President Biden's re-election campaign broke a fundraising record for one-hour periods during the first hour of his State of the Union address - and broke that record in the second hour with Katie Ledecky-style speed. The campaign then set a record for a one-day fundraising period - $10 million. He then began a campaign tour of swing states, hitting the ground running.
Then he did something that may one day cause his campaign to hit the ground.
During his speech, President Biden referred to the migrant who killed Georgia nursing student Laken Riley as an "illegal" immigrant but a couple of days later apologized for calling the killer "illegal," saying he should have called him "undocumented" and that migrants deserve to be treated with dignity.
Excuse me?
This migrant who committed murder doesn't deserve dignity. He deserves punishment. I don't believe in capital punishment, but I hope this migrant gets thrown into jail for life and the key gets thrown away. And yes, he should be called "illegal," because he entered the country illegally. And the last time I checked, homicide is also illegal.
The President apologized - in an interview with MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart, who brought up the moment in his speech with a tone of disappointment and disapproval - for his choice of words primarily to mend fences with the progressive base of the Democratic Party that disapproves of the use of the word "illegal" to describe a foreigner who enters this country without permission from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, an office that progressives want to shut down. But he also needs swing voters who don't identify with either base of the two major parties and who take a pretty dim view of anyone who dictates to them how to talk. And these swing voters see immigrants coming into the country without permission or without papers as illegal because they entered . . . illegally! And I speak as the grandson of an Italian immigrant who came to this country illegally a hundred years ago. He worked on an Italian ship that docked in Texas and jumped ship at about the same time Congress passed a law restricting immigration to the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries. My maternal grandfather was a decent and law-abiding man, and he did become a citizen eventually, but he was still an illegal immigrant.
I may be liberal on a lot of issues, but I happen to be pretty conservative when it comes to other things. I am musically conservative, obviously, as my idea of music doesn't include hip-hop or electronica. But I am also linguistically conservative, as I have became hostile to efforts to make the American English lexicon more sensitive and less offensive, as if words hurt even worse than sticks and stones. And so Hispanics become Latinos and Latinos became Latinx (pronounced "Lat-tin-ex") in the interest of gender neutrality (except that the Spanish language is highly gender-sensitive, applying gender to inanimate objects), the poor become economically disadvantaged, the handicapped become physically challenged, the ghetto becomes the inner city (which doesn't make sense when you consider that some of the worst ghettoes in America are on the edges of city limits, like the Austin section of Chicago or the Vailsburg section of Newark, both bordering upper-middle-income suburbs), and blacks become African-Americans (or "black" must be capitalized, as in "Black," suggesting, as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote, that "blacks were a national group similar to the 'French' and the 'Chinese'"). And, of course, "urban" is a synonym for "black" because it's accepted that white people don't live in cities anymore (not true, of course; majority-black Detroit even has a white mayor).
Look, I understand that non-heteosexuals need an all-encompassing term to define what they are, as opposed to a term like "non-heterosexuals," which defines what they're not. But until the PC Language Police comes up with an acronym I can actually pronounce, I am going to keep referring to "non-heterosexuals."
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