WHY DOES DANA ROHRBACHER HATE LATINOS?

I met my friend Irwing a couple years ago at a Ramones tribute concert, the day before Johnny Ramone died. Irwing, like a lot of the people at the show, was in a punk rock band. He's a talented guitar player, a serious songwriter and a dedicated musician. I've helped him broaden his horizens by taking him to see some artists that weren't playing in the neighborhood punk clubs. He seemed really impressed by Rickie Lee Jones, Barenaked Ladies and Depeche Mode. A couple days ago we went to see k.d. lang curate a film presentation at the Silverlake Film Festival. On the way, Irwing mentioned he and his whole family had gone downtown the day before to participate in the mammoth demonstrations against the Republican Congress' viciously racist immigration legislation. "The whole family?" Yeah, even his brother who lives in Riverside had driven into L.A. to meet the rest of the family for it. "Why?" I asked. Well, I'm Mexican, he said.

I live in a real polyglot neighborhood. The neighbors on one side are from Austria and on the other side they come from Ethiopia. The area is rich in a cultural diversity that makes it pretty unique and, for Americaa, kind of fascinating-- with people coming from backgrounds in Latin America, Armenia, Korea, China, Thailand, Europe, Iran... A few days ago I met a woman down the street who's originally from Bulgaria. I feel so lucky to live here. I had never thought of Irwing as Mexican. I mean his name isn't Mexican; he doesn't "look" Mexican or speak with a Mexican accent. He plays guitar and keyboards in punk and alternative bands. He's not an illegal immigrant. He's not any kind of immigrant. Like me, he was born in the U.S.A. So why did he schlep all the way Downtown to be in that whole hegdish and with the whole family? He felt-- and he told me everybody felt-- that the approach the Republican Congress was taking is a racist attack on Americans of Latino descent.

That's why there were more than half a million people on the streets in L.A. earlier this week. And that's why the L.A. high schools were nearly empty. Marjorie Cohn has a very perseptive article today at TRUTHOUT called "The New Civil Rights Movement" and I suggest everyone read it. When you finish it, you might have a better understanding of how Republican racists, fascists and demagogues like Jim Sensenbrenner, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrbacher are stoking xenophobia and using the immigration issue for their own narrow partisan agenda.

Everyone already knows what vile, drooling right-wing loons Sensenbrenner and Tancredo are, but how does a Southern California congressman wind up in this kind of company? Well, Rohrbacher has always been a wild-eyed extremist and a bit of a kook. He was probably the biggest supporter of the Taliban in the whole Congress and has a disturbing history of supporting other dangerous terrorist orgnizations as well. (One of his more outsanding quotes is "As long as they target people I don’t like, terrorist groups are OK with me.” We never got an answer from him after his pals in The Taliban turned their attention-- and their weapons-- from the Russians Rohrbacher doesn't like to Americans he apparently doesn't care about.) So when Rohrbacher joined the dozen most bigoted right-wing extremists on Capitol Hill yesterday to rail against the Senate's moderate immigration bill no one should have been surprised to hear what he blurted out:

"I say let the prisoners pick the fruits."

The Orange County rubber-stamp Republican hasn't been directly implicated in the scandals that have already led to prison for one of his closest congressional allies, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, but no one who has followed Rohrbacher's shady political career thinks his hands are clean of anything. A big supporter of both Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, and big recipient of questionable bribes from Jack Abramoff, Rohrbacher is certainly someone worthy of a close look by federal investigators investigating the Republican Culture of Corruption in DC.

The ultimate irony, of course, would be vicious criminals who have wrecked constitutional governance in our nation-- inmates and prospective inmates, like Cunningham, Cheney, Libby, Abramoff, DeLay, Harris, Blackwell, Lewis, Doolittle, Pombo, Goode, Bush and Rohrbacher himself working in orange jumpsuits picking fruits and vegetables in the near future. (in fact, Rohrbacher and Abramoff are so close they could be cellies.)

As for the ginned-up immigration "problem," it's a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party with the corporatists demanding amnesty so they can continue enforcing low wages and continue weakening the bargaining power of workingmen and women and their unions, and the racists screaming for deportation or whatever tune Fox News has them singing today. Just keep in mind what I told you about this last week: Bush is a liar and everything he says is a lie. His immigration lie-- "Americans don't want these jobs"-- can be repeated ad infinitum and it still won't be true. At $5.00/hour they don't. But in a capitalist, free market economy-- as opposed to Bush-ist corporate socialism-- market conditions set wages, not schemes for importing cheap foreign labor.

A few days ago Thom Hartmann penned a piece at Common Dreams that explains the immigration "probelm" for what it really is-- a battle over economics, a battle that pits the working and middle class against the corporatists and oligarchs who don't want to share the wealth with anyone. At least the debate has awakened Latino youth who don't appreciate being turned into the Republicans' new hot button electoral issue.


MONDAY UPDATE: HOW THE RIGHT-WING WORKS THEIR VICIOUS HOT BUTTON ISSUES

There's a truly incredible diary over at Daily Kos, Anatomy of a Wedge Issue: Immigration, that explains the complexities and nuances of the current debate-- and how Rove and the far right exploit and demagogue issues like this to fracture American solidarity, make people forget what an unmitigated disaster 5 years of George Bush has been and spread the worst kind of divisiveness, racism, xenophobia and hatred in our society. I heartily recommend everyone read it.