Whew Go Arizona!

[A Black Falcon]

Excuse me. *Goes to bash his head against the nearest wall* Seriously, Falcon? That's the argument that you're going to use? It's as I said to you in a previous rant: the left's use of the race card is getting old.

It's not a card, aside, or anything else. It's a fact, and it is what has happened to the Republican party over the past five years as they have pushed their anti-immigration platform that so many Hispanics find racist.

As I said, George W. Bush tried hard to win the Hispanic vote. He supported immigration reform, spoke Spanish, had been a governor in a state with a large Hispanic population, and more. It's one of the only issues he understood, really, and he was rewarded with fairly significant numbers of Hispanic votes. People like W. and Karl Rove realized that the Republican Party had to expand its base to keep winning, because minorities are an increasingly large part of this nation and Hispanics are one of the largest and by far the most rapidly increasing part of that. Republicans can't win for much longer if they keep hating Hispanics.

However, the right-wing base of the Republican party hated that idea. A lot of them are racists (sorry, but we all know it's true, even if you aren't), but either way many Hispanics get offended by the anti illegal immigrant hatred that inevitably seems to spread to general Hispanic hating. By 2008, the Republican party had bowed down to these forces and immigration reform was off the table, and anti-immigrant language was in the Republican platform.

What was the result?

Predictable, of course. John McCain won a significantly smaller percentage of the Hispanic vote than W. had in either 2000 or 2004, despite also being from a state with a lot of Hispanics in it, Arizona, and the anti-Hispanic fervor in the Republican party was the reason why.

So as I said, long-term, the more Republicans say how much they don't like Hispanics, the more they alienate a huge block of American voters and make their future chances for electoral victory more remote. At this rate even Texas will turn Democratic eventually, thanks to the Hispanic vote being mostly Democrat.


And I mean, as Bush shows, it's not like Hispanics are automatically natural Democratic voters. They are mostly Catholic so dislike for abortion and such is strong, for instance, as with the Republican Party. But when the Republican Party is doing everything it can to alienate them, the results are going to be obvious.

Go watch Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel when you get the chance. You''ll be quite surprised what you see.

Most Americans would not take those jobs. That some do doesn't mean most would, even if they had no other place to look for work!

Also, one other argument that has been made by the agricultural industry is that most Americans do not have the proper skills for farm work, while Central and South American people, mostly from small villages, do. And that's a good point, really, and how many of those people get in on visas every year... but this is why immigration reform is needed, those big farms then exploit those workers terribly.

"The ultimate morality for this country is the willful surrender of people to the collective. For such an ideal to manifest itself, the individual self--an abhorrent and unnecessary representation of people--must be destroyed and replaced with an altruist reality that is so potent, that it finally parallels the "I" with the "We."

That sounds like Communism, not socialism. Communism doesn't work, certainly, because it doesn't have much relation with the way human beings actually are.

Socialism, though, as they have it in Europe (which is the best model) does work, and certainly is not incompatible with free enterprise. That kind of scaremongering is ridiculous.