Dreher tells his readers what he thinks of them

Rod Dreher seem to have given up claiming that as a professional journalist carrying out an assignment by his superiors he is not responsible for the “Texan of the Year” essay that he wrote for the Dallas Morning News. Now, under his own name, Dreher is justifying, with astoundingly weak arguments, the selection of illegal aliens as “Texan of the Year.” For example, he points out that the DMN picked George W. Bush as Texan of the Year when he was living in Washington D.C.—as though being president of the United State and residing in the nation’s capital is the equivalent of being an illegal alien! Dreher has also adopted the language of the scornful liberal elite. He writes that those readers who have attacked the TOY essay are “angry” and “confused,” and that their arguments are at best “legalistic,” meaning that they’re merely prejudiced people with no reasonable concerns on their side. But he doesn’t stop at that. To show how bad his critics are, he quotes one commenter who in proposing the mass deportation of illegal aliens referred to Hitler’s mass transit of the Jews to concentration camps.

Rod, I’m staggered. What you’re now doing is what Linda Chavez did during the immigration debate last spring, when she used bigoted e-mails she had received from nobodies to tar as bigots all opponents of the Comprehensive Immigration Bill, including the entire staff of National Review. You’re better than this, Rod. Admit that you’re the one who has gotten confused here. After all, as you said about yourself last July:

“Having been absolutely certain that the war was the right thing to have done, and that we would prevail easily, I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly.”

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Terry Morris writes:

Dreher wrote:

“Could anybody plausibly deny that he’s a Texan, even though he wasn’t born here and hasn’t resided here for years? Come on.

“For better or for worse, illegal immigrants are de facto Texans, certainly for purposes of our editorial’s points. To deny that seems to me to be a legalistic argument.”

And Dreher accuses YOU of writing before you think???

Here’s the most insulting inference I draw from Dreher’s completely illegitimate defense of his article: Dreher is calling illegal aliens by the laudable title “de facto Texans”. And what is his basis for describing them as such? Best I can tell, using Dreher’s criteria and a little deductive reasoning, all an Hispanic alien need have done to earn the honorable Dreherian title “de facto Texan” is to have occupied, illegally, a spot of ground in Texas for some unspecified amount of time. In other words, if one was once a de facto criminal invader in Texas now residing back in his home country of Mexico or whatever, he is, according to Dreherian logic, entitled to the descriptive “de facto Texan” in the exact same way that Carl Rove is entitled to the descriptive. This is the basis of his defense of the DMN article, and it discredits his entire protest.

The inference I draw from this is that Dreher is saying that illegal aliens, whether they currently reside in the States or in their home countries, or they’re in transit to or from, or whatever, are and of right ought to be de facto Americans, for the moment or at intervals occupying some spot of ground elsewhere. Indeed, if it’s a stretch at all it ain’t much of one to conclude, using Dreher’s argument, that some obscure Mexican citizen now contemplating crossing the Texas border illegally is, by all rights, a “de facto Texan” in spirit. He just needs to commit the act to be one in reality. If he does so, he is automatically entitled to be called by this description which has life-long advantageous implications for he and his family and his native countrymen.

The “defacto Texan” denomination is bad enough and it should enfuriate all Americans, particularly Texans. But if that isn’t enough to enfuriate every and all legitimate American, just take it to its logical de facto American conclusion. If a Texan is a de facto American, then an illegal alien who has at one time or the other occupied space in the state of Texas, or is currently doing so, or seriously considering doing so, is by Dreher’s definition a de facto de facto American, right?

Is it going too far to declare that Dreher and the DMN editorial board, on the basis of their own published words, are de facto unAmerican? In the absence of a retraction of these statements, at very least, my opinion is obviously that it isn’t. And you can quote me on that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 31, 2007 03:01 PM | Send