Leave it to the wingnuts to promote the sensational idea that Mexicans are planning a reconquest of the American Southwest to reclaim territory lost in the Mexican War of 1848.
It's the perfect story to up fire up the anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant feelings so rampant on the far-right side of the political spectrum. For Americans in touch with the actual world—including the conservative Manhattan Institute—reconquista is "a fantasy, a boogeyman."
Yes, the U.S. has millions of illegal immigrants, which is an on-going and serious problem that needs resolution.
But that's not what the wingnuts are screaming about.
They've concocted, mostly from their fevered imaginations, a dark conspiracy that the illegals are planning to retake California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (and probably Oklahoma) and make these states part of a new Mexican nation.
Jim Boyd, a Nashville activist and losing candidate for the City Council there, claims that even legal Mexicans are planning a new nation in the Southwest. "They'll shuck their citizenship as easily as you or I take off a jacket," Boyd told the Los Angeles Times.
Naturally, right-wing broadcasters such as Michelle Malkin and Lou Dobbs have repeated such nonsense, even though, the Times reports, they "may not believe in the existence of an actual plot to retake the American Southwest." Nevertheless, such blabbers feed the fantasy, even as more informed observers find it completely lacking in substance.
Then again, the wingers seem to inhabit a place where neither reason nor actual facts can find a home.
2 comments:
After citing numerous incredulity-inducing rhetorical flourishes from the Republican field, the redoubtable Digby concludes:
"I think it has to be said that the pervasiveness of this idiocy can't be a coincidence. Republican voters must want it or the GOP wouldn't insist that all their candidates be morons.
"Let's hope there are far fewer Republican voters this time out. The world really can't take much more of this."
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/requirements-by-digby-seven-years-in.html
Ya know, Travis Loller really put her subjective slant on this story. She describes me as an “Anti-immigrant activist.” This is after she met me and my wife at the American Red Cross where I was giving blood that day. She met my wife who is immigrating to the US LEGALLY!!! She neglected that element for it didn’t fit in with the agenda of her story.
I'm not against immigration. I'm against ILLEGAL immigration!!
If I’m anything, I’m an Anti-ILLEGAL immigrant activist. Write a few checks to the Department of Homeland Security for hundreds and hundreds of $$ in the legal immigration process and you’d be one too! I have nothing against immigration. ILLEGAL immigration has been, and remains a CRIME!
“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on”
- Mark Twain
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William James (Jim) Boyd
www.votejimboyd.com
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