PeterZ wrote:The E wrote:Item 1: The GOP happily jumping on the bandwagon of anti-immigrant fear mongering whenever possible.
Bullshit. The focus has been on illegal immigrants.
No, it's not. Unless the syrian refugees are definitely illegal.
It also doesn't cover the whole shebang of memes the GOP is spreading about arabs and latinos.
The E wrote:Item 2: Giving a platform to concerns over President Obama's citizenship.
He stated in his autobiography " Dreams of My Father" that he was born in Kenya. Was he lying then and not now? This wasn't something created by Republicans.
See, this is why I can't take birthers seriously. It takes just a little bit of snooping to figure out that the "born in kenya" bit was something printed in promotional material for the book, not in the text itself (the passage there reads: "He was an African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father—my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama—had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa.
In 1959, at the age of twenty-three, he arrived at the University of Hawaii as that institution’s first African student. He studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated in three years at the top of his class. His friends were legion, and he helped organize the International Students Association, of which he became the first president. In a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love. The girl’s parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married, and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.").
So. Who is lying? Is it the text of the book? Is it the promotional material (that the author usually has no control over)?
Or is it the people who very desperately need to believe that Obama not only shouldn't have been President, but couldn't have been? The same people who, need I remind you, scour the obituaries for anyone with even the slightest, most coincidental connection to the Clintons to fit into an ever-expanding gallery of "Clinton assassinations"?
The E wrote:Item 3: Using the spectre of voting fraud as a tool to enact rules that make it harder for minority voters to gain the right to vote (source).
All we are asking for is just the same sorts of protections Germany has. Implementation of those policies must be applied as fairly as possible. Also, voter fraud is far less important that election fraud. Still, every bit counts.
Then prove that fraud, of any kind, is actually happening. Prove that the measures the GOP is instituting are actually fair.
The E wrote:Item 4: The enthusiastic endorsement of the various anti-immigrant, anti-muslim policies of one Donald Trump by the party's base.
That we apply some standards for who we accept into our country is prudent. Trump and most Republicans I know are looking to apply adequate screening process. If you think that's unreasonable, there is really no point in further discussion.
No, sorry, you do not get to apply "we just want reasonable checks" here. Donald Trump said, "Donald Trump is calling for a complete shutdown on Muslims entering the US", to great acclaim. There is nothing measured or reasonable about that. Trump's standard is "Are you muslim? Are you from a conflict zone? If yes to either, then you're out." This is not a "some standards" kind of thing. It's not "adequate screening" by any stretch of the imagination.
And all of that was cheered. All of that rhetoric brought Trump to where he is. And it's racist/"nationalist" bullshit at its worst.
The E wrote:Item 5: [url]=https://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/08/01/888775/-A-design-feature]The southern strategy[/url].
Yup, Republicans sought to gain the southern vote. They did not change their egalitarian policies as a result. Neither did the Democrats change their fundamental view that the races were inherently different.
The South is much more egalitarian than it was. Democrats have insinuated their brand of racially targeted policies in the Northern inner cities. The result? One example is that Detroit was one of the richest cities in the US after WWII, now it is one of the poorest major cities.
Robert Byrd Democrat and KKK[/quote]
David fucking Duke. Praising and being praised by Trump. Do the math.
The E wrote:Item 6: A correlation exists between restrictions on the vote, presence of minorities, and republican leadership ([url]=https://thinkprogress.org/study-more-voter-suppression-laws-are-proposed-when-more-racial-minorities-vote-8498306871c0#.g7eopezhk]source[/url]).
Requiring an ID to cote is racist? Then Germany is racist. What is the difeerence between Germany's requirement than this?
The difference is this: Mandatory national ID has been part of the german legal canon for decades by now. It was instituted before we had the Wirtschaftswunder. Getting an ID is easy and can be done in an afternoon. It's a well-oiled process by this point. You do not have that. You don't have the infrastructure for it. As a result, and there are multiple studies on this that you can find for yourself, it is much harder for an American to get ID documents than it would be for a german national.
The E wrote:Item 7: A whole collection of casual racism from prominent GOP figures
Again: The GOP is a predominantly white, predominantly old, predominantly affluent party. This is going to bite them in the long run. In 2012, the GOP realized this, yet they were unable to respond in any meaningful way to the influx of borderline (and not so borderline) racist voices in the runup to and in the wake of Trump.
That's right, having some control about who actually comes into our country is somehow racist. Bullshit. have a screening process. Limit immigration to amounts we can practically integrate. If those policies are racist, then racism has been redefined too broadly to be useful. Well, its only use appears to be as a cudgel for the left to silence those with whom they disagree.[/quote][/quote]
Could you please respond to the point I was making in item 7? Not the one you think I was talking about, but the one I was actually talking about?
