WaPo on debunked claim of English-only chant: “neither side quite right”

By Dan Brooks in Democratic Candidates 2 Comments
Lifelong civil rights activist and Hillary Clinton supporter Dolores Huerta

Lifelong civil rights activist and Hillary Clinton supporter Dolores Huerta

On Saturday night, after Hillary Clinton won the Nevada Democratic caucuses, civil rights activist Delores Huerta tweeted that she offered to translate during an event at Harrah’s casino but was shouted down by Sanders supporters who chanted “English only.” It was an alarming claim, repeated by actress America Ferrera and then reported by CNN and the Washington Post. Fortunately, it didn’t really happen. Actress Susan Sarandon, of all people, posted an unedited, hourlong video of the event that showed no such chant when Huerta took the stage. Several eyewitnesses disputed Huerta’s claim, and in a subsequent account she said that Sanders supporters merely booed and offered a Spanish translator of their own, at which point the moderator opted to go ahead without translation. Snopes has rated the report false. The Washington Post, on the other hand, has updated its account to say that “neither side was quite right.” The CNN story is still up, uncorrected.

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Rick Santorum and the aristocratic mode

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 1 Comment

Good morning, dicks!

Clearly god exists, because Rick Santorum is the front-runner for the Republican nomination. He’ll do really well in the general, too, except for with women, homosexuals, hispanics, people on public assistance, recipients of student loans, libertarians and atheists. But he’s got the white male Christian high school graduate vote sewed up. If you draw a Venn diagram of all the bias groups in the United States—straight, Christian, male, dumb—the region where they overlap is the Santorum constituency. It’s a group that defines itself by what it is not, and the word for what it is not is elite. Santorum gave us a usage example yesterday, when he described the Obama administration to his audience at a campaign rally:

They don’t believe that you can make these decisions. They need to make these decisions for you…Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average American. These elite snobs.

Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.

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