License to Lie

Ed is outraged that the president of the American Legion, a stateside based Vietnam Era vet, has been misrepresenting himself as a Vietnam War vet. Very few phone calls on this topic, not any from the disagreeable straw men residing in Ed’s festering brain that, according to Ed, say “Just leave the guy alone, let him keep his job, you’re making a big deal out of nothing”.

Floundering and out of gas, it was time to move on, yet again, to those nasty brown people:

Outgoing lame duck Massachusetts Governor and Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney tries to improve his cred with the national wingnuts by directing the creation of a special set of the Massachusetts State Police who will be trained so that they can arrest people suspected of being illegal immigrants, should they encounter them in relation to some other incident such as a traffic stop.

In the middle of his rant, Ed claims that some Massachusetts cities and towns want to give illegal immigrants the right to vote. These must be those mythical cities and towns that exist only in the dank, dark crevices of Ed's cerebrum. Ed also repeatedly insists that Governor-elect Deval Patrick wants to “give illegal aliens driver’s licenses” (presumably whether they want them or not).

One caller says “it's about time” for Romney's action because these illegal immigrants are “tearing down our American morals, our American traditions, and taking our heritage away from us” and Ed concurs “I agree with you one hundred percent”. This is so nutty on too many levels to even begin to address. What American traditions are they tearing down? Columbus Day? St. Patricks Day?

Another caller complains “you can pretty much drive down the street and see them (illegal immigrants) all doing their little thing and you can’t do anything about it”. Apparently this guy has a very special pair of glasses that he wears while driving around that enables him to discern which brown people are legal and which ones aren’t, while they're "all doing their little thing", whatever that might be...? A dance? An animal sacrifice? Who knows.

Dave calls and suggests they create an internment camp out on the local airbase for these people. Dave also claims that while on the ferry to Nantucket he saw about 44 Mexicans and “only one of them spoke any English” (just imagine, he actually queried every single one of them). Ed agrees with Dave that it’s unfortunate that someone in authority can’t be waiting on the dock to check their papers when they arrive. Yeah, that’s a genius idea; Nantucket's largest single source of revenue, the tourists, would find that very entertaining, especially the foreign ones, and the "foreign looking" ones.

Ed agrees with caller Jim that something like Romney's directive should apply to the local town police as well. Jim claims that over 3000 robberies and murders a day are committed by illegal immigrants. Ed believes it. This kind of nonsense has already been debunked, among other places, here.

Why this directive of Romney’s won't work: Granny O'Reilly, naturalized Irish American citizen, gets pulled over for "failure to yield" by a State Trooper, and, whoopsie, she also left her purse at home with her driver’s license in it. She gets two citations, one for failure to yield, one for not having a license in her possession, and she’s allowed to drive her merry way home, crying about the cost of her tickets and the jump in her insurance premiums. This happens, infrequently, but certainly not rarely. Sean, an Irish illegal immigrant (still here many years after his student or work visa expired) commits the same traffic misdemeanors, the Trooper believes Sean's story about how he must’ve left his wallet in the work pants he just changed back at home, he gets two citations as well. An hour later, Sean gets in an accident and injures another driver, the State Police investigation reveals records that he was pulled over only an hour earlier. Juan gets pulled over, he is a naturalized citizen (or on a student or work visa) and unlike Sean, he actually did leave his wallet in his other pants, but the Trooper isn’t buying Juan’s story. It’s off to jail for Juan until this is all straightened out and, with the help of a competent attorney, that traffic stop will cost the Commonwealth of Massachusetts millions of dollars in a civil rights lawsuit. At least we won't have to worry about Juan not being able to pay for his own healthcare.

The point is, if you want to avoid civil rights lawsuits, it doesn't do any good to leave it up to the discretion of the Trooper to guess whether someone is in this country legally. If you have the misfortune of not having your ID in your possession, then the Trooper ought to err on the side of caution and arrest you, even if you don't have an accent or "look like" an illegal immigrant. Romney knew that, that's why he never had the guts to impliment such a lame-brained scheme until he was on his way out the door.