Other languages to be made illegal, Thompson says

Well, no, not says, I suppose. But very definitely implied, perhaps even promised. As Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, wrote Sunday:

As When Iowans call up the power company, [the woman] said, "everything is in Spanish; it's sickening."

"You are so, so right," Thompson responded. English should be the national language, he told the retiree, and immigrants bear some of the blame for the home-loan crisis. "A lot of them couldn't communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from," he said.

So, Thompson thinks illegal immigrants can't speak English well enough to understand their mortgages, but lenders shouldn't be allowed to speak to them in Spanish? That's just ... stupendously stupid. (Let's leave aside for the moment the stupidity of blaming the poor folks who got suckered into this get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme instead of the rich folks who cooked it up to make themselves richer.)

But let's examine the implications of that position. If "English should be the national language" to prevent private businesses from offering other languages on their phone lines ... well, how are we going to do that, Fred? Because business only offer "press 2 for Spanish" - not to mention Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, etc, etc, etc - because it makes them money. As far as I can tell, the only way to stop them is to pass a law that makes it illegal for people to speak something other than English.

And that's even stupider.

But unless Fred's just pandering to the immigrant-haters and -fearers in his party, he must mean something like that. Mustn't he?