Yawn: Frank Rich's Predictable 'Show Me Your Papers' Take on Arizona's Immigration Law
Increasingly predictable Times columnist Frank Rich did nothing to afflict his liberal readership in his Sunday column; both subject (Arizona's new immigration law) and tone (Republicans are angry racists) were foretold: "If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem."
The only mild surprise: Rich is actually somewhat less intemperate in his rhetoric about the Arizona law than his Times columnist colleagues, former Times reporters Linda "police state" Greenhouse and Timothy "crackpot Republicans" Egan.
Don't blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can't be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.
If many of Arizona's defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it's that the new "show me your papers" law is sui generis: it's seen as one angry border state's response to its outsized share of America's illegal immigration crisis. But to label this development "Arizona's folly" trivializes its import and reach. The more you examine the law's provisions and proponents, the more you realize that it's the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants - and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America's two major political parties.
Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington's protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national "Take Back America" crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.
The Arizona law also "dovetails seamlessly" with federal immigration law - law that the federal government has failed to uphold.
Like a good liberal, Rich can't stop whining about the Willie Horton ad (now 22 years old):
In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans "really don't have a reason" to vote Republican, citing his party's pursuit of a race-baiting "Southern strategy" since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.
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