Univision and the Seven Dwarves

10 December 2007

The Seven Old White Dwarves — Sleazy, Dopey, Preachy, Nasty, Floppy, Wacky and Clueless — tortured Univsion viewers last night for several hours.

I’m not sure why, other than to show off that none of them speak much Spanish. Clueless managed to refer to KING Juan-Carlos of Spain as “Prince” Juan-Carlos. Um… Juan-Carlos has been the King for the last thirty plus years. OK, so Clueless is a bit long in the tooth, and was out of circulation for a few years back then. Geeze, you’d think he’d catch up by now. Clueless was speaking in reference to the King’s rejoinder to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The King told the President to “shut up” recently — which Kings aren’t supposed to do, never mind that the Venezuelans really don’t appreciate their former colonial “master” telling them anything. And, seeing the audience were American citizens, I’m not sure what it has to do with anything, other than raising some bribes (oops… “campaign contributions”) from Venezuelans who can’t steal their own country’s wealth any more and took off for the riper pickings of Miami.

Wacky — to his credit — said that we’d have to at least talk to Hugo Chavez. You know, like Presidents are supposed to do. Alas, Wacky is running for the Presidency of the wrong country. About the only politician he seems to resemble is Juan Domingo Peron — and Argentina just picked a fine new president and isn’t in the market for another.

Think about it… Wacky is a right-wing anarchist (what we call “libertarian” in the U.S.), trying to simultaneously appeal to the far right and the left. Sure, I might approve of his anti-corporatist, non-interventionist stance… but his fascist supporters (and his own reflexive racism) are pretty scary. Not to mention his immigration policy, support of the “Minutemen”. One difference is that Peron was very much a 20th century man. Wacky would drag us back to the 18th: I’ve never heard anyone after 1830 or so speaking in favor of “Letters of Marque” — piracy as state policy. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a job for Blackwater?

Floppy, one of Blackwater’s biggest boosters (or rather bribees), like Sleazy and Preachy, tried to win over their audience of aging, right-wing Cubans by speaking out of both sides of their mouths: all three of them tried to somehow blame “illegal immigrants” for anti-immigrant know-nothingism. In other words — if THOSE brown folks hadn’t crossed the border, we’d be more open to YOU brown folks.

Sleazy and Nasty should have done better. Sleazy fits the image of an old Latin American pol…Carlos Menim of Argentina, who threw his wife out of the Presidential Palace, or Jose Lopez-Portillo of Mexico who tried to make his mistress Minister of Tourism, say.

Nasty at least has some cognizance of his audience. They’re Cubans, and he has managed to praise Cuba — or rather OUR corner of it, Guantanamo, where “They’ve got health care that’s better than most HMOs. And they got something else that no Democrat politician in America has: They live in a place called Guantanamo, where not one person has ever been murdered”. Admittedly he said this a couple of months ago, but then Nasty doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Miami of going anywhere. Too bad: I was hoping Nasty and Dopey would be the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates. I looked forward to “Hunter-Thompson: Fear and Loathing for America” bumper stickers.

I’m still not sure why these guys even bothered.

A study released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center showed that inroads the party made with Hispanics during the Bush years have been more than wiped out. Hispanic voters are now overwhelmingly Democrats – 57 percent, compared to 23 percent Republicans, a bigger gap than in 1999.

Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority group, with 46 million people and about 15 percent of the U.S. population, and they are expected to hold outsize clout in key battlegrounds next year, including four states President Bush carried by less than 5 percentage points in 2004: New Mexico, where they are 37 percent of voters; Florida (14 percent); Nevada (12 percent); and Colorado (12 percent).

In Arizona and Iowa, the Hispanic vote is bigger than Mr. Bush’s last margin of victory.

And, when you come down to it, the “Hispanics” who are likely to vote for one of the seven dwarves are usually second or third — or tenth or twelvth generation immigrants who don’t use Spanish as their first language anyway.