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.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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Notes of a Neophyte
March 30th, 2013 at 8:22AM
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.
March 30th, 2013 at 8:48AM
dmf: In the case of Don Young, no problem. He always says exactly what’s in his head.
April 1st, 2013 at 5:45PM
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.
April 2nd, 2013 at 8:05AM
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.
April 2nd, 2013 at 10:14AM
Ah, yes: the old “false, but accurate defense.” American academia has taken Ratherism to heart and embraced it as its very own.
April 2nd, 2013 at 5:43PM
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.
April 3rd, 2013 at 8:19AM
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.
April 3rd, 2013 at 2:18PM
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.
April 4th, 2013 at 3:52PM
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.”