REP. O’BRIEN: My son who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid. Yet this girl was going to get financial aid. My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country. [...]
REP. GATEWOOD: Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?
REP. O’BRIEN: Well she wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion.
28 comments
Why do GOPigs get so upset when they can't rape the system?
Financial aid exists to help students without a mother/father in Congress, gain access to higher education. It's sad how you fuckers frown on "those people " trying to achieve.
"Well she wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion."
Well, hot diggity damn. I don't know about the rest of you, but he's got me totally convinced.
I'd love to see him try to maintain that in court. Judge'd have him thrown out on his ass faster than you can say "non-sequitor".
"She's one of them there dirty brown people! She's a goldam furriner!"
Why is your son worried about getting financial aid? Can't you pay for his schooling from your salary? It's not like you're working at McDonald's.
As a Kansas resident, I just want to reassure that not everyone from here thinks the same way Rep. O'Brien does. It's just that the millions of bad apples keep spoiling it for the other couple hundred of us.
"Prepare to hear yet another billion excuses on how this isn't racist."
And complaining about "TEH DUMB LIBERALZ WHO SCREAM RACISM AT EVERYTHING!!!1"
In conservative fantasy land racism doesn't exist anymore. After all, slavery's illegal now, so racism is gone too! Right?!
But really they have no way to justify this...how can you possibly argue that judging someone to be illegal on their skin color is okay?
I guess they'll find a way.
Of course, we have no olive complexioned LEGAL citizens, do we? What a tool, probably O'Brien is either a GOPer of a TPer. (I checked, I was right. She is a GOPer.) Figures.
By the way Cenk Uygur (who happens to be Turkish ethnically,and a citizen) says he has an olive complexion and was wondering how the expression got started, because olives are usually black or green. I wonder too.
So, what colour is a person originally from America supposed to be? Does this person really believe there will be homogeneity of appearance in a population that is almost entirely composed of the descendants of immigrants from pretty much every country on the globe? Why do these fucking idiots keep getting elected?
If you're under, IIRC, 24, your parents have to be on your financial aid application even if they are not actually the ones paying your tuition. If they see a motherfucking Congressional salary on the FAFSA, they're going to assume the kid's family can afford school, y'know? I know financial aid doesn't actually always come up with numbers that reflect the family's reality, but I don't see why people who COULD afford the school themselves are always the ones to bitch about not qualifying for financial aid. It's not FOR you. If the kid's having trouble, maybe he should've spent more time in high school studying so he qualified for MERIT scholarships, instead of pointing to random girls and whining that they got more money.
On the bright side, this verifies my "Conservatives Are Spoiled Brats" theory of American politics. On the dark side, pretty sure this woman would think I was illegal.
I'd like to point something out that's bothering me: This is an example of a statement taken out of context to make it look or sound worse than it actually is.
If you -listen- to the entire recording, O'Brien didn't actually say that the girl in the line next to hers was an illegal immigrant. Gatewood's response was a likely intentional loaded question, using factual statements ('how you could tell') instead of theoretical ('Why did you think') in order to railroad O'Brien into implicitly admitting to thinking that.
O'Brien was suspicious of the girl's legal status because of her lack of any photo ID or a driver's license in combination with her ethnic appearance, this isn't the same thing as claiming outright that the girl was 'an illegal' because of her ethnicity. While O'Brien's arguments were ultimately pointless (because this girl wasn't eligible and did not apparently get any financial aid,) racially biased, and ignorantly stated, they weren't as bad as the way they were portrayed out of context.
Now I'm not pointing this out to defend anyone, but to ask readers to take a moment to get more of the story, to learn the context of quotes on this site. And to ask submitters to try not to crop or frame quotes in such a way as to bias the readers (In this case it was the ThinkProgress article writer who dressed it up, but I've seen folks here doing it too.)
This is dishonest, and it makes your side of a debate look bad.
This woman is so stupid she can't understand how financial aid works, and yet people voted for her. Well, don't worry, Pell grants are going to be cut back for everyone due to Dubya driving the country into debt.
Equality according to America : racism directed at African Americans or Jews is wrong. We got the lesson from WW2 and the Civil Rights movement.
Every single other form of discrimination - racial, sexual, religious, whatever - is A-OK.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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