If I Have To Spend Eight Years Listening To Mark Penn...

Just kill me.



Welcome to your time machine. A Hillary Clinton presidency will be eight more years of parsing and waffling and incomplete thoughts. Look, just come out and say it. She didn't want a press release that said "Hillary Wants To Give Illegals Candy." But that press release will happen anyway, so what's the point? Why not try to get OUT IN FRONT of an issue for a change.

In the absence of any leadership on immigration from the left, the issue has been demagogued to death. I heard a guy last night on right-wing radio talking about how his tax refund was lower than ever this year, and blaming illegals for it. Uh, the federal government sets tax policy, not Jose Jimenez, and they've been redistributing wealth upwards for decades. There's serious concern among the middle class about their economic future, and this has been seized upon by nativists. It's the precarious underbelly of right-wing populism, and this radio caller's comment was the distilled essence of it. They think they're not getting ahead because the illegals are taking their jobs and sucking up government services because they have no "survival skills" (a direct quote). Survival skills are ALL that a Mexican national travelling through deserts and rivers to feed his family has. They're contributing more to the economy than they're taking away, and they're being exploited by cruel and greedy employers. Fix that part of the issue, which has been degraded severely in the Bush era, and you fix it all.

Someone needs to be giving voice to the voiceless and fighting for an immigration reform that is sensible and reflects American principles. Hillary Clinton and her spinners offer nothing but mush. She won the AFSCME endorsement today, so that'll probably overshadow last night's pathetic performance. And her team will probably be successful in framing it as "6 guys ganging up to attack 1 woman" (uh, it's called being the frontrunner, if you don't like it, drop out). But we need more than status quo, follow the polls, mushy-middle technocracy. There are too many challenges we face for that to characterize the next 8 years.