Pop culture freak for open borders

Paul K. writes:

There’s a column on the immigration bill in today’s LA Times by Jonah Goldberg. He opposes S.1348, though just barely, writing, “Philosophically and politically, I am on the side of every pro-immigration movement of the last two centuries. We’re a better country because of previous waves of immigrants.”

However, his point often takes second place to his compulsion to make pop culture references, however irrelevant or confusing.

In his opening paragraph, he writes:

For many of us, the definitive pro-immigration speech comes from Bill Murray in “Stripes”: “We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi, we’re not Spartans, we’re Americans. With a capital ‘A.’ And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts. But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt. Who saw ‘Old Yeller’? I cried my eyes out.”

Apparently this is a movie moment Goldberg just had to relive with his readers, despite its absurdity. Goldberg also writes:

Bush and his supporters have bought into the idea that being pro-enforcement is anti-immigrant, which is why every move he makes on the issue is the political equivalent of Foghorn Leghorn trying to walk through a field of garden rakes.

I watched my share of cartoons as a child, but I have no idea what Goldberg is talking about. Evidently he is still watching cartoons so they are fresh in his mind. How this boy-man ever achieved success as a conservative pundit is a mystery to me.

LA replies:

As I say, he degrades every subject he touches.

Since early 2006 I’ve been pointing out the unprecedented degree of personal emotion that immigration supporters have been displaying about the Bush open-borders bill, because, as I see it, busting America wide open once and for all represents their ultimate fulfillment.

But for Goldberg to quote, as an argument for large scale immigration and his mongrel vision of America, a movie character talking about how he cried his eyes out at the death of a dog in another movie, that is just unreal. In a country with standards, such an article would not have been published. But we no longer have standards, we’re no longer the American people we once were. We’ve been turned into the Pop People.

LA adds:

Also, is Goldberg really so ignorant of American history as to believe that America was created by “mutts” and riff-raff who were all “kicked out” of decent places and so came here? Is that the way he perceives Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson?

There are two aspects to Goldberg’s view. On one hand, it is pure intellectual barbarism, which ought to disqualify him from being published in any conservative magazine. On the other hand, it is a typical expression of the effort, led mainly by liberal and neoconservative Jews whose ancestors came to America via Ellis Island, to redefine America in leftist Jewish terms as the “Wretched Refuse Nation,” as though there had been no America prior to the massive Jewish influx at the turn of the 20th century.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2007 01:02 PM | Send