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Douglas Brinkley is having SUCH a good day today.

He’s watching his dunce-nemesis, Alaska Rep. Don Young, twist slowly in the wind after having made his contribution to the Republican party’s effort to rebrand itself.

Of course Young has not apologized. Why should he apologize? Wetbacks is what they’re called.

UD definitely believes, along with Roman Hruska, that mediocrity has a right to representation in our government. She’s less sure about people like Don Young.

Margaret Soltan, March 29, 2013 9:39AM
Posted in: headline of the day

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9 Responses to “Douglas Brinkley is having SUCH a good day today.”

  1. dmf Says:

    I always appreciate it when they let the mask drop and speak frankly about their prejudices, let’s get all the cards on the table so we know exactly where, and on what, we stand.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    dmf: In the case of Don Young, no problem. He always says exactly what’s in his head.

  3. theprofessor Says:

    According to ABC, Young “Refers to Latinos as ‘Wetbacks.'” In the transcribed remarks on the web site, Young doesn’t mention “Latinos” at all. The implication the American Bullshit Corporation wants to convey is that Young is generically referring to all Latinos (illegal immigrants or not). This is sleazy and a smear in itself.

  4. Alan Allport Says:

    tp, the only sensible way for a politician to use the word ‘wetback’ is not to use the word ‘wetback’ at all. If Young doesn’t have the sense to realize that, that’s his problem.

  5. theprofessor Says:

    Ah, yes: the old “false, but accurate defense.” American academia has taken Ratherism to heart and embraced it as its very own.

  6. Alan Allport Says:

    Oh dear. If you can’t see that a statement like “he was making racial slurs in a far more nuanced way than those librul media types claimed” is precisely why the GOP is heading towards long-term electoral disaster, I can’t help you.

  7. theprofessor Says:

    Why don’t you start being an academic again, Alan? We are supposed to be the ones who care about accuracy and can see beyond the political exigencies of the moment. Then again, if you want to endorse a lie, well, that’s your choice.

  8. Alan Allport Says:

    ABC should indeed have said, to be strictly accurate: “Young implicitly refers to Latinos as ‘Wetbacks.’” Whether you believe that it was a monstrous wrong not to do this is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. But to see this as the only moral problem of any importance associated with Young’s comments is a retreat into pedantry more pitiful than outrageous.

  9. theprofessor Says:

    I think it’s actually a greater wrong when a major national news organization, under absolutely no deadline pressure on this story, tells an outright lie, as it did here, than when a politician who is three months short of being 80 years old, who grew up on a truck farm in California, in the midst of interview that has nothing at all to do with illegal immigration or Latin America drops a term that no one would have blinked at when he was young. You can tell as much about Don Young’s real racial attitudes from this comment as you can from Barack Obama’s “typical white person” comment about his grandma. Or, for that matter, lily-white Joe Biden’s, who, in his best minstrel-show dialect before a black audience, said that Romney and Ryan were “goin’ to put y’all back in chains.”

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