He wants us to speak Spanish, I’ll give him Spanish: Obama, por que no te callas?
And here’s a quick Obama-inspired vocabulary lesson for us all:
- elitista
- arrogante
- incompetente
-
sin experiencia
- débil
- desinformados
- Socialista
More commentary on Senor Hopenchange’s latest gaffe:
QandO: studies show Americans think Obama is an idiot.
Instapundit: didn’t it used to be a privilege to serve the American people?
Say Anything: what, you want us to accomodate illegal aliens?
Best take ever from The Anchoress: “all them ugly ‘mercens that just make Obama feel so bad about his country. We should hang our heads.” and she also takes note of the fact that apparently “President Bush – that moron – is the only president in recent memory who has been bi-lingual.” Hah! Take that, liberal multicultis!
Obama is NOT bilingual, by the way.
Added: Ace has a long, thoughtful post on this.
He’s not talking about forcing your kids to learn Spanish to open up additional job opportunities. He’s talking about forcing them to learn Spanish to simply be more competitive at jobs for which a second language was never previously a requirement, nor even much of a benefit. What you could do yesterday with just the native tongue at English, you now increasingly need some Spanish to do.
You’re not gaining any new opportunities or benefits; you’re just having to expend time and effort to do what you used to take for granted.
This is a dramatic shift, and most Americans, quite rightly, resist it. Obama, pandering to the Spanish-speaking lobby, instead embraces it, and demands that America change to better accommodate itself to its growing, and largely non-assimilating, cohort of Spanish-only speakers.
When my daughter was first applying to jobs here in the Houston area after returning from overseas she was often asked if she was bilingual. She would say yes. Invariably they would speak to her in Spanish or ask her some questions in Spanish to test her comprehension. To which she would reply, “I don’t speak Spanish, I speak Russian”. It became routine for her. What was amazing though is how many people would then tell her that she was NOT bilingual and that she was misrepresenting herself by putting down on the application she was. Excuse me? She would point out bilingual meant having two languages, which she did. Several interviewers had the gall to tell her that no, bilingual meant you could speak Spanish.
We are raising a lot of idiots in this bilingual culture of ours.
I’ve heard that many people nowadays are expected to be computer-literate. You’re not gaining any new opportunities or benefits; you’re just having to expend time and effort to do what you used to take for granted.
Paul, that’s an unusually facile answer from you – did you click through and read the article? I didn’t want to snip too much of it, but it’s very much worth a read and I’d certainly be interested in your take on the whole thing.
Pottermom – scary! But then mastery of the language is deteriorating daily – between simple vocabulary issues like saying the word “niggardly” or the term “black hole” is racist, and the text messaging craze… I got a *business* email with UR in it, as in “you are.” And it wasn’t even sent from a blackberry or anything like that – this was from Outlook, at his office! Part laziness, part newspeak, I guess…
You think my comment on an article titled “Obama’s Bullshit on Bilingualism” is facile? Hmm.
No, I’ll confess that I didn’t read the entire article, not least because it was taking a huge number of words to say not very much. Yes immigrants should learn English. No, Spanish isn’t the first or even third language of world commerce. No, it shouldn’t be given status as an ‘official’ language. It is, however, much easier than Chinese for English speakers to learn, is an obvious first foreign language for Americans in particular, and is widespread enough that it’s a useful skill both at home and abroad.
On a related note, my non-existent Spanish falls back to Babelfish for an example of ‘elitista’ – “Pienso que I posee diez casas”
I’m a bit rusty, but, “I think that I have ten houses,” ? Elitist, indeed!
I did think it was facile, Paul, because you conflated the use of a new technology with learning an additional language, and I don’t think it’s a very accurate comparison. As for Ace’s title… well, Ace is profane, as usual, but the heart of his piece is well thought out even I don’t like the way he communicates it. The whole language debate is about who is going to accommodate whom and it points to who is actually in power. (Not, mind you, who deserves or has earned power; just who HAS it. We concede power, for reasons I don’t understand, when we accommodate lawbreakers or even legal immigrants.)
Jay Tea at Wizbang had an excellent article quite a while back about the difference between immigrants and colonists that dovetails nicely with Ace’s post:
Fully ten percent of the population of Mexico now lives in the United States. Our language and culture is being displaced, and no good can come of it. A Mexican illegal alien who moved from California to Kentucky said this:
That doesn’t describe, of course, the entire state of California but she was describing the colonized areas where she had lived. That’s what lax enforcement and accommodationist policies get you, and we need to take a stand against it.