Bob's Links and Rants

Welcome to my rants page! You can contact me by e-mail: bob@goodsells.net. Blog roll. Site feed.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

McCain: Americans not tough enough to pick lettuce

He probably sank his "Straight Talk Express" speaking to some AFL-CIO leaders about immigration yesterday:
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.

"I’ll take it!" one man shouted.

McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can’t do it, my friends."
The second part of that last sentence was made unnecessary by the first part. By the time he reached the comma, McCain didn't have any friends in that room. McCain is the very essence of a cheap-labor conservative.

You know, John, if Americans aren't tough enough to pick lettuce, we surely aren't tough enough to fight pointless wars. If the conditions and pay in these jobs are so bad that Americans can't do them, it is certainly criminal to expect immigrants to do them. Raise wages, shorten hours, improve conditions. More and better jobs for everyone.

It surely is a sign of how bad things are when the awful guest-worker plan proposed by Bush and supported by McCain is the better of the two bills being considered (the other being Sensenbrenner's xenophobic lock-em-all-up bill).

(Via Greg Saunders at This Modern World.)