Just say Nyet to Barack

Doc MacDonald has a good post today about Barack Obama and his latest pandering to the Hispanic lobby. If you haven't heard it by now, Barack has suggested that we need to be more like the Europeans in our second language capabilities. Actually, Barack wants us to learn Spanish, not French, or German, or Italian, or anything that would actually serve us well in most of Europe (guess I should add Arabic there!).

See the video of Barack's comments here, to see for yourself


Anyway, some of my thoughts are:

1. Barack fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the D primaries, so as with all the other classes of voters he dissed during the primary season (gun owners, the military, anti-terrorists, churchgoers), he must start pandering to those groups now - and this is just another example. It doesn't help him that McCain actually polls fairly well (for a nominal Republican) among Hispanics.
   
2. In his comments, he says, "When Europeans come here, they all know English." To which I say - don't we already speak English? Isn't the fact that those sophisticated Europeans are learning English evidence enough that English is the language of the free world?
3. He also makes a statement that we should not be "worried" about immigrants learning English, because "they'll learn English." To which I reply - Barack, if we make it easy for immigrants from Mexico and Central America to NOT learn English, then they will not hasten to learn English, and we will not have rapid assimilation, and we will see the balkanization of the United States, as we already are.
   
4. I don't know what Barack learned about cultural assimilation in all that fancy college education he received, but he obviously doesn't understand that a common language is vital to a culture's and a nation's survival. We can not have "E Pluribus Unum" with every ethnic group doing business in their own language. It is for this reason that we MUST make English the official language of this country for business, and the government can press that issue by requiring all government forms and business transactions to be conducted in English. No more duplicate forms in Spanish. If businesses want to appeal to Hispanics by doing it, so be it - that's a business decision, driven by the profit motive, but official, government communications should be in English only.
   
5. I have no problem if we decide as a country that we need to bring in 2M or 5M or 10M immigrants a year, the bulk of them from Mexico, if that is what we need in our labor pool. But, let's do it under some sense of order and seek rapid assimilation, and the fastest way to do that is to push hard for them to learn our language.
6. Incidentally, the Barack campaign seems proud of the fact that their videos feature Spanish captioning.
   

No more...