Quote of the day

From a recent digby article that discusses Arizona's reactionary immigration law:

The American Dream has been patented for use only by Real Americans, I'm afraid. But immigrants shouldn't feel slighted. According to the right wing anyone who doesn't vote Republican is "foreign" too.

Our reactionaries, it seems, believe that the set of all real Americans, when measured by the number of individuals it contains, is smaller than the set of all American citizens and much smaller than the set of all individuals who reside within the boundaries of the United States. Now, let us suppose that 100M of us are Real Americans. (I know I'm not a real American, not that that admission amounts to much.) And let us next consider the possibility that these real Americans might someday make a claim on the government to purify the country they love by cleansing it of every non-American living within its boundaries. If the federal government were to meet their demand, it could do so only by expelling, jailing, killing, etc. over 200M individuals (I base my crude arithmetic on the Census estimate of July 2009). An obvious question follows from these considerations. Would this purification project not be a human catastrophe so immense that would surpass the aggregate suffering generated by the Second World War?

Real Americans for genocidal cleansing….