Finesse? Not Since Jefferson Dined Alone … : A man named Shaun Kenney was recently named Executive Director of the Virginia Republican party. Here is a post of his from the blog, Bearing Drift. In it he argues that “Conservatives have a moral duty to drive out nativism once and for all.” It becomes clear by the end of the post that when he says “nativist” he’s including more or less everyone in the party who opposes “comprehensive immigration reform.”
“There are 12 million people in the United States today who want a better lives for themselves and their families, whose only crime was that they came to America to do it.
‘”The nativists have a very simple solution: apprehend all 12 million of them, boxcar them back to their point of origin, and drive them out as so many locusts. …
‘”The American conservative movement has driven out ideologies from our camp once before. We drove out the progressives and the America First movement in the 1940s. We did it again with the John Birch Society in the 1960s. We did it once again with the anarchists in the 1980s. Every time we have purged the ranks of poison, we have emerged stronger …
“It’s time to clean house.
‘”You will hear a lot of talk in the coming months about immigration reform. In it will be included guest worker programs, documented worker status, real border enforcement that doesn’t require walls, and a sound program that takes an antiquated immigration system and brings it into the 21st century. That’s not amnesty, that’s reform.
“Conservatives embrace the idea of more Americans coming into this country to work hard and prosper.
“Nativists reject Pedro. …
“Drive em out, ladies and gentlemen. …”
I’m a Democrat, so I can’t be too offended by this, though there are plenty of Virgina Republicans who might be. If the state GOP wants to empower this sophomoric sneerer slanderer to insult their core voters with language reminiscent of Daily Kos on a bad day, that is the state GOP’s problem. But maybe the press should drop the PR that says Kenney got the job because he’s “worked well with both sides.” Or, in his own words describing his suitability for the post:
“It takes a little bit of finesse … and generally being tolerated by all side to be an effective executive director. The executive director is kind of like the first diplomat.”
If Kenney is the Virginia GOP establishment’s** idea of a diplomat, it should be an interesting few years. Or weeks. …
P.S.: Attempts to reach Kenney by phone and email were unsuccessful.
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**–Kenney seems to be an Ed Gillespie person. Gillespie is running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Democrat Mark Warner. He has long been a strategic squish on amnesty, though not necessarily amnesty that ends in citizenship. Does Gillespie share Kenney’s cheesy Manichean view of the opposition?