Tuesday, May 6th, 2008...7:16 am
The Republicans and Latin-teenos
First off, I’d like to give Rush Limbaugh a bit of help. Apparently, he can’t tell the difference between Antonio Villaraigosa and a “shoeshine guy.” That’s right, a well dressed, successful Latino looks just like a “shoeshine guy.” Far be it from me to accuse Limbaugh of racism, I mean, I keep hearing from folks on the right that all the racism in the world is actually on the left. So, I’d like to help Rush out by supplying this picture of a shoeshine guy.
First off, you’ll see that he doesn’t wear pants.
Now that I think about it, the quote implies that he doesn’t know the difference between a shoeshine guy and the Secret Service either. This could be problematic for him for other reasons.
In a tangentially related development, John McCain now has a Spanish language website. Last night, Keith Olbermann noted the irony that McCain supported an English-only bill last year, but is happy to advertise in Spanish. Heck, Keith, that ain’t nothin’. McCain and the entire congressional delegation (including J. D. Hayworth) signed letters opposing the anti-immigrant PAN initiative back in 2004, but you’d be hard pressed to find any evidence of this opposition in their rhetoric now. In the 2006 campaign, while McCain’s party here in Arizona was being represented by the likes of Hayworth, Randy Graf and Don Goldwater, they were running ads on Spanish language radio condemning Democrats for supporting anti-immigrant legislation. Mr. Straight Talk has recently switched his position on the border fence, which he no doubt will again depending on his audience. So, courting the support of the Latino community with one side of the mouth while whipping up hatred against them with the other ain’t new for McCain or his state’s Republican party.
As for the site itself: on the front page, it features messages from Latino political leaders who support McCain. I hope he isn’t aiming for diversity here, the four featured are Mel Martinez, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart. Hmm…he’s trying to reach out to an ethnic group that is going to hit 90 million people over the next decade, consists of people that trace their ancestry to dozens of countries and lives in just about every state in the union, and the only folks he could find are four Cuban-Americans from Florida (McCain’s nod to geographic diversity is including both Greater Miami and Orlando). Heck, two of these guys are brothers.
Anyhow, I had my Spanish language expert look over the site. I was hoping for one of those really fun errors (forgetting to put the tilde in the word años is always a favorite of mine), but no dice. My expert says that there are some gramatical bugaboos, such as the omission of articles and capitalizing some prepositions like de in titles, that indicates that the writer wasn’t formerly trained in the written language. Oh well.
1 Comment
May 6th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
surprised they didn’t enlist the taco bell chihuahua, the fictional juan valdez and tony montana introducing McCain as his leetle friend. y la chiquita banana lady?
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