Southern Poverty Law Center takes note of Dobbs' Anti-Immigration Stance

[ck4829]

I know that there are many DU'ers who say that they like Lou Dobbs, but I trust the Southern Poverty Law Center. So, when I see that they wrote an article about him, I think that it has become apparent that all DU'ers see him for the Nativist (and it is even safe to say Racist) enabler that he is.

"Lou Dobbs is a genial sort, a pleasant-faced CNN anchorman who regularly presents himself as standing up for American working men and women against those who would injure them. Hosting "Lou Dobbs Tonight" for a prime-time hour every weekday, he is also well known and powerful. So when Dobbs focuses on an issue, millions of Americans learn just what it is that Dobbs thinks they should know.

For more than two years now, Dobbs has served up a populist approach to immigration on nightly segments of his newscast entitled "Broken Borders." He has relentlessly covered the issue, although hardly from a traditional news perspective -- Dobbs favors clamping down on illegal immigration, and his "reporting" never fails to make that clear. He has covered the same issues, and the same anti-immigration leaders, time after time after time. In recent months, Dobbs has run countless upbeat reports on the "citizen border patrols" that have sprung up around the country since last April's Minuteman Project, a paramilitary effort to seal the Arizona border.

But there's one thing Lou Dobbs won't do. No matter what others report about the movement, Dobbs has failed to present mounting and persistent evidence of anti-Hispanic racism in anti-immigration groups and citizen border patrols.

It's not that Dobbs hasn't allowed a pro-immigration activist or two to complain about efforts like the Minuteman Project ("vigilantes," according to President Bush), or even that he has made racist statements on his show. What the anchorman has done is repeatedly decline to present the evidence that links these groups to racism, calling the very idea "mind-boggling." On his July 29 show, he called the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he said he liked in other ways, "despicable" and "reprehensible" for saying otherwise."

http://splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589

[ingac70]

1. So what?

They are illegal for chrissakes!
And shooting at border guards.

If a bunch of neo-nazis don't mind preforming a service that we pay taxes for, yet doesn't get done by the government, so what? About time folks like that do something of value.

My husband is a LEGAL immigrant, and for the money and BS we had to put up with dealing with immigration, giving two shits about lawbreakers pisses me off. :nuke:

[Solo_in_MD]

5. The Mexican Military Supporting Drug Runners Flap

(which is currently unproven) is starting to scare me. Someone on the US side will figure out that the only way to prove it is a body in uniform, and when the shooting starts, it won't stop for some time. The solution will mean fences and patrols ala East Berlin. Which is the part that really scares me.

[Shyriath]

2. I was wondering when they'd mention it.

Lou Dobbs does have a certain no-nonsense approach that I find appealing at times... and he isn't wrong to go into threats to working Americans. But I always did think that he obsessed too much over the whole illegal immigration issue. And when I first heard him dismiss the SPLC's investigations without so much as a bit of justification, I have to say I was disappointed in him (to say the least!).

It makes you wonder... was he racist from the beginning? Or did he get so caught up in one side of the immigration issue that it blinded him to the possibility of anything he defends being wrong?

[radio4progressives]

4. Dobbs is a racist white supremacist through and through

he's also tries to be an advocate the working class, so it appears. but when has he ever advanced stories concerning Union issues?

Yes, to be fair he does cover bad labor practices, but it is very narrow in scope, with a few exceptions now and then, generally stops short of labor abuses here in this country.

I'm sorry to say, but that's where he's at. and people need to understand what is being advanced is the most racist xenophobic point of view.

that doesn't mean there are not issues that really need to be intelligently resolved - but they have to be resolved with a socio-economic justice goal for all concerned, not a nationalistic xenophobic pov.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

3. I don't always agree with who Lou allies himself with.....

....on this fight, but I know that for damn sure it's not the Bushies.