Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

One of the things I always found funny on the show Cops is that there would be some guy who would act like the biggest badass on the block, but the moment the police got him and slapped on the cuffs, he would wail and scream that they were too tight.

It reminds me of the way some conservatives act the moment they find out that somewhere there is liberal thought expressed somewhere in the universe. They pour over every incident, every statement made by obscure professors at obscure community colleges, every action by an official to find some evidence that the liberal man is keeping them, the good Americans, down. The charges may be a bit more believable if they weren’t presented by majority party elected officials on well funded news shows, or for that matter well-connected bloggers.

I read on Greg Patterson’s blog his comments on Monday’s flag burning incident:

The Supreme Court has decided that you have a Constitutional right to burn an American flag, but don’t try burning a Mexican one.

Yeah, the Border Guardians are being opressed for burning a flag, while all of those hippie communists are allowed to get away with burning American flags, and probably are paid to do it by the NEA. Those Tucson police are well known for being radical lefties who look for any chance to punish true patriots. Give me a break. This ignores the actual reasons for the arrest.

Roy Warden, the flag burner, is being charged with three things: reckless burning, criminal damage and assault. Reckless burning is a charge that has been brought up against flag burners in the past, and federal courts have said that such prosecutions are legal because they apply if you are burning a Mexican flag, American flag, or a stack of Danielle Steele novels. I suppose Warden’s supporters will still argue that prosecuting him for this is a violation of his rights, but that doesn’t do anything about the other charges, one for the damage he caused to the shuffleboard courts and the other for assaulting a cameraman. I suppose next we’ll hear that his striking the cameraman was because he felt opressed by liberal media bias. Given that Warden and his group were trespassing (rally organizers had a permit to use the park, the Guardians didn’t), and that they were attempting to incite a riot, he was lucky to only get charged with these crimes.

(Something I find interesting the various statements from immigration opponents about this incident is the implication that somehow American flags have been burned at protests in Tucson and Phoenix. Anyone heard that this has actually happened? Really? I didn’t think so.)

One of the most extreme examples of the new conservative “we-are-so-big-and-tough-but-we-will-cry-when-the-big-bad-liberals-do-something” school of rhetoric is Bill O’Reilly. He talks like some swaggering dockworker, but then claims that if some clerk at a Wal-Mart somewhere doesn’t say “Merry Chistmas,” he is being hurt deeply.

Rep. Jonathan Paton, who has told colleagues that he isn’t doing all of this for publicity, appeared on yesterday’s O’Reilly Factor with Moon-yee Fung, president of Tucson High’s Teenage Republican Club. Once again, they rehashed the cost of the busses during the student walkouts (requested, as it turns out, by the police) and Dolores Huerta’s “Republicans Hate Latinos” statement.

Apparently, Fung was so offended by this that she tried to leave, and wasn’t allowed to. Unlike O’Rielly, I won’t pretend to know the reasons for this. Ironically, Fung herself admits to voluntarilly attending the event, and supports some sort of legalization process for undocumented workers. Shh…don’t be too loud about that part, or these new friends you just got will drop you and they can be a heck of a lot nastier than Dolores Huerta can be.

Fung’s supporters are claiming that she wanted so desperately to go to her own state legislative delegation about this incident, but they were Democrats and she was scared to talk to them. Yeah, that Victor Soltero is a scary, scary man.

I don’t want to pick on Fung because I became politically active around the same age she is now. Heck, if she thinks it is hard to organize Republicans at Tucson High, try to organize a Democratic club at St. Gregory, back in the days when they didn’t give so many scholarships. My trouble here is with people on the right who poke around until they find a “victim” of yet another supposed lefty plot. It is ridiculous.

What I would suggest to Fung is that she and her club engage in the discussion and show that there are well-intentioned Republicans like her that want sensible immigration reform. Given that the day before Fung appeared on the show, O’Rielly claimed that a Cleveland newspaper was “pro-criminal” because there were so many minorities there, that may be the wrong forum to give that message.

Paton also tried to make a slap at Rep. Raul Grijalva for appearing on the campus. Grijalva did not even make a formal speech, but discussed issues with students. What’s that? A congressman meeting with high school students? How dare he! You have kids meet with their community’s leaders, they may grow up to be responsible members of society, they may even vote. We can’t have this.

(Hands up all of you who think that Republican hackles would be raised if Sen. Jon Kyl spoke on a high school campus somewhere.)

As expected, O’Rielly merely used Paton and Fung as an excuse to whine that those darned public schools are indoctrinating our good American youth into being unabashed lefties. Given that Huerta was invited by the students, it doesn’t sound like much indoctrination is necessary. O’Rielly cares so much about this issue by the way, that he claimed not to know who Dolores Huerta is, even though every story about this incident would have told him exactly who she is.

By the way, Paton has been invited by Tucson High to speak, you know “fair and balanced” like, and he has refused.

NB - Paton and Fung were not in O’Rielly’s studio, of course, but were interviewed remotely. They were in the studios of KUAT, the local public television station located on the University of Arizona campus. I’ll let you tally up the ironies.