If You Think This is Funny YOU Are the Problem

I received this in my private email earlier today.  I'm offended, not the least because of the factual errors in the content, and the stupidity of the ideas it contains.  Many of those ideas are promoted by self-identified conservatives.

Let me 'fisk' this for readers - for those unfamiliar with the verb: fisk (fɪsk) - vb
slang to refute or criticize (a journalistic article or blog) point by point, after the use of this technique by Robert Fisk (born 1946), British journalist, to criticize articles]

From Larry, the farmer next door.

"Larry" looks a lot like Larry the Cable Guy from the blue collar comedy programming; aka Daniel Lawrence Whitney.
A lot of what Larry promotes as humor is crude, not funny; he regularly appeals to what can fairly be described as the lowest, least informed, least thoughtful demographic.

And the truth be told!

Sadly, 'Larry' wouldn't know the truth if it bit him on his capacious backside.

Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in Our Country lately:
Illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida .....
Not me -- I concentrate on solutions for the problems -- it's a win-win situation.

Defining the problem accurately and correctly IS the only means of identifying and solving our nation's problems.  Larry does neither, and only in his deluded imagination is this a win for anyone.

* Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border.
* Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levees.
* Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border.
Any other problems you would like for me to solve today?

            Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border :

Digging a moat, or building walls, or any of the other many proposals to recreate the great wall of China on our southern border have been flawed by failing to actually stop illegal entry into the country, while maximizing very real problems economically and environmentally.  It has resulted in the process of eminent domain destroying the property rights of a large number of American citizens who live along the border.  It doesn't work, it costs a lot of money that we cannot afford that would be better spent on more effective border security measures, it causes flooding problems and is badly engineered.  In short, it is an unmitigated disaster; but conservatives LOVE it.  It gives them a false sense of security while pandering to their bigotry.
From the Wall Street Journal back in 2009:

Opponents of the fence have petitioned the Obama administration to halt construction. Environmentalists are demanding a top-level review of the route, which they say would block such rare species as the ocelot from critical habitat. Property owners are contesting federal seizure of their land. Engineers are struggling to address flooding concerns.

And all the while, drug smugglers and illegal immigrants continue to breach the fencing that is up, forcing Border Patrol agents and contractors to return again and again for repairs. The smugglers build ramps to drive over fencing, dig tunnels under it, or use blow torches to slice through. They cut down metal posts used as vehicle barriers and replace them with dummy posts, made from cardboard.

The problems of the levees in New Orleans is not an absence of dirt; rather it is about problems with the concept of the design of the changes made to New Orleans by the Army Corps of Engineers, an absence of understanding the ecology of the wet lands that had been buffers, and most of all, the problems of corruption.
Apparently tragedies like Hurricane Katrina seem a legitimate topic for humor to Larry and those who find him funny.  It doesn't amuse me; promoting this as humor simply continues the ignorance that contributed to this being a problem in the first place.

Don't even get me started about the alligators or other wildlife issues.  Suffice it that the suggestion is every bit as ignorant and ill-conceived as the rest of Larry's crap.  Stupid isn't funny, it isn't clever, it isn't witty. 

It's just stupid.

Further, the number of illegal immigrants has been steadily declining for years; current estimates are not at 11 million, but closer to 7 to 9 million.  Of those, an estimated 40 to 50% are not people who entered this  country illegally at all, but rather people who overstay legal entry paperwork.  Those who promote bigotry, racism, and ignorance would like people to believe that the issue is entirely or nearly exclusively, a crisis of Hispanic people sneaking over our southern border.  It is not, but this treatment of immigration issues allows conservatives to define the problem as an us versus them dichotomy.  Disguising this 'they're not like us' paranoia as humor is an attempt to camouflage the ugliness as something more acceptable.

The United States has a major problem with visitors overstaying their visas, taking jobs and staying illegally as if they were immigrants. A chief reason for the problem is that we have no effective tracking system for visitors to our country. The most recent estimate of the INS is that about 40 percent of the nine to eleven million illegal alien residents in the United States originally entered the country with nonimmigrant visas.

There are a tremendous number of legal entries every year of nonimmigrants — in fiscal year 1996 the number of nonimmigrant entries was 24.8 million — and our business and tourist visitors are an important part of our economy. Nevertheless, the large number is not sufficient reason for having no effective systematic tracking system. The number of credit card transactions in the United States each year dwarfs the number of visitors, yet no one would suggest that the number of credit charges was too large to keep track of.

At present there is only a partial record of nonimmigrant entries. Foreign visitors who arrive at airports and ports of entry are required to complete an entry record (form I-94) to present with their passport and visa. Although the visa requirement is waived for several countries that have been determined to have little or minor abuse, they still fill our the I-94 form on their arrival. In 1996, nearly half (45%) of all of the nonimmigrant entries were by persons admitted under the visa waiver program.

Think about these:
1. Cows
2. The Constitution
3. The Ten Commandments

Apparently 'Larry' has trouble working past the first three letters of the alphabet.

COWS:
Is it just I, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.

Let's begin with your awkward grammar problems Larry.  Correct grammar would read "Is it just me", the correct first person singular pronoun.  Mad Cow Disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in humans it is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.  It is zoonotic illness, a disease which can be transmitted between multiple species, including humans.  It is a tragic neurodegernative disease; it has resulted in millions of animals having to be destroyed, and hundreds of people have been affected.  The disease has no known cure and is always fatal.  Yup, funny stuff, that mad cow disease.

The mad cow scare in the United States was NOT three years ago; it was in 2003, some 8 years ago.  Occurrences in humans are monitored by the Center for Disease Control, even more effectively than the USDA monitors the occurrence in animals.

Comparing immigrants, legal or illegal, to cows and disease epidemics  is racist, it is bigoted, it is hugely insulting, degrading and demeaning to human beings.  It is NOT funny, it is not witty; it is not humor.  It is an ugly way of thinking masquerading as humor.        I find it amusing that it is the conservatives who least seem to know or wish to maintain our United States Constitution that most want to gut it, to drastically change it to something that would be unrecognizable to our founders of this country.  As noted by Bob Evans, in his August 2010 article, Spin Meter: Republicans Hot, Cold on Constitution: .

THE CONSTITUTION: They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq ...why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.

Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn't care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.

This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among those like Broun who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.

Republicans have proposed at least 42 Constitutional amendments in the current Congress, including one that has gained favor recently to eliminate the automatic grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

Democrats — who typically take a more liberal view of the Constitution as an evolving document — have proposed 27 amendments, and fully one-third of those are part of a package from a single member, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. Jackson's package encapsulates a liberal agenda in which everyone has new rights to quality housing and education, but most of the Democratic proposals deal with less ideological issues such as congressional succession in a national disaster or voting rights in U.S. territories.

The Republican proposals, by contrast, tend to be social and political statements, such as the growing movement to repeal the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship. The problem with such a view, says constitutional law scholar Mark Kende, is that divining what the framers intended involves subjective judgments shaded with politics. Holding up the 2nd Amendment as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is "cherry picking," said Kende, director of Drake University's Constitutional Law Center.

Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed.

Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters.

"People are responding to the politics of the day, and that's not what the framers intended," she said. "They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool."

Nothing says devotion to the Constitution like wholesale draconian changes to it!  But that's not funny; that's just cheap, sleazy hypocrisy.

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS: The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this -- you cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' , 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery' and 'Thou Shall Not Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians; it creates a hostile work environment.

No, Larry; the reason we can't have the ten commandments posted in a courthouse is that we are a secular government with a respect for the separation of church and state, not a theocracy.  We are forbidden under the establishment clause from giving preference to any religion or religions over other religions, or over agnosticism or atheism.  We respect the individual's right to belief.  Displaying the 10 Commandments is promoting the beliefs of the Abramic religions over other faiths.  Don't let respect for that U.S. Constitution of ours get in the way of a cheap shot Larry; again, not witty, not clever, not funny.  Just one more instance of the promotion of stupidity in the guise of appealing to ignorance and conservatism.

Also, think about this ....
If you don't want to forward this for fear of offending someone --
YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM!

While I agree that being politically correct can be carried too far.......this is simply an attempt to rationalize the very real pricking of one's conscience for promoting stupidity, bigotry, and ignorance.  YOU, Larry, or whoever wrote this in your name, are the problem, as are those who found anything in this email purporting to come from you even remotely amusing.  Nor is the attempt to present this as good natured, simple-minded humor and 'common sensical thinking' much of a disguise for the calculated manipulation that this presentation really is.  This is ignorance, hatred, paranoia and racist bigotry masquerading as wholesome patriotism.  It is anything but that; what it more resembles is the attempt through association to do what Jonathon Swift did in his "A Modest Proposal", but for far less benevolent purposes.