The Pink Flamingo :: There Goes the Neighborhood

Dobbs is now confirming John Fund’s piece (below) that he is considering an egotistical run for the White House. There is a piece about him in Crosscut. Sounds like we are dealing with an ego out of control. (as usual with these people) A Lou Dobbs candidacy is one of those ego driven miasmas that nightmares are made of. I have no earthly idea what he believes, only that he is one of those individuals who is blatantly promoting anti-immigration hate and sentiment. Naturally Group Think Conservatives will feel otherwise. Presented for your approval is a litany of why Lou Dobbs is an recipe for disaster.

MY RUN IN WITH DOBBS
Several months ago I wrote an article for Blog Critics about John Tanton. My editor at Blog Critics wrote an "UPDATE" from Dobbs, who claimed he had never met John Tanton, nor associated with him.

"...An email from Lou Dobbs calls the assertion that he is "closely associated" with Tanton "utterly absurd."

"I've never met the man, nor talked with him," writes Dobbs.

SJ Reidhead Replies:

I think Dobbs is misrepresenting his position. He may have never met Tanton but he utilizes Tanton's many organizations as his anti-immigration sources.

The Southern Poverty Law Center writes,

The soundbites and long-format interviews on Dobbs' program were skewed in favor of the most passionate immigration critics. Viewers were less likely to see analysts who would either defend immigrants or emphasize the relative benefits of immigration.

On the October 31 broadcast, for example, one report featured comments from only two sources, both representatives of anti-immigration groups: Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies and Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. (Interestingly, both groups were founded with the help of John Tanton, an anti-immigrant funder with ties to the white supremacist movement.

I am not interested in getting into a game of semantics with Dobbs. He associates with these people. They are on his show. Many of them are deeply involved with Tanton. Dobbs would not be able to utilize the facts and figures on anti-immigration and his anti-illegal immigration stance if it were not for John Tanton."

NOTE: You may find the comments, spammed by the St. Louis CofCC to be very interesting.

Nightly Nativism: by Daphne Evitar

“…But on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, it was a different story. "Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters today failed in their attempt to shut down most of our cities to support amnesty for all illegal aliens," the network's 6 pm news anchor reported that evening. Dobbs elaborated in his online column: "It is no accident that they chose May 1 as their day of demonstration and boycott. It is the worldwide day of commemorative demonstrations by various socialist, communist and even anarchic organizations.... No matter which flag demonstrators and protesters carry today, their leadership is showing its true colors to all who will see."

You might expect that sort of McCarthyesque description from Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh or some other famously right-wing provocateur on Fox or talk-radio. But Lou Dobbs, on CNN? These days, the network once pilloried by conservatives as a leading voice of the "liberal media" is offering an expansive platform to the nation's leading spokesman for anti-immigration hardliners. Night after night, under the rousing headline "Broken Borders," the distinguished-looking 61-year-old instructs his growing audience that illegal immigrants import deadly diseases, rampant crime and international terrorism; they live off welfare, destroy public schools and burden hospitals; what's more, most haven't even learned to speak English. Add that they're foot soldiers sent by the Mexican government to "reconquer" the Southwest, and by the end of the hour, we have seen the enemy--and he's a Spanish-speaking immigrant. Despite the grave threat, Dobbs declares, our lawmakers are doing nothing about it. Thus Dobbs branded the recent bipartisan Senate reform bill, designed to allow more immigrants to work here legally while also securing the borders, "The Amnesty Agenda"--a "pathetic sham" that would make a "mockery" of the American people….By vilifying immigrants, Dobbs is following in a long line of illustrious, and notorious, Americans who have played pivotal roles in the nation's periodic outbreaks of nativism [see Daniel Tichenor, page 25]. "Whenever we've had a great wave of immigration, there's been a backlash," says Wayne Cornelius. But there's a difference this time. "In previous waves, the reaction can be attributed in part to economics. Now, unemployment is down to 4 percent; there's no reason to target them."

Still, Dobbs, who abandoned the financial-news pretense when he renamed his show Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003, has taken an increasingly hard-line, restrictionist view. He champions Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner's bill in the US House (HR 4437), which would make assisting any undocumented immigrant a felony. He supports sending tens of thousands of troops to militarize the US-Mexico border, and favors building a fence along its entire length. And although he's never acknowledged it, his constant call for enforcing US immigration law would mean deporting some 12 million people.

As the stakes grow higher and Dobbs's tone more shrill, his popularity has soared. In the second quarter of this year his show had the largest total viewer growth of any on CNN, with more than 800,000 viewers each night. While that's still only half of O'Reilly's top-rated cable-news audience, Dobbs is catching up, and CNN is giving its star more and more airtime. Now, in addition to five hours a week on his own show, Dobbs is regularly featured as an immigration expert on CNN's other evening news programs. (CNN says Dobbs is a legitimate immigration specialist deserving of extra airtime: "Anytime you can have somebody bring that level of expertise to a subject, you'd want to have that knowledge on the air," says network spokeswoman Christa Robinson.)

Not everyone inside CNN feels that way. Although the network keeps a tight rein on what even former staff can say (former anchor Aaron Brown, for example, needed permission from CNN to speak to me, which was denied), one senior former Dobbs staffer told me, on condition of anonymity: "Lou went from straddling the line between journalist and pundit to becoming a full-blown pundit, shifting the debate very, very far to the right. People don't get it. They trust that CNN is a reputable organization, so they trust that he's a respected journalist. They think he won't put anyone on who's a right-wing nut. But he does."

Another former CNN news staffer from an overseas bureau said (also on condition of anonymity) that whenever Dobbs's producers contacted the bureau for stories, "they would request stories that would fit their agenda.... We wanted to provide a balanced view. But people on Dobbs's show would look at the script and ask for changes. If we gave too much of a balanced view, they would kill the story."

As for why the network tolerated this, both current and former CNN staff, although not privy to executive-level discussions, said their understanding was that Dobbs had autonomy based on finances. "His show brought in a lot of revenue," one former senior Dobbs staffer said.

As another former CNN newsperson put it: "Lou was one of the originals at CNN, and when he left, they really suffered. (Dobbs left CNN in 2000, reportedly after a dispute with management, and returned a year later.) Now Lou is his own island; he dictates to them what he does."

According to several former staffers, many at CNN find Dobbs's views deeply offensive. But over time, many have become jaded. "At first people said, 'How can they let him keep beating this dead horse? There's no even-handedness; it's outrageous,'" one former senior news staffer told me. "But now, people have become so desensitized to it all. Then again, if you want to stand on your soapbox about journalistic integrity, where are you going to go?" (CNN president Jonathan Klein refused The Nation's requests for an interview, but he has told the New York Times that "Lou's show is not a harbinger of things to come at CNN.")”

CNN’s Lou Dobbs is one of those individuals whose ego knows no bounds. Evidently after hopping up the rabid anti-immigration extreme right, he’s not content to rest on his increasingly racist laurels. Now he’s going to (evidently) throw his pointy little had into the ring and try a run for the Oval Office.

In Thursday’s WSJ Opinion Journal’s Political Diary, John Fund wrote (I am quoting in full)

“Lou Dobbs for President? Don't laugh. After months of telling reporters that he "absolutely" would not consider leaving his highly-rated CNN show in which he crusades against free trade and illegal immigration, Mr. Dobbs posted a commentary on his Web site last week predicting a surprise new presidential candidate in 2008. The mystery candidate is an "independent populist . . . who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites."

Friends of Mr. Dobbs say he is seriously contemplating a race for the first time, although it's still unlikely. They spin a scenario under which the acerbic commentator would parachute into the race if Michael Bloomberg, the New York billionaire and favorite of East Coast elites, enters the field as an Independent. With Hillary Clinton continuing to score badly in polls in the categories of honesty and integrity, and with the public's many doubts about Rudy Giuliani and other GOP contenders, Mr. Bloomberg may well see an opportunity to roil the political waters by entering the race late. If so, Mr. Dobbs then sees a niche for a "fourth-party" candidate who could paint the three other contenders as completely out of touch.

His playbook would be similar to that of Ross Perot in 1992, who didn't enter the presidential race until the major parties began holding their primaries but quickly shot up to 25% in many polls.

Similarly, Mr. Dobbs could leverage his name ID and popularity to secure a place on 50 state ballots and generate a mountain of free publicity.

"No one, seemingly, is listening to the average-but-angry voter," notes the Boston Phoenix. "So an independent populist-style candidacy could fill a huge vacuum." Mr. Dobbs, who has written best-selling books deploring the government's "war on the middle class," would be a natural fit in this campaign playing the role of the anchorman in the 1970s movie "Network," who bellowed, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore."

Mr. Dobbs himself once told me that "Q" ratings that measure the popularity of media personalities found that no other media figure was more respected across the board by Democrats, Republicans and Independents. He claimed he was striking a chord with the broad middle class that transcended ideology. I think his ratings may also have something to do with picking a couple of hot-button issues that are easily demagogued, but don't be surprised if you hear more rumors about a Dobbs candidacy. Even if he doesn't enter the race, any such discussion would serve to boost his ratings.”

From RCP – Steven Stark

“…That's where Dobbs comes in. Like Perot and Pat Buchanan before him, Dobbs pushes the right populist buttons with the right rhetoric. Economic nationalism. Corporate greed. The government's "war on the middle class." Politicians who are "viciously partisan and contemptuous of their constituencies." Though he's often lambasted for his over-the-top rants on immigration, he's struck a considerable chord with his recognition that the average voter's problem with illegal immigration isn't that it's immigration, but that it's illegal. It's a law-and-order issue that both Democrats and Republicans have managed to dismiss, much to their detriment.

Dobbs also has the perfect platform from which to launch a candidacy against the establishment. If Virginia was once the mother of presidents, CNN is now the mother of populist presidential candidacies. Buchanan, of course, went straight from the studio to the campaign trail, even bragging when he announced, "No other American has spent as many hundreds of hours debating the great questions of our day on national television."

Perot, of course, did something similar, as Larry King essentially allowed him to hijack his show in the early '90s to help promote his prospects.

Any Dobbs effort would, of course, be a long shot; everyone knows independents don't win (everyone, that is, but the prognosticating Mr. Dobbs). And, perhaps, a presidential run is the furthest thing from his mind. But if you were positioning yourself to run as an outsider, you'd find yourself a media forum, write books, work the lecture circuit, and bide your time. Just like Lou.

In a year when the political and media establishments are tone deaf, Dobbs, of all people, is in tune with the public mood. Even if he doesn't run, he bears watching….”

HotAir has more.

The Dobbs Column that started it all:

“…The presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle are fighting for campaign contributions and selling themselves to corporate America in the process, and we all know the end result of such practices. Corporate America is funneling money into both political parties, hedging their bets in the hopes that no matter which candidate is eventually elected, all their political bases are covered. Donating the maximum $2,300 contribution to two candidates whose ideologies are of direct contradiction is now commonplace. The day will come soon when we'll have the opportunity to choose new leaders who understand and respect our independence and right of self-determination. We the people still possess the power to chart the course of our own destiny. I don't know who will win the next election, but I doubt that independent Americans will choose any one of the announced candidates now running. More Americans than ever before are now identifying themselves as independents, and I hope millions of Americans in the day and weeks ahead will drop their party affiliation and become independents, refusing to be taken for granted by these two political parties and refusing to be taken for fools by the candidates they're putting forward. I believe that independent Americans will demand a far better choice than any of the candidates now seeking their party's nomination. I believe next November's surprise will be the election of a man or woman of great character, vision and accomplishment, a candidate who has not yet entered the race.”

The SPLC on Lou Dobbs

“…For more than two years now, Dobbs has served up a populist approach to immigration on nightly segments of his newscast entitled "Broken Borders." He has relentlessly covered the issue, although hardly from a traditional news perspective -- Dobbs favors clamping down on illegal immigration, and his "reporting" never fails to make that clear. He has covered the same issues, and the same anti-immigration leaders, time after time after time. In recent months, Dobbs has run countless upbeat reports on the "citizen border patrols" that have sprung up around the country since last April's Minuteman Project, a paramilitary effort to seal the Arizona border. But there's one thing Lou Dobbs won't do. No matter what others report about the movement, Dobbs has failed to present mounting and persistent evidence of anti-Hispanic racism in anti-immigration groups and citizen border patrols.

It's not that Dobbs hasn't allowed a pro-immigration activist or two to complain about efforts like the Minuteman Project ("vigilantes," according to President Bush), or even that he has made racist statements on his show. What the anchorman has done is repeatedly decline to present the evidence that links these groups to racism, calling the very idea "mind-boggling." On his July 29 show, he called the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he said he liked in other ways, "despicable" and "reprehensible" for saying otherwise….”

A MINI RANT
Dobbs never fails to not correct the false claims he CONSTANTLY makes about illegal immigration. In fact, he is one of the movers and shakers when it comes to whipping the extreme far right anti-immigration extremists into a rage. The SPLC has been documenting his canards for several years. Canards, prevarications, major ego – yep, he’s ready to run for POTUS.
More from the SPLC

“…• In April 14, 2005, Dobbs said an "invasion of illegal aliens" was bringing "highly contagious diseases" to America "decades after those diseases had been eradicated" here. Reporter Christine Romans stated that more than 7,000 new cases of leprosy had been reported in the previous three years. The real number of new leprosy cases from 2002 through 2004 was 398, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dobbs and Romans said their source for the 7,000 figure was the late Madeleine Cosman, a lawyer who told an anti-immigrant conference in 2005 that "most" Latino immigrant men "molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns."
• On Nov. 4, 2003, Dobbs' said "illegal aliens" are "taking up a third of the cells in our federal penitentiaries." The reality: The Government Accountability Office reported in 2005 that 27 percent of federal inmates in 2004 were immigrants – including those here legally. Another GAO study estimated that just 12 percent of non-U.S. citizens in federal custody were there for committing violent crimes. Dobbs often covers crime issues relating to undocumented persons, but several studies debunk the notion that there is a relatively high level of criminality among undocumented immigrants.
• On Oct. 30, 2003, a Dobbs reporter claimed that a National Academy of Sciences report showed an economic loss of up to $10 billion from immigration. The report actually showed that immigrants caused a net gain in the U.S. gross national product of between $1 billion and $10 billion.

• On February 10, 2006, state Rep. Russell Pearce of Arizona was quoted as saying, "You know, the illegal aliens kill more people on an annual basis than we probably lost in the Iraq war to date in the United States. It's enough is enough." At that time, approximately 2,500 of U.S. servicemen and women had died in Iraq. Though there were 16,692 murders in the U.S. in 2005, there is no data that show how many murders were committed by undocumented immigrants.
• On May 19, 2006, Dobbs had on as a guest Robert Rector, a senior research fellow from the Heritage Foundation, discussing his recent report about the number of immigrants that would come to the U.S. if the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill then under consideration by the Senate were to be passed. Dobbs said, "Your initial report suggested well over 100 million over the next 10 years." Though Dobbs noted that the White House disputed Rector's numbers, Dobbs supported Rector's research, telling him, "thank you for paying close attention." As to Rector's numbers, they defy logic. As demographers quickly pointed out, his minimum figure of 100 million is equal to almost the entire current population of Mexico. His high-end estimate of 180 million over the next 20 years would require that the equivalent of the current population of Central America be added, too. A series of leading demographers told the San Francisco Chronicle on June 20, 2006, that Rector's projections were vastly overstated, ignored the effects of emigration and used unreasonably high estimates of legalization and naturalization.

• On May 23, 2006, CNN correspondent Casey Wian referred to Mexican President Vicente Fox's visit to the U.S. as a "Mexican military incursion." Wian went on to say that Fox's trip could be called "the Vicente Fox Aztlan tour," referring to the conspiracy theory, popular among anti-immigration zealots, that Mexico is plotting to "reconquer" the American Southwest. As Wian spoke, a graphic appeared on the screen – a map of the United States highlighting the seven southwestern states that Mexico supposedly covets and calls "Aztlan." Remarkably, it was prominently sourced to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist hate group that has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity" and compared pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape….”

From the NY Times

The SPLC V. Lou Dobbs

“…That's why a debate this spring between the Southern Poverty Law Center and CNN host Lou Dobbs was important. For more than four years now, Dobbs has been delivering almost nightly reports suggesting that undocumented immigration is harming this country in innumerable ways. On the way, he's managed to spread ideas that are not only one-sided, but in some cases entirely false.
Take leprosy.
On May 6, CBS' "60 Minutes" ran a profile of Dobbs in which correspondent Lesley Stahl reported that in 2005, CNN reporter Christine Romans "told Dobbs that there have been 7,000 cases of leprosy in the U.S. in the past three years." Stahl pointed out that the government had actually reported that that was the number of cases in America over 30 years, not three. In the three years referenced by Romans, in fact, the government registered just 398 new cases. "If we reported it, it's a fact," Dobbs responded defiantly. He was asked how he could guarantee that. "Because I'm the managing editor, and that's the way we do business. We don't make up numbers, Lesley. Do we?"
The next night, on his own show, Dobbs, after lambasting me for comments I'd made in Stahl's story, repeated that he stood "100%" behind Romans' report. And he brought back Romans, who said: "I was quoting from Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a respected medical lawyer and medical historian… : ‘Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy.'"
On May 15, SPLC ran ads in The New York Times and USA Today asking that CNN retract Dobbs' false leprosy claim, as Dobbs himself refused to. The following day, SPLC President Richard Cohen and I were invited on Dobbs' show, presumably to argue out the veracity of Romans' claim.
What we were met with was a classic bait and switch.
Just before the debate, Dobbs ran a taped piece that made an entirely new set of claims. Now Dobbs said that new cases had "risen" to 166 in 2005. He insisted that "we did not say there were [7,000] new cases at any time." And then, bizarrely, he reran the clip of Romans saying, on May 7, that "there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years."
Dobbs also now claimed that Romans' reporting had always been based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But that was simply false. As Romans had made crystal clear in her own comments, the report was based entirely on Cosman, the "respected" lawyer and historian.
Cosman, who died last year, was no "doctor" — she had a Ph.D. in literature. And she was hardly a "respected" authority on disease and immigrants. In fact, she was a wild-eyed propagandist who has made a series of charges about Latino men heading north, including this gem from 2005: "Most of these bastards molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns." As the Intelligence Report showed two years ago, Cosman also lied about a 1976 book she wrote being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award….”

Oricus

“…But unquestionably the most egregious example of Dobbs' use of extremist material was the time he lifted a graphic from the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens -- a group that Dobbs had the gall to tell Cohen and Potok he finds "reprehensible" without mentioning that he had used their material. Shortly after the CCC graphic ran, Dobbs mumbled his "regrets" for using the CCC as a source. But the "regrets" didn't include reporting a far-right conspiracy theory about "reconquista" as fact. Indeed, note the wording of the "regrets":
A freelance field producer in Los Angeles searched the web for Aztlan maps and grabbed the Council of Conservative Citizens map without knowing the nature of the organization. The graphic was a late inclusion in the script and, regrettably, was missed in the vetting process.

At no point did Dobbs or his reporters ever issue a correction about the phony Aztlan nonsense. The only problem was that they had used an unpleasant source.

As I noted at the time:
[T]he obsession with "Aztlan" -- which, as far as Latinos are concerned, mostly appears in a few relatively obscure '60s-era documents and among a fringe hate group -- has for most of the past decade and longer been almost exclusively the purview of white supremacists: American Patrol, VDare, American Renaissance, the National Alliance, the CofCC, the Barnes Review, and the like.

So when you hear talk about "Reconquista" -- which has not appeared in any MEChA documents or speeches -- the chances are nearly certain that this is where the talk originates. That's who draws up these maps, and touts the claims of an "invasion" incessantly.

Nonetheless, pointing out that racists are the people promoting these hobgoblins just raises a predictable whine: "Can't we talk about immigration without being accused of racism?"

Indeed, that's exactly what Dobbs consistently does whenever he's called on this crap. At some point, you'd think someone -- executives at CNN, other journalists, maybe an advertiser or two -- would catch on…”