Ali Frick of ThinkProgress posts an interview with Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) in which the Congressman is asked to respond to a 2007 statement by talk show host Michael Savage about refugees unable to assimilate. Cao responds appropriately, drawing to his own life experiences as a refugee from Vietnam. Additionally, he hopes “that the GOP will not tolerate those kinds of views and will not take those positions.” So far so good.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): Part of that is this whole idea of multicultural diversity, which on the face sounds wonderful. … But guess what? Not all cultures are equal.
Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA): There is quite a large number of people that are coming across the border that are of Middle Eastern origin as well as Asian origin. A lot of these are single, they have no families. I don’t think they are coming here to cut our grass or work in our chicken plants.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): If there are no jobs people will go home. They won’t continue to go here. Now a lot of ‘em wouldn’t go home; you’d have to round them up.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA): We could also electrify this wire [on the border fence] with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL): The numbers [of immigrants] cannot be too great, or it takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems that wouldn’t occur if it was a little slower.
Frick gets an “A” for effort to paint Republicans as bigoted, anti-immigrant fools. But as they say, history is our best teacher, and let’s see what we can learn about Democrats, starting with quotes from our soon-to-be vice president, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):
- There’s less than 1% of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4% or 5% that is, are minorities. What is it in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.
- I mean, you got the first mainstream African American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.
- You cannot go into a Dunkin’ Donuts or a 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent.
- Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) 1993: Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.
- Jimmy Carter, former President: I’m not going to use the federal government’s authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. . . . I have nothing against a community that’s made up of people who are Polish or Czechoslovakian or French-Canadian or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.
- Robert F. Kennedy, former Attorney General: I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes.
- Robert Byrd (D-WV): I am a former Kleagle [recruiter] of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County. . . . The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union.
