Rove on immigration: 'I don't want my son to have to pick tomatoes' "The Corner" at the National Review Online reports that at a Republican luncheon yesterday, White House adviser Karl Rove was overheard explaining the Bush amnesty immigration plan by saying, "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
Excepts from "The Corner" article below:
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There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
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Via: Nitpicker
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