The Boston Marathon bombing will be used as a political tool by all sides. Be careful.
Gun control will be a big one. The other is Immigration — which we touch on here.
I am a big fan of Jim Geraghty and his online newsletter from National Review Online. He definitely plays to a right-wing audience but he also is inviting to a lot of moderates and other common sense folks.
However, I am not so certain if Jim is a big fan on mine. When I questioned him about one of his stands on Twitter, he tweeted back to me: “Who are you, and why do you think you’re in a position to give me orders?” I imagine him tweeting with our shared Irish laughter and not, as his picture shows here, “who’s this asshole?”
Today he tackled a reaction to the Boston bombing. He writes:
In Tuesday’s New York Times, Marcelo Suarez Orozco and Carola Suarez-Orozco, the dean and a professor, respectively, at the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, wrote an op-ed entitled, “Immigrant Kids, Adrift.” It began:
The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.
Really? Really? These guys blow up a marathon and shoot a cop in the back of the head, and we have to look at ourselves to see where we failed? Where we’re not adequate?
I agree with Jim’s reaction but he’s playing to a too far right audience.
His headline reads, “They Always Blame America First.” Who are they? And they ALWAYS blame us first? Always? I don’t think so.
This comes across as “inflamed meeting inflamed.” This is what Fox News and MSNBC do. They create a controversy from what the other extreme person has broadcast. When extremists talk to extremists they leave out the common sense middle. Most of us should sit back and say, “We’re all upset. Let’s cool it for a little, folks.”
Jim is writing, at this point, for the person who will always yell, “We’re the greatest country in the world” even when we do stupid things. This is the person who now has a reason to block bi-partisan immigration reform.
The reality: the Brothers Tsarnaev are morons, but they represent an infinitesimal amount of the immigrants who live here.
The person Jim should be talking to is the person who says, “America welcomes all cultures to be part of the American experience. However, assimilating and succeeding here is not easy. If you don’t do either, it’s not our fault. Your imagined rights don’t take away your responsibility as a human being.”
The issue the right — or those who are tough on immigration — should be pushing is English-only.
Sure, many think this is discriminating. On some levels, it is. But on the more important side, it will make life and work for immigrants easier and make them – you guessed it – more informed and less inflamed. It will also make them less dependent on government and it will cut government costs.
Watch my interview with John Nichols, a liberal journalist, who talks about a friend’s father who came here from Italy and he read 7 newspapers a day to learn about America and our language.
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