Father Coughlin's Reincarnation as Father Lou

Lou Dobbs speaks a variety of the English language known as lie-speak. I was pleased to see a favorite commentator Amy Goodman taking up the cudgels against him, in her piece Lou Dobbs Spreads Vile Misinformation about Immigrants. Of course he isn't the only one but he has been given an important platform for his propaganda by CNN. She documents several of his lies such as that 1/3 of U.S. prison inmates are "illegals" and also one thing new to me.

On May 23, 2006, Dobbs aired a report on a state visit by Mexican President Vicente Fox. His correspondent, Casey Wian, called it a "Mexican military incursion" and displayed a map of the U.S. with the seven Southwest states highlighted as "Aztlan," which, Wian reported, "some militant Latino activists ... claim rightfully belongs to Mexico." The graphic came from the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, points out is the current incarnation of the old White Citizen Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, which Thurgood Marshall referred to as "the uptown Klan." The SPLC has reported that several of Dobbs' guests and sources have had links to the CCC, such as Joe McCutchen of Protect Arkansas Now, part of the Minuteman vigilante movement, and Barbara Coe of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Another guest, Glenn Spencer, head of the anti-immigrant group American Patrol, speaks on the white-supremacist circuit. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer had Spencer on, he told his audience that the SPLC had designated American Patrol as a hate group. When Dobbs had him on, he never identified the connection.

I think that it is important to track these new hate groups in our localities. Eric Haas from the Rockbridge Institute told this story about one "illegal in his piece"Losing Our Minds Over Immigration:

Some of these foreign workers are even heroes. The AP just reported on one. On Thanksgiving, Jesus Manuel Cordova Soberanes, a 26-year-old bricklayer from northern Mexico, rescued a nine-year-old boy who had been in a car wreck. Soberanes had snuck across the border to find work to feed his family. While he was walking through the Arizona desert, he came across the boy. The boy's mother had swerved off a cliff and crashed. The mother was severely injured, and the boy had gone in search of help. Soberanes returned with the boy to the car, but he could not save the mother. As night came and temperatures dropped, he gave the boy his sweater and built a fire. Soberanes stayed with the boy through the night, until he was rescued the next morning. The boy was flown to a hospital in Tucson, and Soberanes was turned over to Border Patrol agents, who deported him back to Mexico. According to the local sheriff, Soberanes is "'very, very special and compassionate' and may have saved the boy's life."

He makes a strong point in the article about how use of the term "illegal" to describe undocumented aliens creates a frame in which we unconsciously begin to associate immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally as criminals. As he points out, people who risk their lives to get here in order to find work so that they can support themselves and their families or simply to make a better life for them, are not likely to break laws. They are here to work and the last thing they want is to come to the attention of the justice system and be shipped back home.