Sunday, February 13, 2005
Scratch A Republican, Find A Racist, Part 4: The "Southern Strategy" Works In The Suburbs, Too
My hometown paper, the StarTribune, has been doing some interesting articles over the past few months on how the suburban voters -- many of whom are white-flight newcomers from out of state -- have made Minnesota more conservative over the years. Today's Strib has another series of articles (here, here, and here) along these lines; they concern immigrants and the growing resistance of many Minnesotans, particularly those in the suburbs, to the influx of Southeast Asian, Hispanic and Somali immigrants. (This resistance echoes the findings of the researchers cited by Edward Glaeser last year in the Los Angeles Times.) And of course, since the Strib is fair-minded, sometimes to the point of being a patsy for certain especially unscrupulous wingnuts, they allowed longtime Republican operative Sarah Janacek a few column inches as well, so she could try to deny that the Republicans were playing to the fears of white suburbanites. Can Sarah Janacek be trusted to tell the truth about political things? Let's put it this way: Remember the 2002 Williams Arena memorial event for Paul Wellstone? I was there. So was Al Franken. So was Sarah Janacek. She was one of the Republicans who ran screaming to her buddies in the press, eager to slime the event and the people who held it. On page 187 of the hardcover version of Franken's book Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, he quotes from a StarTribune story (which is now behind a pay wall in the Strib's archives) which reported Janacek's comments:
Republican political analyst and lobbyist Sarah Janacek said that what she found most outrageous were the screens inside Williams Arena prompting audience reaction -- when to laugh and how loudly to clap.As Franken notes, Janacek was referring to the captioning that memorial's organizers had thoughtfully provided on the Jumbotrons for the hearing impaired. You all know what captioning is. It's what every TV in every sports bar and many restaurants features. Unless she's a total airhead, Sarah Janacek knows this, too. Janacek is either very stupid or deliberately lying out her ass -- and longtime GOP lobbyists like her don't earn their fat fees by being stupid. You can tell the Strib what you think of Janacek and her lying ways at opinion@startribune.com.
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