Monday, October 18, 2010

Playing The Paranoia Angle, Part 12

I'd say Sharron Angle strayed perilously close to EPIC FAIL territory, but she crossed that border with this rant on...crossing borders.  Angle has taken a lot of grief for her anti-Latino ads in Nevada, but she refuses to even own up to her own campaign spots when trying to convince Latinos to vote for her.

But during an appearance before a group of Hispanic children at Rancho High School in Nevada, Angle implausibly claimed she had no idea that the people in the ad were meant to be Hispanic, and claimed the ad was about the "northern border." From Las Vegas Sun reporter Jon Ralston:
Question: Why is it that in all of your commercials you have the image of Latinos? What do you see when you hear, and I quote, "illegal aliens?"
Angle: I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials. I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence. What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That's the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists; we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don't know why they're coming. So we have to secure all of our borders and that's what that was about, is border security. Not just our southern border, but our coastal border and our northern border.
This is an example of how racism in politics works these days -- when a political candidate wants to exploit racial animus, all he or she has to do is leave themselves some semblance of plausible deniability. The problem is, Angle didn't leave herself any. When confronted by a high school student about her inaccurate, race-baiting ads demonizing Latinos, Angle dissembled and suggested she's actually concerned about a massive influx of Canadians. Then after demonizing Latinos, she has the chutzpah to ask for their votes.


Yeah.  She's worried about Canadians.  It's bad enough if you're going to demonize Latinos, but to then try to win the Latino vote by saying all those "scary immigrant ads" are really about Canada is just horrendous buckets of EPIC FAIL.

How stupid does Sharron Angle believe Nevada's Latino community -- or for that matter, all of America -- is, anyway?  Vote for Republicans.  They think you're morons.

[UPDATEGreg Sargent puts an end to all this "I was referring to our northern border" crap.

But here's what's funny about this: Angle's campaign makes direct references to Mexico in a previous ad and in a previous campaign mailer which both blast Reid on immigration in precisely the same terms the new ad does.

Game, set, match.
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