...slurrin' them Middle Easterners is on the go. First it was President Bush, and then it was in my fantasy football league's chat room. Now it's politicians everywhere, and they ain't too shy to get in the occasional immigrant-oriented jibe, neither. From a great NYTimes article on political foot-in-mouths of recent months:
Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said Wednesday that the United States confronts a “faceless enemy” of terrorists who “drive cabs in the daytime and kill at night.” Despite a hail of criticism on Thursday, Mr. Burns has not apologized for this remark as he did after complaining in July that a group of firefighters did not do a “goddamn thing” to stop a wildfire east of Billings.
Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, has been serially apologizing across Virginia since demeaning a man of Indian descent as “Macaca, or whatever his name is” at a campaign rally last month...
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, asked forgiveness after a C-Span microphone caught him saying “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,”...
...Mr. Burns, the Montana senator, is both an accomplished apologizer and non-apologizer. He demonstrated as much in June when he joked that “the nice little Guatemalan man” working on his house might be an illegal immigrant. He has not apologized for the quip, as he once did after calling Arabs “ragheads.” “I can self-destruct in one sentence,” Mr. Burns, a former livestock auctioneer, recently told supporters. “Sometimes in one word.”
