The Return Of Somebody Else's Problem Fields

The Village is certainly doing a number on Arizona and Lake Palin, and it proves that the cynical Republican worldview of "I got mine, screw you" is at the heart of it all.

Even after the recent — and highly publicized — oil spill in the Gulf Coast, that’s the overwhelming sentiment from the public, with six in 10 Americans supporting more offshore drilling, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

In addition, a majority believes that the potential economic benefits of offshore drilling outweigh its potential harm to the environment.

Those aren’t the only striking results from this survey, which was conducted after several significant and newsworthy events:

• Nearly two-thirds of Americans back Arizona’s new controversial immigration law;
• After the failed car bomb in Times Square, 58 percent of respondents say they’re worried this country will experience another terrorist attack, the highest percentage on this question in almost five years;
• And in the wake of the federal government’s fraud charges against Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, a clear majority thinks that the biggest concern about the financial reform legislation moving through Congress is that it won’t go far enough to rein in Wall Street’s perceived excesses. 

Some pretty amazing results there in the full poll.  60% want more drilling, 53% say the benefits outweigh the harm.  Really?  I suppose if you live in Indiana or Colorado or Montana, offshore drilling is fine.  It's not like you have to worry about your state's tourism and fishing economies being destroyed by a patch of black and red goop the size of Massachusetts and growing and putting potentially thousands, maybe millions of Americans out of work in the middle of a massive recession that only now beginning to recover.  "Hey that's a real shame about those destroyed beaches and stuff.  But hey, let them pay the price, not us.  We get 100% of the benefit.  I got my cheaper gas.  Screw you East coast guys.  You're not real Americans anyway."

This despite the fact that 87% of Americans believe there will be some impact on our economy because of this.  They don't care.

Meanwhile, 64% favor Arizona's immigration law, while 66% believe it will lead to discrimination and racial profiling against Latinos who are here legally.  Folks, that means mathematically there are millions of Americans who think racial profiling is a perfectly reasonable price to pay for this law.  And I'm betting a very, very large majority of the group of people who believe both that the law needs to be supported and that the law will lead to discrimination and profiling are white.  "Hey, you know that's too bad that legal Latinos are going to be harassed and stuff, but frankly I don't care.  But hey, let them pay the price, not us.  We get 100% of the benefit.  I want the illegal ones outta my country.  I got my cheap labor.  Screw you Latinos.  You're not real Americans anyway."

Spoken only like somebody who's never been singled out for skin color.

Maybe that explains the 51% who approve of racial profiling to stop terrorism, and the 52% who want to give up civil liberties in order to prevent another attack.  "Somebody else will pay the price, not me."

It's somebody else's problem.  And as long as the people paying the price aren't "Real Americans in the heartland" then it doesn't matter how high that price gets for those "others".

[UPDATE] Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix finds a McClatchy-Ipsos poll that shows a slightly higher percentage of people support cops detaining people who can't prove they're in the country legally (67%), including 55% of Democrats.  It gets worse.

While the Democratic Party generally is regarded as more sympathetic to illegal immigrants' plights, 46 percent of Democrats said they favored the law for Arizona and 49 percent said they'd favor the law's passage in their own states. 

Not all racists are Republicans, I've known that for quite a long time.  One must be reminded of it from time to time.

[UPDATE 2]  Bob Cesca has more on this.

Hey, Americans support all of this despite the erupting tragedy in the Gulf. As long as this is the case, Republicans -- 28 percent of whom want to drill because of the disaster -- will continue to attend these kinds of events. If an enormous oil spill and a global climate crisis won't change minds, I'm feeling kind of hopeless about the effort.

If anything, the enormous oil spill is making the wingnuts even more rabidly anti-environmental.  At some point soon you will see Republicans seriously begin to ask why anyone should pay for the cleanup, because God will take care of it.