Webloggin » Heard it on the Radio

Unusually for me, I spent a lot of time in the car today and, even more unusually, I didn’t have any kids in the back. That meant that I got to listen to some pretty long stretches of talk radio. I heard two interesting things, one from Dennis Prager, and one from Michael Medved.

The Dennis Prager bit was his segment (or, at least, most of his segment) interviewing Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists : The Christian Right and the War on America. Unsurprisingly, given the book’s title, Hedges was for many years a correspondent for the New York Times. Prager did a fabulous interview. Without ever becoming hostile, or overbearing or aggressive, he repeatedly exposed the hollow fatuity and fear underlying Hedges’ basic premise, which is that a broad segment of American Christian fundamentalists are precisely the same in tone and quality as Al Qaeda or Wahabbi-ists. It was a masterful interview, and one I strongly recommend. If this link doesn’t work, just go here and look for Prager’s “Christo-Fascism” show from May 18.

The second thing I heard, which hasn’t been uploaded yet onto Townhall radio, was Michael Medved’s riff about the compromise immigration bill working through Congress. I’d already figured out that the bill has the Republicans in a bind. The Democrats are all for it, because they’re counting on millions of new Democrats flowing in from South of the Border (with 12 million having already arrived illegally). The Republicans, who object both to the morality of granting amnesty to cheaters and to the idea of 12 million new, probably Democratic voters, nevertheless cannot object too much because, if they appear hostile to Hispanics (rather than hostile to a Democratic bid for permanent political power), they risk alienating (a) current Hispanic conservatives and (b) any future Hispanic conservatives. In other words, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Medved points out, however, that the compromise bill provides that those given amnesty can vote, at the earliest, only 13 years after the Bill goes into effect.

A lot can happen in 13 years. So, while the Republicans are bowing to the inevitable, they’re also getting a very valuable commodity: time. Who knows? In 13 years, quality Republican leadership (assuming such can be had), might be able to convince Hispanics that it is not in their best interest to vote for a party that has for forty years backed policies, such as unlimited welfare and bilingualism, that seem aimed to keep many immigrants ghettoized forever.

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