> > Aren't there about 100 members of Congress who are to the right of Le Pen?
>
>Le Pen says that 80% of the immigrants in France are illegal where
>reputable statisticians put the number at 5-10%. He says he wants to
>round up that 80% and deport them immediately and then pass a law that any
>child born in the country to a non-French person would not get French
>citizenship. And of course he would also ban all legal immigration, which
>is currently running at a flood tide of 0.2% annually. And cease all
>naturalization.
>
>Loathesome as they may be in many ways, I think this still represents a
>view that's off the chart for right-wingers in Congress. No?
The right-wingers in Congress who are pro-immigration are so probably less out of devotion to the principled free movement of people than to the national passion for wagecutting. But immigration aside, the discourse around welfare reform, just to pick one example, was at least as racist as anything Le Pen says. (I'll never forget that cretin Bill McCollum during the House debate on the Personal Responsibility Act. He held up a sign saying "Don't feed the alligators," and explained that in Florida swamp parks, they post those warnings because if tourists fed the ravenous beasts, they'd lose the ability to fend for themselves. Just like the character-rotting AFDC.) And the sexist Christian "morality" - is that any worse than Le Pen's social philosophy? I say this not to argue that Le Pen isn't scary - he is - but because it's easy for Americans to get all excited about the Other's ravers and forget about just how loony our own are.
Doug