Wednesday, March 21, 2007

More charming behavior from College Republicans:

A Boise State University group has angered Latino leaders and other organizations by promoting a speech with a "food stamp drawing" that requires climbing through a hole in a fence and offering fake identification for a chance to win a dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

The school's College Republicans organization is offering the dinner for two to promote a speech it is sponsoring by Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez, a vocal critic of U.S. immigration policy who is planning to run for the U.S. Senate in 2008.

The speech scheduled for Thursday by the College Republicans is in the midst of the university's Cesar Chavez Week, sponsored by the Boise State Cultural Center....

The flyer ... contains the dinner drawing information: "Win dinner for two at a local Mexican Restaurant! Climb through the hole in the fence and enter your false ID documents into the food stamp drawing!"

Jonathan Sawmiller, president of the College Republicans, defended the flyer as "It's more of an attention-getting device," Sawmiller said. The group's Web site calls the dinner drawing "humorous." ...

Vasquez said the promotional flyer was not racist and that those who thought otherwise "find racism in everything that they disagree with."


Silly liberals -- they think "faggot" is anti-gay and they think illegal alien jokes are anti-Hispanic. Where the heck do they get these cockamamie ideas?

Here's the BSU College Republicans' Web site; the flyer is here (PDF).

(By the way, that's not the original version of the flyer. The original version gave the name of a specific restaurant, but the name was removed because it was used without the restaurant's permission, and the owners of the restaurant complained about getting angry phone calls from people who thought they supported this stunt.)

Vasquez, by the way, is a classic play-to-the-cheap-seats far-right showboater: He was the author of a resolution (which passed) that declared his county a disaster area as a result of illegal immigration, and he once sent a bill for $2 million to the Mexican consulate in Salt Lake City because he wanted the government of Mexico to pay for services to illegal immigrants. Oh, and he's mastered the art of constructing sentences out of ready-made right-wing catchphrases:

"As you sit in your Subaru Outback with the 'Save Tibet' bumper sticker," he wrote in one sneering column directed at liberals, "sipping your decaf-soy milk-latte, dining on your veggie burger, and whining about the poor al-Qaida being bombed, think about this: Freedom is not free. But don't worry. Your friends and neighbors are paying the price."

Wow, Robert, that's devastating -- I haven't heard those insults before. At least not this morning until now.

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