Dobbs, rejected!

Thanks to Dave Neiwert for the link to this cob-web site.

The Lou Dobbs outrage du jour did have a happy ending. His (bad) show always ends with a poll designed to maximize a lopsided result. Like this one from last week:

The results of our poll tonight, only 98 percent of you say the state of our economy is worsening. Are you listening, Mr. Bush?

Yesterday's show ended with this:

DOBBS: The results of our poll tonight. 48 percent of you say Senator Obama is intentionally misrepresenting my position on illegal immigration and I guess the rest of you are going to give him the pass. I'm not.

That's right... 52% told Dobbs to STFU.

While we're talking Dobbs, it should be noted that he spent a large chunk of his time talking about the Air Force's decision to give a big contract to the Northrop Grumman/EADS consortium instead of Boeing.

That's a perfectly fine topic, but if he's going to spend the opening minutes of his show going after Obama, shouldn't he even mention at least once that John McCain is deeply involved in the lobbying effort that led to that contract ending up with EADS?

Shame on you, Lou Dobbs

Even though DB has never felt as badly scooped as I do right now with the blog-o-sphere abuzz with talk about Lou Dobbs' and Laura Flanders, here is the post I began and then set aside last week. (The only thing worse for this blogger than feeling like a particular post has zero effect on the topic is realizing that it may be too late to even have any effect on the conversation in general).

The thing that bothers DB about Lou Dobbs, more than anything, is the way he uses language to dehumanize the millions of hard-working people and families who are in this country without documentation. But beyond that, it is also the way he simultaneously shifts the entire burden of culpability onto the people with the least amount of power in the nation.

I wrote last year about the hypocrisy of the deport-them-all position. In a nation which has all but ignored its own laws, with a representative government and large segment of employers who have synergistically conspired to offer a tacit invitation to workers to enter the country illegally, the idea that the blame lies with people who have accepted those invitations and have done little or nothing other than fulfill their end of the bargain by working hard and raising families in pursuit of the American Dream is ridiculous.

Dobbs insists on calling them "illegal aliens," rather than "undocumented workers." He doesn't refer to our nation's employers as "illegal employers." He doesn't refer to our executive, who has deliberately decided not to enforce the laws against those employers as an "illegal president." He doesn't refer to representatives who have deliberately decided not to seriously fund an effort to stop people from crossing the border as an "illegal congress."

It has been decades now that the American government, ultimately accountable to the American people, in tandem with wealthy American employers, have waved their hands in invitation to hard-working people from South of the border. And yet, despite the fact that he knows this and reports on this, though Dobbs' use of language, the blame is shifted entirely to the workers, who hold the least power in the entire equation and who are the most susceptible to victimization and hate crimes (in fact, not just theory) by an intolerant audience whose emotions are manipulated by this language, despite Dobbs' attempts to distance himself from those elements.

In short, if the American employers and the American government (and by extension, the American people) don't care enough about our immigration laws to have enforced them to any sort of standard that indicates we take them seriously, why should people who come here to simply work and raise a family be charged with the high crime of being disrespectful of the rule of law?

In addition to his use of language, Dobbs also uses dubious sources for his statistics and "facts." Dave Neiwert has done a remarkable job of documenting Dobbs' recent transgressions. The silver lining in being completely scooped by a superior blogger is that I don't need to waste time rehashing how horrible his encounters with Mark Potok and Laura Flanders were. But I have a little bit more to add, anyway.

As incredible as the exchange with Flanders was, what took it to a level of absurdity for DB was the fact that it shortly followed this report from Casey Wian:

WIAN: Surveys of practicing Catholics also reveal discord. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked Catholics if they would quote, "support allowing undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for several years to gain legal working status and the possibility of citizenship in the future." Sixty six percent favored the idea, 32 percent were opposed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WIAN (on camera): But a year ago, the Pew Center asked a different question of non-Hispanic Catholics, using the word "illegal immigrants" instead of "undocumented immigrants." Only about a quarter of the group favored allowing illegal immigrants already in the United States to stay permanently, Lou.

DOBBS: And I believe that same poll and also and certainly the Zogby poll revealed that just about two thirds of all Catholics believed in strict border security and a very tough immigration law that should, should congress actually begin contemplating it.

WIAN: Absolutely.

Anybody with a brain would understand that language matters and that using the term "illegal aliens" would have a negative impact on the results of the poll, so it's no stretch to imagine that Dobbs would get that, too. But he even reported it and he did so only moments before berating Flanders for suggesting that he stop using language like that. His argument with her was a remarkable example of bullying (particularly in light of the fact that he apparently followed her off the set to say "How dare you!"). That it followed Wian's report made it a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance.

I'd also point out that the impetus for this conversation was the reported abuses by the Los Angeles police at the May 1 immigration rally. Dobbs devoted the absolute minimum of attention he possibly could to that story for a week. Despite having a reporter based in Los Angeles (Wian), Dobbs had no report on the incident. Perhaps it was too late to get into that day's broadcast, but look at the rest of the week: May 2, just five sentences in passing; May 3, seven sentences in passing; May 4, six sentences in passing. Finally, a report from Wian about it on Monday, May 7, which was incorporated into Dobbs' larger, ongoing reporting about the Catholic Church's involvement in the immigration movement, easily done because Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa joined Cardinal Roger Mahony at a "Catholic mass of reconciliation" that Sunday.

There was no relenting in Dobbs' coverage of his perceived damage to America by "illegal aliens," but practically no effort to describe the abuses to these demonstrators that were making headlines everywhere else.

And it is also important to note, as many have, that this was hardly the first time that Dobbs has been challenged on his use of language in describing undocumented workers. The way he treated Flanders, however, was extraordinary.

Consider also this exchange seven months ago in his hour-long special "Broken Borders:"

After repeating the word "illegal" 13 times in the program's introduction alone, he eventually reached this moment in the town hall-formatted special:

DOBBS: We're also here with Sheriff Rick Flores from Webb County, Texas. Sheriff, we've heard discussions about ordinances, local law enforcement, local communities taking up what the federal government won't do. Give us, if you will, your perspective as an important law enforcement officer in this state on the border.

RICK FLORES, SHERIFF, WEBB COUNTY: I can tell you, Lou, that Mexican people have been crossing the border since we've had a border with Mexico.

We've never had problems with Mexicans. Mexicans are not terrorists. It's the other than the Mexicans. The other people that are using Mexico as a jumping board to come into the United States who we are worried about and our Mexican border is very porous.

Now, in terms of -- and I do agree with Rosa that these are undocumented people. I don't like the word Mexican or illegal aliens.

DOBBS: You don't like the word Mexican?

FLORES: I don't like illegal aliens. Mexican is OK. Undocumented Mexicans, but see, there's a lot of people coming in through the Mexican border that are OTMs and those are the people that we're concerned about. And that's the reason why Congressman McCaul decided to investigate the Texas border sheriffs and the work that we were doing because of the violence that was escalating along the border and the potential for terrorist cells to make their way through Mexico to come into the United States. This deal about immigration, it just came post-9/11. Nobody had ever complained about illegal immigrants here.

DOBBS: I think you're exactly right.

FLORES: It was post-9/11.

DOBBS: I think you're right.

Dobbs thinks Flores is exactly right? Could anybody believe that? Perhaps it was because there was an audience, perhaps, as I'm inclined to believe, it's because he was not only hearing it from a man, but a sheriff, but in any event, there was no finger-pointing and Dobbs didn't try to talk over him and call him "obfuscatory."

Whatever his motivation for not just taking the comment in stride, but for actually completely agreeing with it, there was no indication in Dobbs' subsequent behavior that he took any of those comments to heart. That special aired over a weekend. The following week, on Lou Dobbs Tonight, the words "illegal aliens," "illegal immigration" or in the country "illegally" were spoken 96 times.

The word "undocumented" appeared just three times: Twice in viewer mail, mocking the term, and once by a member of a Catholic charity Lou brought on to lambaste for being in favor of impoverished "anchor babies" qualifying to receive food stamps as citizens of the United States.

Here we are, seven months later, and Dobbs still feeds a racist audience false statistics and provides cover for those who would dehumanize millions of hardworking people and advocate the destruction of their families by either deportation or the base tactic of simply starving them out of the country by eliminating their sources of income.

It is simply shameful. Shame on you, Lou Dobbs.

Timing is all

This has been an exceptionally bad week for DB as far as timing goes.

I should have known better than to think for a second that Marty Lederman wasn't going to write a much better response to Doug Kmiec than I ever could have. But the salt in the wound was the fact that I stopped working on a different post about Lou Dobbs in order to address the Comey testimony and allowed another blogger to scoop me on that subject, too. The shards of broken glass in the salt on the wound is that, again, I was not only scooped, but it was by another sensational blogger who saw my point and raised me by a sum I could not hope to match.

I still have a few things to say about it, and I refuse to resign from blogging just because my absence would apparently not have any impact on anything, if the last week of online discourse is any indication.

So I'll be back with my post about Dobbs later. In the meantime, get out the world's smallest violin for me. And read Dave Neiwert's interview with Mark Potok and his follow-up post about Dobbs' incredible exchange with Laura Flanders.

UPDATE: Flanders chatted on FDL this morning about the episode with Dobbs, which is now on Crooks & Liars.

So now, in addition to the shards of glass and salt in my wound, there are now hungry rats. How are those tiny violins coming?

Dead to me

The choice between Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson is excruciating.

3:00 p.m. PT is now officially music hour in DB HQ.

Please feel free to offer some suggestions.

Nothing is over until Bush decides it is

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

MICHAEL GOODWIN, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: I think, Lou, you said the magic words there. Petraeus' September deadline is the real deadline. And I think that what Congress is doing now is just trying to -- it's really about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign more than anything else.

LOU DOBBS: How is she doing?

GOODWIN: Well, so-so. And I think that is the problem for her.

DOBBS: But she's leading.

GOODWIN: But that's why she's trying to separate herself from the others. And she is still trying to get over her initial Iraq vote. I don't think this will accomplish that.

ED ROLLINS, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: And first of all, I mean, our troops are still there fighting. Your report earlier of the great burden that's going on in our Army and someone like Harry Reid basically saying, we've lost the war already. Who have we lost the war to?

We may have not objectively won, but the Democrats' strategy of drop our guns and run is not going to work. And we've got three or four more months to try and make this thing work. If it doesn't work at that time, it will have bipartisan support.

We may have not objectively won... Nice one, Ed.

This is why it is so important for the GOP to prop up Gen. Patraeus and mention his name in every interview. They know this war is over. They just want to wait until they hear a grim report in September, so they can say that they are looking for an exit because General Patraeus says it's time to redeploy. If they leave when Harry Reid says it's over, they can't call him a surrender monkey.

It is practically certain that Congress will call for an end to this in September. Every casualty from now until then will be because of politics.

But then, I'm afraid, it will get even uglier. Assuming he hasn't started anything with Iran by then, with a majority of Congress calling for withdrawal, Bush will have to start redeploying. It is important to realize that extracting ourselves from Iraq will be a complicated and dangerous operation.

Consider the incompetence of this administration for a moment. Now imagine this Commander in Chief presiding over that redeployment. It has the potential to be a disaster. And, as Pat Buchanan has been saying all week, they will blame every problem and death on the "party of defeat."

I'm not suggesting that they will deliberately make the exit a disaster. I will not enter "Republican Strategist" Ed Rogers' dwelling:

The clumsy politics that the Kerry campaign is playing on terrorism should be offensive to all Americans. And the media should blow the whistle on them. I think -- in my heart of hearts, I think that they're hoping for an attack, so that they can say, I told you so.

(I must say it makes me quite apprehensive to hear people with such a pathological lack of empathy and who are the embodiment of solipsism making comments like that.)

But, no, I will not go there. I will only go as far as asking how much this administration, which hasn't given a crap about the troops throughout the entire war, will care about them at this dangerous juncture?

I almost think it would be safer to leave the troops in Iraq until somebody with competence and a fully-functioning moral compass takes office, if that happens.

What a horrible mess we are in.

Oh, but what about the children?

LOU DOBBS: Seven-year-old Saul Arellano, a pawn in the battle over illegal immigration, appeared before Mexico's Congress today. Arellano's mother, an illegal alien, has taken refuge in a Chicago church in an effort to avoid her deportation from the United States over the past three months. She has been deported before.

The boy is an American citizen. And immigration advocates and the boy's mother apparently see no problem in using her 7-year-old son as an outright political pawn.

A little American boy is trying to keep his mother here, with him, in America by talking about her situation to anyone who will tune in.

A rich American man is boosting his ratings and helping his network sell advertising by talking about this same woman to anyone who will tune in.

Regardless of how you feel about illegal immigration, that's basically the story here. Dobbs helped make this boy's mom a piece of national news. He's advocated for this boy's mother to be deported.

Now he's concerned about the boy?

Take it away, Kitty

With today's revelations about Senator George Allen's association with the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, DB wonders how grateful Lou Dobbs is to be on vacation this week.

Fair is fair

This may be hard for some to swallow, but there's no denying that it's true: The American government and American employers have tacitly encouraged illegal immigration.

Employers have hired illegals and taken advantage of their status, while the government has sporadically and arbitrarily enforced the law. How could anyone deny that the people coming here did so without the federal government looking the other way?

Why is it important to face this fact? Because although it is entirely appropriate for the United States to decide that, as of this minute, the laws and borders will be enforced fervently, it is absurd and immoral to pretend that this seriousness of purpose began in the distant past and that people who came here to establish families and to work for the American Dream did so without any complicity from those who would punish them today.

If we recognize the contributions of the undocumented workers who have been here for some time, does that tell the world that it's OK to break the law? Lou Dobbs and others will say it does, but the truth is that this country already told them that. It is absolutely delusional to think that we can focus all the burden of this policy transformation on to a hard-working minority and somehow communicate to the world that we are the shining emblem of justice.

This government isn't suddenly telling people they can no longer jaywalk. These immigrants have established lives here. Anybody claiming to have respect for life, for families, for work... for the American Dream should have enough room in his or her heart to accept the people who are already here.

If we don't want to tell the world that it's OK to break the law, we should ask our Senators and Congressmen to stop figuring out how to change the laws so that the president isn't breaking them anymore.

UPDATE: Following up, DB would like to add that it is not hard to understand why people in Bay Buchanan's "deport them all" camp would feel no hypocrisy in taking a position that people in the U.S. illegally deserve no "reward" for being here. People like her and Dobbs aren't individually culpable for the lax enforcement of the immigration laws. To the contrary, they've been demanding tougher enforcement for years.

But they, more than anyone, should recognize that collectively, our nation has not respected its own laws. Dobbs' show would not even have its primary focus had the federal government been enforcing the laws and had American employers been hiring legal workers exclusively. It should be more clear to the people who don't feel personally responsible for the problem and who have been critical of the federal government that it is in no position to act with any legitimacy as though it believes its laws are sacrosanct.

The point is that the message, "You get rewarded for breaking the law," isn't going to be sent out by anything the government does at this point. That message has been sent for decades and the people who came here to work are here because they received it.

The only message we should be worried about sending to the rest of the world at this point is "The people with power and money in our democracy will sell out their own citizens by hiring cheap foreign labor until it becomes politically untenable, at which point they will tell the minorities working for peanuts to get the hell out."

Tougher border security and consistent enforcement of the laws is not only appropriate, but DB demands it. Treating working people with families, already in our communities, like garbage to be dragged to the curb, however...

Oh, Lou

Are you astounded that illegal immigrants would demonstrate to protest the enforcement of the borders they crossed illegally to enter the United States?

Lou Dobbs is nothing if not consistent and willing to fight for what he believes. For that, DB applauds him.

However, this question assumes that there were "illegal immigrants" among the protesters. DB will stipulate that's probably true, but how does Lou know how many there were? It's as if everybody out there protesting "crossed" the borders.

What about neighbors and first-generation citizens? Maybe Lou's right and everybody in the Los Angeles streets this weekend snuck into this country... but this blogger thinks that Lou should be sure about that before throwing that question out there.

Furthermore, 77% of his respondents were "astounded" by that. Why would anybody be shocked that people assumed to have not respected a border would protest its enforcement?

Maybe Lou's next question should be:

Are you astounded that a television show would wonder why people don't respect a border when American business owners are offering gainful employment to undocumented workers and the governments on either side tacitly encourage people to cross it by inconsistently, infrequently and arbitrarily enforcing the laws?

UPDATE: Just to be clear. DB has little doubt that some percentage of those protesters are in this country illegally. Obviously, it is unreasonable to assume that none are, and it is both statistically and logically likely, based on the point of the protests, that a substantial number are. But DB gets the impression that Dobbs, and those who share his ideas about immigration, looked at those crowds and saw 500,000 Mexicans, when it is just as likely for a reasonable person to assume that some substantial percentage of the protesters are citizens. Without any evidence either way, this poll question seems irresponsible.