Bush smears illegal immigration opponents (12/18/2008 edition)

On December 18, beloved and can't-leave-too-soon president George W Bush spoke at the American Enterprise Institute convocation and said [1] the following (via this):

...And I'm a little concerned about the tone of the immigration debate, labeling our party as "anti"-people. It's one thing to say they want the border enforced, and I understand that. But if a group of people think that a political party is against them, it doesn't matter what else you stand for. And the tone, in my judgment, at times got to be "anti." At one point in our history we had too many Jewish people and too many Italians. I don't know if you remember that. And it was -- I'm just confident people were saying, I can't believe this is the America that I came to live in where I'm "anti" -- people are "anti"-me.

And so we're going to have to work, like, with the Latino vote to say, we care about you, we hear you, and we share your values -- faith and family, small businesses, military vets or, you know, disproportionate -- more Latinos serve as a percentage of their -- of population in the military than any other group, if I'm not mistaken.

Who exactly is "they" in the second sentence? Wouldn't the normal thing be to use "you" when referring to a non-specific group of people? I assume Bush considers himself and those like the members of the AEI to be a completely different class of persons from the Great Unwashed.

The rest of statements have been said by many others, so to save time arguments showing how they're all wrong will be added at a later date; check the tags below.

[1] whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081218-2.html

Sat, 12/20/2008 - 20:13 · · Importance: 4