Is Andrew O'Reilly of Fox News Latino in touch with reality? (Tea Party and immigration)
Andrew OReilly of Fox News is not in touch with reality, at least when it comes to immigration and the Teaparties.
Consider his post "With Tea Party Decline, Immigration Battle Shifts Focus" (link):
The times are certainly changing for hard-line anti-immigration activists.
Just a few years ago, spurred by the grassroots effort of Tea Party stalwarts and fears of a record number of people crossing over the country’s southern border, conservative leaders virtually killed any chance of comprehensive immigration reform. Today, thanks in large part to the waning power of the Tea Party and a massive loss of Latino votes in November’s presidential election, Republican leaders have shifted their rhetoric – putting on a friendlier face toward Hispanics and stressing a bipartisan immigration effort.
“The momentum has shifted back to the pro-immigrant side,” said Gary Freeman, a politics professor at the University of Texas. “The Tea Party went too far, they were too angry, too pejorative.”
This anger and alleged anti-immigrant sentiment turned many Latino voters against the GOP in the last election...
...Since November, the GOP has worked to silence its remaining Tea Party members and actively promote instead its Latino face...
...One of those hurdles (to comprehensive immigration reform) – a vestige of the Tea Party – is the idea of so-called amnesty for undocumented immigrants. While both the presidential and congressional plans propose a path to citizenship, the idea of allowing the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. a reprieve rankles many conservatives feathers, who want stricter border security and a system of accountability for immigrants...
The last quoted paragraph is largely incoherent, and the rest never happened as described.
The last time "reform" was quashed was in 2007, two years before the Tea Parties movement began (at least in its latest incarnation).
Since they began four long, disturbing years ago, the Tea Parties have largely ignored immigration, even though it's far more important than their fiscal obsessions. While there's been some counter-productive ranting at townhalls recently (example: peekURL.com/zFPDZkt ), there was almost nothing like that with a few minor exceptions over the past few years, whether from the Teapartiers or other groups. Those pulling the strings on the Teaparties - fiscal "conservatives" like Dick Armey of FreedomWorks, the Koch family, and Grover Norquist - are on the wrong side of amnesty.
To get the facts, the reader can scroll backwards through the 235 entries on the Tea Parties page.
But, it is a time-honored tradition to complain about the immigration debate tone and at the same time make it worse by demonizing opponents of amnesty, so if nothing else Andrew O'Reilly is in touch with reality when it comes to that one thing.