Believe me, I am absolutely sick of describing the Bush adminstration and its enablers as Orwellian . . . and of continuing to have to read such critiques.
But on Sunday the AGN ran the following letter by F. Wayne Chapman under the headline "An insightful one-liner":
In addition to acronymic sharing, it's also evident that the Open Border Lobby and Osama bin Laden are into goal-sharing.
We don't make a habit of debunking every single wingnut letter that gets published by the Amarillo Globe-News (we have jobs), but this one merits notice for a variety of reasons.
The AGN editorial staff will try to claim that they are not biased right-wingers by pointing out that they publish letters and columns by people holding a variety of political opinions. And they're right; in fact, they regularly print letters and columns from PTSers.
However:
The point of a letter's headline is to summarize the author's point, not to add additional editorial comment. The AGN editors showed their cards when they described Chapman's letter as "insightful."
And, in fact, it is not insightful at all. Whoever the "Open-Borders Lobby" may be, they obviously do not refer to themselves as such. A couple of internet searches show that the term is primarily used by right-wing websites such as the Eagle Forum, FrontPage, and the notoriously racist vdare.com.
The term is hardly used in the mainstream press at all. A LexisNexis search finds fewer than twenty references. But of these, only one occurred before September 11, 2001 (in the American Spectator, natch.)
It's clear that the online wingnut community and a few disreputable arch-conservative columnists like Michelle Malkin have seized on the term solely because of the infamous initials. It's the same old tactic: they demonize the word "liberal", they change "Democratic Party" to "Democrat Party," they call us "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak shows."
They call everyone who disagrees with them "terrorists."
And "F. Wayne Chapman" and the AGN editorial staff fell into the wingnuts' trap, having exactly the same "insightful" reaction they were programmed to have. And, yet again, a group (in this case, immigration reformers) are proclaimed to be doubleplusungood and booted unceremoniously out of the public conversation.
SPACEDARK
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