How do you say “straw man” in Spanish?
Former Bush speechwriter extraordinaire Michael Gerson takes an unfair swipe at many conservatives’ opposition to the Seante immigration bill in the WaPo:
In 1882, Congress passed and President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Today we don’t name laws as bluntly as we used to. But anti-immigrant sentiments are very much alive, this time expressed in opposition to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. For a certain kind of conservative, any attempt to grant a legal status to illegal immigrants is as welcome as salsa on their apple pie. One conservative commentator claims that the law is “going to erase America” — an ambition even beyond Ted Kennedy’s considerable powers…the real passion in this debate is not political, it is cultural — a fear that American identity is being diluted by Latino migration…A nativist party will cease to be a national party.
“The real passion in this debate is…a fear that American identity is being diluted.” That might or might not be a valid criticism of the bill (perhaps it is really a criticism of media culture and the educational establishment), but it is being used as a straw man to tar opponents with nasty epithets.
Our “real passion” in the debate on the Senate bill is that the law is designed to fail on its own terms, but that’s another matter. It is the unhelpful reaction to criticism by the White House and its allies which is really noteworthy here. We ask: what’s the deal with this snide tone among the political elites and Washington insiders towards opponents of the Senate bill? Must opponents of legislation be demonized by their own party’s spokesmen and allies, while their objections go substantively unanswered?
Does the White House not understand that the immigration bill may have serious flaws? We’ve commented on the lack of credible implementation procedures in the bill that make it anything other than an amnesty. We’ve reported that most demographic groups in the US — including a whopping 61% of black Americans — oppose the bill: are they Gerson’s white racist nativists too? Or are they responding to a reality on the ground and to the research showing that uncontrolled, large-scale immigration has had very negative effects on black America, as Bruce Kesler has written? There are many valid criticisms of a bill which claims definitionally to be “comprehensive”, starting with the notion that “comprehensive” means that the problem will once and finally be solved, which means effective border enforcement of a kind missing in this legislation. There are many other substantive and thoughtful criticisms and objections to the bill as drafted. These objections deserve answers, not insults.
We agree with Bruce Kesler, Paul Mirengoff, John Podhoretz and many other conservatives that shooting at your allies is as poor a strategy in politics as it is in war.
UPDATE
This video of the Wall Street Journal editorial board discussing the immigration bill is disturbing. They really seem to believe that conservative opponents of the bill are prejudiced against Mexicans and other Hispanic people, but dare not say it — and therefore cloak their racism in talk about “border security.” How very odd, and troubling.
And we’ll make a further, political, point. The editorial board appears to believe that the politics of this bill only work one way, that is, to deprive the Republican Party of Hispanic voters if a bill does not pass. There never seems to be any consideration of the idea that there are perhaps many Democrats who are offended by the US’s lack of control of its own borders and who are admitted across them. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, as we have shown.