About last night . . .
October 18, 2006
Since I will go into the polling booth with the unwavering commitment to getting as many Republicans out of power as possible, my partisan bias in this election is pretty obvious. But even so, GOP Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. gave a pretty sad performance last night during his debate with Bob Menendez on WhineOhWhinePointJive.
If we learned one thing about Kean, it’s that he sticks to his talking points like a barnacle on the hull of an oil tanker. If I fined him fifty bucks for every time he said “as soon as humanly possible” with regard to Iraq, I’d have a nice bankroll to put against my fuel bills this winter.
The moderator’s exasperation was pretty obvious when he tried to get the gingerbread man to answer a simple question aout whether he would still have supported the invasion if he knew then what we all know now. We’ve seen plenty of evasive politicians in our time, but Kean was remarkable for his dull-voiced repetition of set responses. Instead of playing artful dodger (which would have at least offered some entertainment value), Kean simply pounded away at his one-lines responses like a barroom palooka.
Towards the end of the debate, Kean seemed to realize that he should have varied his reponses a bit more. Much good did it do him. Instead, he took to yapping his way through Menendez’s statements like an anxious lapdog trying to get its owner’s attention.
And kudos to Menendez for offering an original response to the beloved winger hobbyhorse of a constitutional amendment making English our official language. As Menendez noted, immigrants are flocking to English language classes because they know that is the path to success in an English-speaking country. If the Bushies are truly interested in promoting the use of English, they should stop attacking public education and start supporting it.
I’ve voted for candidates from both parties over the years. Even though I’m convinced that breaking the Republican grip on power is the overriding priority this year, I was open to the possibility that Kean might show himself to be a candidate truly worthy of bipartisan support.
After last night, I’d say that possibility has been put to rest.
October 18, 2006 at 12:37 pm
I would like to add something to Senator Menendez’s comments about immigrants and the English language. I work in a large bookstore in Somerset County, and I have anecdotal evidence that it is the immigrants who push their children to excel in school. The parents come in and ask for the study guides for both tests and subject matter. And, while the parents might have noticeable accents, their children do not. This “English Only” movement is, in fact, a straw man set up to conceal an innate racial bigotry. Blue collar and marginal middle class whites see the growing numbers of non-white immigrants as a threat to their “worlds”, and they use language as a way to lash out against those they see as interlopers.
What these people don’t remember is that their grandparents and great-grandparents who came here from Europe also tended to live in ethnically segregated communities for the first generation. New York City’s various ethnic neighborhoods (such as Little Italy) supported both the language and the culture of the homeland while that first immigrant generation remade their lives in this new land. Their children, though, tended to move out of these neighborhoods as soon as they could. One of the things that allowed them to leave was the fact that they learned English. This is the same thing that is currently happening in the Hispanic and Asian communities. While the parents may still prefer their native languages, the kids are more than comfortable with English. Sure, there is some linguistic drift as words and even phrases from other languages become part of English, but that has been happening to our language virtually since the beginning.
October 18, 2006 at 4:55 pm
I had a post on Sept. 13 that talked about a report in a journal called “Population and Development Review” which debunked the neocon argument that if we keep letting “them” in, soon we’ll all be speaking Spanish.
The report showed just the opposite to be true, that the US is more of a native language graveyard than incubator. The report’s authors wrote that after 50 years of Mexican immigration to this country — specifically Southern California — native language fluency seems to die by the third generation.
Perhaps Menendez ought to publicize that report a little more.