Letters to the Editor
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Gotta love those republicans
And of course I've gotten lots of angry diatribes as well from people who are angry, don't believe the data, think that it's untrue, that I have some kind of sinister agenda. I've gotten vile e-mails, hate mails, threats, that kind of stuff as well. So that's not been pleasant, of course.
Now, who do you suppose would be so adverse to reality, and have such a vile way of communicating it?
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What makes you think Bill O'Reilly knows a goddamn thing about what causes crime?
Seriously, anyone can pull it out of their loofahed ass and call it reality. I think it's those fat people that cause crime. I'm sure of it.
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Perception is Everything
But not all perception is incidental. There is a massive grass-roots, organized effort to distort the perceptions of those who are most susceptible to having their perceptions warped: those with little to no exposure to the groups they are being taught to mistrust and, ultimately, to hate. This is not happening by some essentially benign accident. It is carefully planned, worked and played out by a very worrisome movement among the far right, and while Bill O'Reilly may actually be stupid enough to be a pawn of the movement it seems infinitely more likely that he is a part of it. For that matter so would the Fox network executives who keep his potentially-exlpoding head yakking on the screen.
O'Reilly's intent, on this occasion, ran into a brick wall in the form of fellow media pimp Rivera, who coincidentally happened to be right this time. What O'reilly was saying was utter "bull." However, he had carefully chosen his example, an illegal alien, which was like a gift from the heavens and argues strongly against the dumbshit defense.
It doesn't matter now, because the damage has been done. Rivera, correct as he may have been and righteously indignant as he may have been, fed right into the conspiracy theory ("They" are taking over - just like blacks before them and Jews before that) simply by virtue of his name. Among the ill-informed (that is to say the brainwashed Fox viewership) a man with the name Rivera is naturally going to take the part of the evil intruders. O'Reilly, on the other hand, is perceived by these people (and they are legion) as the beseiged spokesman for the "good, decent, ordinary men and women" who comprise what today passes for a lynch mob and one day soon may actually revert to lyncherdom.
It does nothing to help the cause that the accused was in the US illegally. However, this is the red herring which O'Reilly successfully rubbed all over Rivera, who otherwise acquitted his point exceedingly well. It's lost on the Fox clientele.
The finest point that can be put on this is that we who consider ourselves intelligent and good need to work toward bridging the gap between critical thinkers and those who believe illegal immigrants are natural-born criminals, blacks are lazy and shiftless, and Jews control the media and the banks (or is it the Freemasons?). The left has helped create this pocket of intransigent ignorance by showing its disdain for those who aren't quite up too speed on the hipness curve. By looking down on the more concrete thinkers, the earnest-but-mistaken part of our nation, by making them fair game for all sorts of ethnic and social ridicule and disdain, the "enlightened" among us have helped create a virtual civil war in which aliens, illegal and otherwise, have become the latest pawn.
We need to take our ethics and our love to the street; not just for the downtrodden Latino or black or Muslim or Jew or sexually non-traditional person, but to all persons. Start talking now, and not down but across, or we will all find ourselves in a cross-cultural brawl that will make the Rivera-O'Reilly fiasco look like Abbott and Costello - which, upon reflection, it did.
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notice the language
I doubt I would ever stand behind Bill O'Reilly on any point, but.... isn't a person who has entered this country illegally already guilty of commiting a crime? Okay, so it's not manslaughter, but still, and whatever the motivation, it is a deliberate criminal act.
I was glad to see that Salon, in its subhead to this article, used the phrase "illegal aliens" instead of the current morph, "illegal immigrants." It's a very clear distinction, one which the immigrants rights proponents need to embrace. I have nothing against immigrants. All but one of my grandparents were immigrants. They committed no crimes, so far as I know, even when they were jumping through the quite numerous hoops that were then a part of the legal immigration process.
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Immigrant or illegal immigrant?
I notice this article is supposed to be about a correlation between illegal immigrants and crime. However, in all of the telling examples, the good professor uses the term "immigrant" rather than "illegal immigrant". Obviously there is going to be a difference in propensity to commit crime between these two groups. Illegals are by definition criminals the very second they become illegal aliens/immigrants.
Is the confusion factor intentional? It's even present in the heading to the article.
What do the statistics about *legal* immigrants have to do with the premise of this article? Absolutely nothing.
I don't think even O'Reichly is espousing anti-immigration ideas. Anti-illegal immigration is a different thing entirely.
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Here's the cold hard truth
There are a significant number of illegal immigrants in CA prisons. There are also large number of people in CA prisons who are the offspring of illegal immigrants. These are the "anchor babies" that illegals have that allow them to stay in the US. Fact: The majority of illegal immigrants are from Mexico by a huge margin. Fact: The majority of gang violence in LA are caused by Hispanic gangs many of whom are linked to to the Mexican Mafia which operate out of CA prisions.
If that's not enough here are more facts:
Illegal immigration costs LA county alone over a billion dollars a year in tax money to provide housing, welfare related items like food stamps, medical care (which is my so many hospitals have closed and thus endangering the lives of everyone else) education costs for anchor babies who have overcroweded the schools to an alarming rate and whose parents refuse to teach them English which automatically puts them at a disadvantage. This tax money should be spent on improving the the lives of everyone, not just the law breakers who bum rush the US and squat while living off the tax dollars of everyone else.
The rapid rise in illegal immigration is the cause for the rapid upswing in identity theft. It's not uncommon at all for illegal immigrants to have several phoney IDs and SS numbers in order to draw multiple unemployment and welfare checks.
Illegal immigrants destroy the neighborhoods they move into. Crime, grafitti, litter, housing violations (remember the story in New Jersey about the 60 illegal immigrants living in a two bedroom house? This is a common occurance) all take a dramatic upswing. Just ask anyone who used to live in LA 20 or 30 years ago before it became a suburb of Tijuanna.
Illegal immigrants drive down wages. Just ask those in the meat packing business who at one time used to earn about $15 an hour. Thanks to illegal immigration those wages have dropped to near minimum wage. Good for the business owners, bad for everyone else whose tax dollars have to make up for it. Just ask those in the construction business who also are having their wages get cut because illegal immigrants don't mind things like a living wage when they can live 60 to a house and get free medical care at the emergency rooms.
Illegal immigrants are responsible for for the upswing in once rare diseases like TB.
The bottom line is this: Illegal immigration has to be stopped NOW! If it doesn't just look at what's happened to LA and most of Southern CA and this is what the rest of the US will look like before long.