Also, Don’t Pee On Our Rug

It’s actually legal starting today, as Sully (who knows a thing or two about sparking up in public) made sure to point out.

Apropos of nothing, have y’all noticed that the Republicans seem to be grooming Kelly Ayotte for a national run? She’s a newly minted Senator with no foreign policy experience to speak of, and yet every time there’s a press conference about Benghazi or what have you she’s front and center with the elder statesmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

@mellbell: December 6 already? How time flies…

@mellbell: Rubio/Ayotte 2016!

There you go. The women and Hispanics are on board. What could go wrong?

We love the new SPD blogger. He’s putting out good stuff, which is a good thing, because the SPD needs all the public relations work it can get. After flunking a federal review and making basically no progress on the highlighted issue, there are lots of people interested in rolling a few heads over at the Seattle “Overuse of Force” Police Department.

If only NYC went there … I know exactly the man to write me the Rx.

@IanJ: The Blotter Blogger is great. The captain of the Park Station sent out a weekly blotter that detailed the weekly series of drug and loitering busts in the Castro, the Haight, and Golden Gate Park, but he always referred to marijuana as The Weed With Roots in Hell (italics in original) and prided himself on using an absurd amount of alliteration. He also referred to any male arrested for domestic violence as “an alleged man” in the summaries. He stopped writing the blotter a month ago, the new one is all business and very dry.

If you’re worried about Marco Rubio, forget him. He’s currently in an all-out war with the Spanish language media. They hate his fucking guts and it’s mutual. They’ll make sure their viewers know who really pulls his strings. Also, the RepubliKKKans are generally too tone-deaf and aggressively ignorant to realize that a right-wing, tea-bagger Cuban has basically zero in common with Hispanics from Mexico or any other Latin American country.

@¡Andrew!: That’s something I’ve never been clear about: What are the general political differences between Latinos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans? When we Haoles lump them all together as “Hispanics”, what are we missing? (And what about Spaniards?)

For example: I’ve always thought of Cuban-Americans as descendents of wealthy Batista exiles. Aside from the occasional Boatlift, does that apply?

Also: Perez Hilton.

@¡Andrew!: For example…

Because Rubio comes from the small Cuban community, whose members have long been granted automatic citizenship — as political exiles, not as immigrants — he risks being perceived by Hispanics as an out-of-touch élitist.

Maybe I knew about automatic citizenship a long time ago, but if so, I’ve long forgotten it. And given the very different citizenship status of Latinos and Puerto Ricans, that’s a big difference.

@¡Andrew!: Also recall the initial distrust of Hawaiian-born, Kenyan-sired Barack Obama among slave-descended Black folk. His history wasn’t theirs.

Hey, remember when everybody hated the Irish? Good times!

@nojo: The Miami Cuban community were teabaggers avant la lettre. They are the reason we don’t have political relations with Havana. I can’t think our Central American compadres (Yes I can be more cluelessly condescending, thank you for asking) have anything in common with them. Plus many of them present as aristos whose ancestral homes were stolen by you-know-who.

@nojo: I don’t hate the Irish. I fear their literature.

@Benedick: As Cristina García (author of the lovely little book “Dreaming in Cuban”) says, “If every exile who claimed to have a deed to his ranch on the island actually produced it, the joke goes, Cuba would be the size of Brazil.”

@nojo: I hesitate to make too many sweeping statements, but the Cubans who’ve settled in Florida are the wealthy right-wingers and their descendants driven out by Cuba’s Communist revolution. We got their plutocratic sloppy seconds. This is what produces head-scratchers like them block-voting for the overtly racist RepubliKKKan party.

As such, they are not sympathetic to immigrants from other Latin American countries, who were motivated by the desperate poverty, lack of opportunities, and corruption of their own countries. Some of this immigration is caused by US intervention in those countries, both directly (ex. US-funded Central American right-wing death squads, CIA involvement in the overthrow of democratically-elected leftist governments) and indirectly (US agricultural subsidies that have destroyed the Mexican farming industry and, of course, the War on Drugs). Right-wing Cubans approve of these hardline policies and actions, not that it matters that much since no one can understand their accents.

They are in direct political and cultural conflict with other Hispanics, who know or are related to people who’ve arrived in the country legally and illegally for the reasons above. Other Latinos tend to hold more liberal views and communal attitudes, thus are much more likely to vote for the Democrats.

@¡Andrew!: And I already forget the statistic from the New Yorker article, but Latinos comprise — the Recovering Copy Editor in me just looked that word up to confirm — some enormous amount of Hispanics, 70 or 80 percent.

The Cubans affect Florida, not much else. And the Puerto Ricans, while citizens (actually dual citizens — it’s complicated), have a greater presence in West Side Story than American politics.

Even the whole Hispanic designation is messy — a Census decision on how to slice the demographic pie. Matthew Yglesias (three-quarters European, one-quarter Cool Grandfather) had a good discussion about that awhile back.

All of which leads back to your original point: Republicans who don’t recognize the differences are doomed to Failure by Condescension. They’re doomed to failure anyway, but they’re not making their best case.