this right here, that is...
AUSTIN, Texas — Republicans U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Gov. Rick Perry are walking a tightrope heading into their primary, where the winner will emerge the front-runner for the governor's race in this decidedly red state.
On one side are Hispanic voters — a growing and influential bloc willing to listen to the GOP titans and one the candidates may need in the general election. On the other is a group that Hutchison and Perry cannot afford to anger: the Republican base of religious, largely white and conservative voters.
So they've done a two-step around Texas, showing up in majority-Hispanic parts of the state to appeal to those Texans while talking tough on guns, border security and other top issues for traditional primary voters.
Witness Hutchison at the Texas Association of Mexican-American Chambers of Commerce convention in McAllen last week. Only days before she had announced she would vote against Hispanic Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
She explained to tepid applause that she could not vote to confirm a judge who was not a firm supporter of gun rights. Balancing Texas gun owners against Hispanic pride? The GOP candidate chose gun owners.
Huh. To think some people would actually see this as a bad thing, someone making an assessment of a political appointee based on said appointee's positions on fundamental human rights as opposed to pandering to the racial grievance-mongers. I could have sworn that was exactly the kind of world Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted his kids to grow up to see:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
And yes, your position on the fundamental right of self-defense is as good of an indicator of your character as anything. As for the issue of border security? It's worth asking just whose side Texas Hispanics are on, as having the porous border we do seems to me to serve illegal immigrants and Mexico better than the United States and Texas itself. I suppose some might wonder where the racial grievance-mongering comes into all this. Well, it seems to me that the way the journalist put it -- "balancing Texas gun owners against Hispanic pride" -- is an indication that particular constituency sees their race as an overriding factor, that we should disregard everything else that's usually taken into consideration when we're talking about political candidates and appointees just because of said candidates' and appointees' race. And I still don't understand why, unless of course you wanna just come out and say all the Hispanics harping on Sotomayor's race are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan. Which is about right to me, really, as politically incorrect as that may be.
|