion. It's not that Dobbs is a solipsist and I suspect he's not really a complete secularist either. He can see the difference between a President preaching and a preacher preaching. He just doesn't care. He's just making a stand.

I don't know what religion is about other than power and money if it's stripped of any concerns for human welfare and made unable to promote kindness, mercy or compassion. I don't know what kind of religious values Dobbs might be in favor of in that he quotes Paul's Letter to the Romans:

"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."

instead of promoting any particular teaching of Jesus. It's hard to understand why Dobbs is furious at Cardinal Mahoney telling his flock that:

"Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."

It sounds suspiciously like a Christian sentiment, if not equally Jewish and Muslim. It sounds like some of the clergy is taking time out from gay bashing and trying to confound science and is instead promoting what Jesus taught rather than what the Roman Paul taught to the Greco-Roman pagans.

It sounds like Dobbs is steamrolling the separation he claims to support if after all, the US government is established by God and must not be opposed. The only supposition that makes Dobbs' tirade coherent is that he just doesn't care about logical consistency or human values as long as we can quickly and ruthlessly expel anyone who entered illegally or overstayed their visa. He's waxed nearly hysterical trying to show that we are all at risk of leprosy and other horrible things because of the "Brown Peril" overrunning our borders. Dobbs explains to us that there is a growing schism between leaders who call for decency and compassion and parishioners who just want the filthy, disease ridden, dope smoking, lascivious Mexicans to go away. Someone needs to explain to him that his "argument" was used to support slavery and trash abolitionists - even though he knows it.

As a rule, I suspect someone of racism when they persist in depicting people as groups and resist looking at the indecencies and inhumanities their policies will inflict on individuals. I think that fits Dobbs like a white hooded robe. Nativism, xenophobia and garden variety racism have been and continue to be as American as the 4th of July. The screams about protecting our borders are not a bit different than what the Immigration Restriction League was howling a hundred years ago; no different than the repugnant phobias against the Irish, the Yellow Peril hysteria that resulted in the Exclusion Act and expulsion of American Citizens of Chinese descent, the arrest and incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent and all the horrors and race riots of the Jim Crow era. The same rhetoric of disease, drugs, corruption of values, traditions, language, ethnic purity and the loss of jobs that was wrong then is wrong now and although I have been on Lou Dobbs' side when he had the guts to question the Bush administration and its lies, I am not on his side now and will not be until he begins to separate the perceived need to control the borders from his need to dehumanize and demonize a group of people. Some people may deserve a legal path to citizenship, others may not. It's not beyond comprehension that we may be able to accommodate both without resort to brutality, that we may be able to treat people as we would be treated - at least not for me.

Dobbs, Hobbes and snobs

Don't try to make too much sense of that - I just can't resist a rhyme.

But speaking of nonsense, ever notice that Lou Dobbs never mentions the world's most populous country without the epithet Communist? I suppose one might, if one were of the right political persuasion, call the island of Taiwan by the name Republic of China, but when we talk about China, we usually think of the big one, the one that owns enough of our debt that we're afraid to do much more than make useless gestures of disapproval, like Lou Dobbs does.

At this point in our history, it really isn't necessary or necessarily accurate to call it Red China or Communist china any more than it's useful to say Socialist Sweden, Capitalist Mexico, Royalist Saudi Arabia, Dictatorial Pakistan or Theocratic Vatican City. It's a gratuitous pejorative when used to describe a still totalitarian country tripping over it's own shoelaces in its haste to get rid of government ownership of the means of production and become capitalist.

Lou seems happy to find an external scapegoat, as indeed many are, now that we don't have the Soviet union to kick around any more. China bashing is a popular sport with left and right and with Dobbs and since the label Communist still has a lot of punch to it and isn't going to be around forever, he's happy to use it while he can. To be sure, there have been enough recent incidents with tainted cat food and plastics that contain enough lead to make us worry about our children, coming from China and now with ethylene glycol being sold as pharmaceutical grade glycerin and poisoning people, we can't ignore the safety of our imports. It's hard to see however that Communism has anything to do with greedy, unscrupulous capitalists and unregulated free markets in China. It seems to me, in fact, that what we are seeing are the results of massive deregulation of a magnitude that would make Ronald Reagan weep with joy. What we are seeing is a need for regulation and inspection in our country whether or not it annoys big corporations like Wal-Mart.

The notion that free markets are self regulating and that unregulated industry will automatically, as if by an invisible hand, steer toward the public good has done a lot of damage in the US and the lack of adequate inspection of imported food and pharmaceutical substances is an example. China is expanding its free market economy so rapidly that the ability to control corruption and greed has not caught up. The US is not experiencing the growth, yet is still under the sway of the Great Deregulator's voodoo; still being led by people who think inspecting food is kind of pinko and inspecting incoming freight will cut into profits.

And while I'm picking on Lou, I have to mention his tirade about the Martin Luther King Memorial using a Chinese sculptor to supply a statue of Dr. King. It's a bit amusing to watch people like Tucker Carlson and Dobbs howling about how it should be made by a "Black" artist so that the world could see what King stood for. No amount of reminding that he seems to have stood for the idea that race shouldn't be a factor in judging a man or employing him, seems to sway the opinions of these wealthy white men about what black people should do. 90% of the hundred million it will take to build the memorial is private money, and it will be built of American stone by American workers. The statue is one small part of the whole. Using interviews of people on the street, CNN launched into a crusade to make it seem as though there was public outrage. What the effort revealed is that the public either doesn't care - and in some instances thought the monument was to be built in China - or lacks the background to have a worthwhile opinion. Seems to me that Tucker and Lou who don't see the irony in their lecturing the "colored folk" about how to memorialize Dr. King, aren't far behind.

As to whether American monuments need to be constructed 100% of American materials, designed by Americans and built by Americans for the benefit of Americans, I have one answer: The Statue of Liberty. And regarding the nativist crappola about building anything in Washington DC, don't forget the Frenchman, Pierre L'Enfant, who designed it.