Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's reprehensible and deliberate exploitation of anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic sentiment is matched only by her cowardice in owning up to it. Angle has run three shameless race-baiting ads using the same discredited attacks on Harry Reid's record on immigration issues, all of which employ racialized images of Latino men. If Reid's closing argument is that Angle is extreme, Angle's closing argument is that Reid wants to take your money and your jobs and give them to a bunch of scary looking "border jumpers."
Faced with an audience of Hispanic children at a high school a few months ago, Angle couldn't even bring herself to take responsibility for the racialized content of her advertisements, insisting that she's in fact concerned about the Canadian border. She even went as far as telling the group that "some of you look a little more Asian to me," as though she's so incredibly color-blind that there's no possible way she could be deliberately trying to frame the issue of immigration as a zero-sum competition between Latinos and whites.
It's not like this excuse is remotely plausible. But in her latest ad, obtained by Greg Sargent, she explicitly shows shots of the U.S-Mexico border. It's as though she's deliberately trying to paint herself as dishonest.
The cholos taking mug shots are a nice touch. I suppose what's so maddening about this, besides the flagrant race-baiting, is that Angle doesn't even have the basic decency to own up to what she's doing. Meanwhile, Reid is supposed to "man up?"
