Guest Post by Morbo
The imprisonment of James Traficant left the position of biggest maniac in the House of Representatives wide open, and competition for the coveted slot has been fierce.
Tom DeLay has put in a strong bid, while still managing to serve as Majority Leader. Oklahoma’s Ernest “Jim” Istook can always be counted on for a strong showing, and no one should rule out newcomer Katherine Harris of Florida. Ron Paul of Texas is always a sentimental favorite.
But my money is on Tom Tancredo of Colorado, whose unique combination of sheer stupidity and utter insanity gives him an edge that’s hard to beat.
Following a series of disturbing stunts, Tancredo’s latest flap was sending a letter to Denver Mayor John W. Hickenlooper demanding to know if the city’s library system is buying Spanish-language material at the expense of English material.
This is classic idiocy for a number of reasons. For starters, Tancredo does not represent Denver. His district includes the towns of Littleton, Centennial and parts of suburban Douglas County. Were I Hickenlooper, I would have tossed his missive in the circular file. Better yet, write back and tell him to go stuff it. Let him pester libraries in his own district.
Secondly, Tancredo is a typical Bush-era conservative who extols the virtues of small government and local control. If local control is best, then why does a member of the federal government even care what books the library buys?
Thirdly, libraries stock foreign-language material because patrons want it. Denver is now 35 percent Hispanic. If it were 35 percent Vietnamese, the libraries would probably stock books in that language. My guess is that Tancredo believes that the presence of this material makes it more likely that recent immigrants will not bother to learn English. That’s not likely. Most Hispanic immigrants are smart enough to realize that English is the dominant language in America, and they want to learn it. At the same time, they want their children to know their native tongue as well. Hence, they check out books in both languages.
Finally, Tancredo is shooting himself in the foot politically. Experts who study demographic trends agree that Hispanics are now the dominant racial minority in the nation. They are already flexing political muscle and are poised to do a lot more of it in the years to come. Politicians who continue to push punitive “English-only” policies are living on borrowed time. Immigrant bashing and irrational opposition to bilingualism may payoff politically – for a while. Eventually, as demographic trends continue, those positions will become untenable for all politicians except those representing a handful of rural, racially homogenous districts.
On his website, Tancredo brags about representing a growing suburban district. What sort of people does he think are moving into that district — only nativist bigots such as himself? I doubt it.
My advice to Tancredo is to keep up the immigrant bashing. It’s just the kind of extreme and stupid move voters are likely to remember in the future. With luck, in a few years we may be able to say, “Hasta la vista, Tomas!”