The Democrats and the campaign engineers for the Republicans all agree. Of course, in the one case, the Democrats, they are hoping that a selective plague comes around and removes anyone who ever thought about being a Republican or a conservative be stricken down like all the first born Egyptians during the Mosaic period.
The campaign engineers for the Republicans, somewhat predictably arriving at the same conclusion as the Democrats, come up with the same, post-wild-mushroom-eating visions of how to win elections. And these people are paid real Yankee greenback money!
Both of these groupings point out that the Republican Party needs to "reach out to Hispanics". Both of these groupings of dolts point out that the "hispanics" are a tailor-made voting block for the Republicans because the "Hispanics" are "all" right in line with the Republicans when it comes down to the meat and potatoes social issues.
Both of these groupings of dolts also demand that the Republican Party, if it intends to grow and remain somewhat viable as a permanent, insignificant minority party on the American politcal scene, needs to absolutely stop being mean to people who need free abortions, have homosexual matrimonial prerogatives, free birth-control pills for 12 year olds, anything they want for free, plus free tuition for any schooling from Harvard to a full trades licensing at the community college...free. Stop, stop, stop being mean! And judgemental! Now! Now! Now!
Well, er, uh, on the one hand we have a built in Republican voting block, "Hispanics" as they are called by the insipid political experts, who are all ''social issues" voters, and then on the other hand we have a horrid Republican Party who dwells too much on things like "social issues" and scares away the nice people who really don't like mean, judgemental anything because it's just not nice...it's like being a meany-poo.
If my great uncles in Tennessee had tried to 'still up anything with ingredients like that, back into the high hollers in the low Smokies, their whiskey would have come out more like frog slime.
But, my uncles were not stupid. The sage political class thinks they were stupid because they were born in a rural area that pertained to the Confederacy at one time. But they learned early on that fluid is put into the bottle. The bottle is not put into the fluid. The ladies learned, 'round the age of 5 that the thread went somewhere into the needle, and that the needle did not go into the thread.
Later, after they go to school in a fancy university, then they can learn how to cut a saw into two parts with a log. They learn that if you pay several generations of girls to have babies that, all of a sudden, we going to have a whole lot of babies and a lot of confused storks flying around without having filed a flight plan. That is called "social progress" in some cases, and in other cases it is called "social democracy". In either case, it does not make very good whiskey, fish bait, or gun oil. That there twas what our 'learnin' was. My great-uncles made good whiskey. They didn't drink it...they just made it and aged it and spread it around, for medicinal puposes.
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| Dr. Charles Krauthammer |
Some of my harshness is regretted because the esteemed Dr. Charles Krauthammer is one who frequently uses the "lumpthemalltogetherterm'hispanic"'. Dr. Krauthammer is a truly great thinker, although no highly filtered conservative. His trudge to the Right has been tectonic, a little slower than, say, the great Mexican poet, philosopher, and author Octavio Paz. He is, in any regard, one of us and a great thinker. But, he doth err. The basic assumption is false. That assumption is the idea, once again (oft stated on this blog) that anyone can say "all hispanics" and then continue accurately with the rest of the sentence. It is difficult unless one is going to say, "All hispanics are more or less human." Or, "Most hispanics are probably male or female, or something else." But, barring a too-long stay in the Olde Saloon, why would anyone want to say such things? Or, perhaps one is being distracted by the producer shouting into the Doctor's ear-piece, saying things like, "Wrap it up, Doc. Ten seconds to the hard break".
Now, El Gringo Viejo's point is, once again, very simple. Latinos are a lot like us "regular, real people". They are all different. Although one can take a broader brush and do some painting of a group portrait, one cannot take The Broad Brush and paint that same portrait. It is a true statement that, under the term "hispanic" one can find people who are 100% Negro and 100% Caucasian and others who are 100% New World Indian. Many "hispanics", if not most, might fall into some combination of of the latter two categories. But, most Americans...and most Hispanics for that matter, could not differentiate, by sight only, a regular run of the mill "palestinian'' from a regular run of the mill "hispanic". Is an Italian a "Latino"....how ridiculous right? How come French, Spanish, Arabs, Romanians, Italians, Turks, Greeks, Portuguese, and the like, look like....Mexicans? Or, that Mexicans look like them. Why do Mexican Indian nations appear physically different from American and Canadian and Peruvian, etc. Indians? Why do they look similar?
Well, the Italians are the original Latinos....of course...the ones who based out the languages that most "hispanics' speak. As far as the Indians are concerned, MesoAmerican Indians come from one place and American and Canadian Indians come from another. Although there are schools of thought who suggest that Polynesia was populated from what is now Mexico and Guatemala. But, I digress....
There is no way the Republican Party is ever going to dominate totally what the Democrat Socialists, the media, and the Republican Campaign Engineers, call "the hispanics". One main reason is that there are now a large number who are derived from a category of people of Mexican origin who have always been trained to believe that the government was the source of riches, favours, and money in general. Some of these people are derived from a class of people who were involved in peonage during the Colonial and Republican periods in Mexico. They have many, many generations of depending upon first the Hacendados to care for them followed by many generations of being told that the central government would care for them an defend them. These same people gradually lost the ability to discern any notion of what liberty, chance, risk, or tomorrow meant. Especially as they urbanised, they put their faith in the futile hope that somewhere....like in the city....they could find a better way to be taken care of.
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As a starter, this is a map of the various languages, not
dialects, spoken in Mexico among the indigenous. Especially
in the southern half, there are probably 10,000,000 native
speakers at this writing.
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The central government, according the the tenets of the Constitution of 1917, told them they had the right to a minimum wage, to a house, to food, to a free education, to free medical care, to fair labour treatment and to union membership, etc. Of course, the only solid advances made during the past 100 years in Mexico have been among those classes of individuals who did not depend upon the government's promises. Even as they might have been using or participating to some degree (it is/was unavoidable for any class of person not to use some government sponsored something in Mexico), the lower-middle class established and stabilised to large degree by mastering blue-collar skills and becoming indispensable to the needs of the upper-middle and upper castes.
During the last thirty years we have seen steady and radical changes to the population that might be considered to be of Spanish/Mexican/Latin American background. The main change is that many of the arrivals in that time period have been people who learnt from a small body of malingerers who were family members already in Texas or the United States how to effectively game the system. So we had something like the planting of a weed in a fine garden. The first amnesty, lamentably; was pushed by Ronald Reagan, whose understanding of Mexican people was from contact with the well-established middle-class Latins with whom he dealt in California. If not them, it was the Mexicans across the Border who treated him with antique civilities and grace and sincere class and dignity in Mexico when he was hobnobbing in Ensenada.
He thought it would be better to have those people among us, and he also thought that they would realise sooner, rather than later, that they were Republicans. In that he was totally correct. Therein lies the problem. If you ask Ronald Reagan, he might say, "All Mexican Americans are......" The ones he knew really were and are almost all conservatives, tending heavily Republican. They are still with us. They are the ones who have gone to war in disproportionate numbers and casualties and medals and Medals of Honour....up to and including Iraq and Afghanistan and Kuwait.
These are still the skilled blue-collar, the small business people, the doctors and dentists and pharmacists and nurses, the accountants, the teachers, the warriors, the farmers and ranchers....who happen to be the true immigrants, colonial people, the refugees from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Depression, who really were here or came here and put up with the cheap trash, sought out and found friends of all stripes, and steadily folded in as the Americans they were born to be.
THOSE ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO WE CAN RECRUIT OR MAINTAIN AS CONSERVATIVE AND/OR REPUBLICAN VOTERS. WE SEE THAT AT THE TEA PARTIES, WE SEE THEM AT WORK, WE SEE THEM AT CHURCH, WE SEE THEM EVERYWHERE. THEY ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH IMMIGRATION LAW.
Then, apart from the above, there are people who come out of the darkness of the public assistance addiction, simply because of the American engine of prosperity. They stumble out of their cells of "help" from the government, their "shackles" of "public assistance" and start to rise....perhaps from a starter job at MacDonald's that turns into "assistant night manager" one day....and then into "assistant day manager" one day..etc.
These are the people who become Republicans and conservatives. They recruit themselves. They will find their way towards their similars, and we simply keep the door open. Receive them heartily, then forget about it. They only want to be Republicans when they are nailing signs and working the phone banks. When they go home they can do whatever thing makes them what they are. But they will come to the open door. They do not need to be helped. There are already large numbers within the ranks, and more are coming.
Some might ask, "Well, if more are coming how come they only voted 29% for Romney, huh? huh?"
And the answer is, first of all it will be nearly impossible to get the old amnesty people in by "attracting them" with some magic ad campaign. At least 60% of those are not reachable. Most do not vote. They eat. There are others, youngsters who look around one day at the graffiti, the litter, and the gangs and violence and go down to MacDonald's one day where he saw a "help wanted"notice. There are others who join the Army on a whim....and then, 97% of the time, that ''hispanic" has been transformed. (of course, that is why we need to take back the military from the social engineers. The military vote this time was 50/50).
The complete answer is also, that there is no way anyone can determine what the "hispanic" vote percentage is because of the method of extracting that data. It is assumed by the "campaign engineers" that "all hispanics" live in "hispanic" neighbourhoods. Such in not the case...and in Texas, by this point, it would be most probable that about 50% of the Latin population is interspersed or intermarried. In Texas, best estimates seem to indicate that the Latinos voted about 40% Republican (or for Romney), or perhaps a little higher. That seems to be born out her on th border. So, it's hard to put that in your pipe and smoke it, because no one knows where the pipe is.
We'll leave all this to ferment. We do appreciate your time and attention.
El Gringo Viejo
4th graders know more about our country, and can probably to a better job than she.