Posted on 08/19/2007 8:50:09 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
What an election: The one-time mayor of Ellis Island, grandson of Italian immigrants, has to make nice with the modern-day Know Nothings if he wants a shot at his party's nomination for the presidency. Mayor Giuliani gets immigrants. He's lived their dreams. He's governed their city. He's won their hearts and their minds and their votes. But now he must walk a razor's edge between advocating sensible immigration reforms on one side and demonizing immigrants as criminals and invaders on the other.
Having transgressed from conservative orthodoxy irreparably on one issue, abortion, Mr. Giuliani has been pursuing a strategy of walking back his transgressions on other issues -- all the while being careful to avoid the whiplash effect that has hobbled Mitt "Flip" Romney. On gun control, he hasn't apologized for his actions in New York City, but he's said regulation of guns should be left to states and localities. On civil unions, he's claimed that his past support was based on imprecise language and that he really only supports domestic partnerships.
Now we come to immigration. His problem here is just how far he stuck his neck out for illegal immigrants while mayor of New York City. Take this, from a 1994 press conference: "Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens," Mr. Giuliani said. "If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you're one of the people who we want in this city."
Powerful stuff. Reminiscent of President Bush's old slogan that family values don't stop at the Rio Grande. But not a sentiment that will play well in the redder parts of the red states.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
A better opportunist there has never been.
Rudy saw the chance to fulfill that role, so he took it!
From the title I figured this was written by Fred Barnes. The elitists just don’t get it, do they? But they only reap the benefits of illegal immigration (cheap labor). They don’t deal with the downside, living in their gated communities.
The phrase is "ILLEGAL immigrants".
On gun control, this position that there should be local/state regulation is anithetical to specific language in the Bill of Rights. Sorry, Rooty, another wrong answer.
L-I-B-E-R-A-L
The difference between the Know Nothings and people who oppose ILLEGAL immigration to day are substantial.
1) The Know Nothings opposed all foreign immigration whereas most of us today are opposed to the hordes crashing our borders with out respect to our present laws.
2) The Know Nothings were avowed racists. Opponents of todays’ ILLEGAL immigrations are opposed to the breaking of our laws, not the racial make up of the interlopers. Witness the many hispanic opponents of illegal immigration.
...and I am not expressing any opinion on Rooty in this discussion
There’s a small contingent of Beltway Boys who do, I suspect. The irony is that if the conservative vote is split and Giuliani does manage to get the nomination, that he’ll be beaten worse than one of Michael Vick’s pit bulls in a general election.
Time for the tourists to go home.
correctamundo! We are not demonizing immigrants we are demonizing illegal immigrants!!!!!!!
The libreral progressives “immigrants made this country” YES LEGAL IMMIGRANTS!!! ANOTHER TWISTED PHRASE FROM YOUR FUN LOVING SOCIALISTS!
Rudy is no Rino. He’s a moderate democrat and should be seeking their nomination.
It is really something for those who want to exploit illegals in ways so similar to slavery , to accuse me of racism .
Yours is the politically correct version. But answer me this....since they were against Irish Catholic immigration, how could that be construed as "racist"? Is Catholicism genetic now? Are the Irish non-white all of a sudden?
And you do know that the Republican Party was essentially the merger of the Whigs, Free Soil and...the American Parties?
You knew that, right?
I stand by my comments.
Rooty is a NE liberal.So is romney for that matter.What kind of a true conservative can vote for these guy?
The party declined rapidly in the North in 1855–56. In the Election of 1856, it was bitterly divided over slavery. One faction supported the ticket of presidential nominee Millard Fillmore and vice-presidential nominee Andrew Jackson Donelson, who won 23% of the popular vote and Maryland's 8 electoral votes. Fillmore did not win enough votes in Pennsylvania to block Democrat James Buchanan from the White House. Most of the anti-slavery members of the American Party joined the Republican Party after the controversial Dred Scott ruling occurred. The pro-slavery wing of the American Party remained strong on the local and state levels in a few southern states, but by the Election of 1860, they were no longer a serious national political movement..Some historians argue that in the South the Know Nothings were fundamentally different from their northern counterparts, and were motivated less by nativism or anti-Catholicism than by conservative Unionism (preserving the Union of states rather than labor unions); southern Know Nothings were mostly old Whigs who were worried about both the pro-slavery extremism of the Democrats and the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican party in the North
Note also these comments:
The term "Know Nothing" is better remembered than the party itself. In the late 19th century Democrats would damn the Republicans as "Know Nothings" in order to secure the votes of Catholics. Since the early 20th century, the term has been a provocative slur, suggesting the opponent is both nativist and ignorant. In 2006, an editorial in the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard by William Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party."[4]Citizen Know Nothing, image of the Know Nothing party's nativist ideal
The lead editorial of the New York Times for Sunday, May 20, 2007, on a proposed immigration bill, referred to "this generation's Know-Nothings...."
Bolding added for emphasis. Slinging around the phrase "Know Nothing" indiscriminately is aiding and abetting the Democratic, er, Socialist-Communist, Party. And adding the accusation of racism is ludicrous: So were all the other political parties except for a small fraction of the Republicans later called the Radicals. The Know-Nothings were probably less "racist" than the Northern War Democrats.
It makes no sense to distort political history from the viewpoint of 1960's Civil Rights radicalism, and use a misunderstanding of the phrase to twist the distortion even further.
And it's funny to listen to Kristol's rap, because the GOP started out being mostly anti-immigration, as illegal immigration barely existed then, and the overwhelmingly Protestant Republicans viewed the Catholics within a broad spectrum of distrust, with the Know-Nothings being just one end of that spectrum.
ping
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