It's all the abortions.. That's what's causing the immigration mess!

[stuntcat]

>From the Huffington Post:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: John Seery: Huckabee: Immigrants are Taking Jobs Away from
Aborted Fetuses
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:25:07 GMT
From: <John Seery>

Last week David Brooks called
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>
Mike Huckabee "the most normal person running for president."

Just two days later, Brooks' go-to guy, speaking before a Christian
conservative group, espoused
<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/10/21/huckabee-likens-abortion-to-holocaust/>
his pet view that the immigration issue should be linked directly to the
abortion issue:

Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our
workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more
than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we
not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme
Court ruling in 1973.

That's right: Huckabee's twisted logic says that immigrant workers are
filling a labor shortage caused, in large measure, by abortion. Huckabee
didn't fill in all of the details at this recent conference, but others
on the lunatic right-wing fringe--Tom Delay
<http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/DeLay-College-Republicans18jul07.htm>
and Charles Colson <http://mediamatters.org/items/200604120014> among
them--have elaborated this crackpot economic theory at greater length.

These GOP loons contend quite explicitly
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/13/AR2006111301129.html>
that the post-1973 generation of aborted fetuses--had their mothers been
forced to carry them to term--would now be filling the low-end service
jobs that most citizens refuse to take. The argument turns on the
insidious assumption that abortions hail mainly from low-income sectors
<http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/tabor/050824>. And hence Huckabee
and his ilk are insinuating that a life of economic hardship is better
than no life at all. Further, lives of lawful destitution are better
than lives of illegal destitution. Such "workforce" lives are morally
fungible, thus permitting a direct trade-off calculation between actual
versus aborted workers (even though the estimates of U.S. abortions
since 1973 range wildly in these right-wing circles from one million to
47 million).

Now Huckabee is going public with this whispered immigrant-fetus linkage
because he clearly thinks it makes for good right-wing politics: Killing
two scapegoats with one stone.

Where to start to parse out the idiocy?

We have all sorts of labor shortages, depending on the wage proposed.
Many immigrants fill highly skilled positions. Does Huckabee think that
/Roe v. Wade/ is responsible for our relative shortage of technically
trained computer programmers? Does he really think that many of these
jobs are being outsourced to India and China because those countries
have had /fewer/ abortions?

CEOs are making obscenely high salaries, supposedly because the demand
for qualified people far outstrips the supply. Does Economics 101
Huckabee-style say that a reduction in abortions will eventually bring
down CEO pay scales? Or does the crackpot theory operate only on the
low-end of the wage scale?

Immigrants have been filling shortfalls in U.S. military recruitment.
Isn't Huckabee diminishing their patriotism and national service by
suggesting that those positions would have been better filled by
native-born yet never-borne Americans? (As Rumsfeld said, you go to war
with the army you have, not with the army you wish we had, had we not
aborted them, as unknown unknowns--or something like that.)

For that matter, U.S. deaths in Iraq deplete the numbers in our domestic
workforce. So do HIV deaths. So do deaths caused by killer bees. Why
stop at abortions when you're tallying the imaginary numbers of
displaced workers owing to potentially preventable deaths?

For that matter, how can Huckabee be so sure that a good number of
immigrant workers aren't here precisely because of abortion forbearance
in their home countries? Would he require that favored immigrants
document their status as abortion-averted persons?

For that matter, his utilitarian argument against abortion is a
double-edged sword: By parity of reason, in times of foreseeable labor
surpluses in certain sectors, selectively /advocating/ abortion would
make for strategic national economic policy. Just as the Federal Reserve
monitors monetary supply, shouldn't Ben Bernanke also be forecasting the
optimal number of abortions given future workforce needs?

Then again, maybe Huckabee is merely being self-deprecating: He's trying
to give us an explanation for why there's such a dearth of respectable
candidates for the presidency.

Anyway, you get my point: We have another mainstream GOP candidate
spewing utterly whacked-out nonsense. And mainstream media pundits such
as David Brooks are trying to normalize such fatuity.




(I always knew David Brooks must be a dope but this is too much x( Stuntcat)