Thread: Rosen: No leg to stand on

Rocky Mountain News


Rosen: No leg to stand on
April 20, 2007

If you call me a conservative, I won't be insulted. It's not an epithet. That's what I am. If I were to call Denver Post TV critic Joanne Ostrow a liberal, that would also be an accurate description. Officially, she doesn't write a political column, but her leftist viewpoints and agenda frequently find their way into her TV commentary.

The term "racist" is another matter. Yes, there are racists out there - people who hate others because of their race. But just because you disagree with, say, Jesse Jackson on a matter of public policy, that doesn't necessarily make you a racist. So, one should be very careful about throwing that term around indiscriminately. Last week, Ostrow wasn't.

Following a heated argument between Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, Ostrow charged O'Reilly with "spew(ing) racist bile." A careful review of the segment yields no substance to her claim.

Understandably, O'Reilly was miffed at Ostrow's aspersion. He invited her to appear on his program to defend her assertion but she refused. So, O'Reilly sent his producer, Porter Berry, to confront Ostrow in person. Armed with a microphone and TV camera, Berry corralled her in a Denver parking lot. When asked to back up her charge by citing an example of O'Reilly's racism on that program, all she could come up with was his use of the term "illegal alien" rather than her preference, "undocumented immigrant." As she put it, "to me that's racist." Well, to me, that's idiotic.

"Alien" isn't a slur. In this context, it simply means one who is foreign born and who has not become a naturalized citizen. It's an official government term. You could use it to describe Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, when he's in New York. He's an alien who is in this country legally. A Frenchman who enters our country stealthily without having his passport stamped would be an illegal alien, as would a Mexican. This isn't a racist judgment; it's a legal one.

The term "undocumented immigrant" is weasel wording, a contrived euphemism employed by the politically correct and those who oppose the enforcement of our immigration laws. Plenty of illegal aliens aren't "undocumented" at all. It's just that the documents they carry are forgeries. Sensible people don't call a burglar an "uninvited visitor" or a bank robber a customer making an "unauthorized withdrawal." There's nothing wrong with calling an illegal alien exactly what he or she is.

For a time, Denver's dailies played this silly PC word game, defaulting to "undocumented" rather than "illegal." It may have been the murder of Denver policeman Donnie Young in May 2005 by Raul Gomez-Garcia, an illegal alien, that jolted them to their senses. Perhaps they felt self-consciously PC in describing this cop killer as "undocumented."

Since then, "illegal" has returned to regular usage. In fact, in 2007, I was able to find news stories by at least a half-dozen Post reporters (including some with Hispanic surnames) as well as Post editorials that used "illegal" to describe aliens. I wonder if Ostrow regards her colleagues as racists? Remarkably, I also found pieces in which Ostrow herself described people as "illegal immigrants." Does that make her a closet racist?

And here's the punch line: In that spat between O'Reilly and Rivera about the drunk-driving illegal alien who killed two teenage girls in Virginia Beach, O'Reilly never even used the term "illegal alien," Ostrow's supposed smoking gun. The closest he came was to say, "when you enter this country illegally . . . you have no right to be here." It was Rivera, her champion in this joust, who referred to "illegals" or "illegal aliens" no fewer than 10 times. Yet this was her lame evidence to brand O'Reilly a racist.

Joanne, shame on you.

Mike Rosen's radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA. He can be reached by e-mail at mikerosen@850koa.com.

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The race card is the only card the illegals have to play. Even though it's not a valid card, they play it anyway because the liberal left just eats it up.
I'm still waiting for official documentation which states that illegal aliens are now their own race.