Half Truths By Ramesh
WaPo writer Ramesh Ponnuru (and Time’s Mark Halpern ) misquotes Obama about his statements on whether immigrants need to learn English.
…Obama was asked a serious question, and he gave a flippant answer–one that suggests that he has not given much thought to the importance of assimilating immigrants.
In fact, Obama said: “I agree that immigrants should learn English. … But instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language.”
on Sunday, July 13th, 2008, 9:22 am in Politics, lies, obama, right wingnuts › 
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Ponnuru feels the need to act all butch because he sounds like a brown Truman Capote. Why didn’t he just hit the gym and threaten to eat his opponents ala the similarly muchkin-voiced Mike Tyson?
How did you come to the conclusion that he was misquoted? I think by flippant, Mr. Ponnurru meant that ‘they’ll learn english’ is a throwaway line in the above sentence. Senator Obama simply assumes they these immigrants learn English when that is exactly the point of contention for critics of bilingual education. On this, I have zero opinion, but, I flippant is a reasonable reading of the quote you mentioned above.
Anyway, the people who like Obama are always outraged at conservatives and the people who like McCain (or are slightly indifferent to him, to be honest, he’s not popular on the right) are always outraged at liberals. Glad I don’t like either of these two - it’s more fun on the sidelines! (Seriously, what unimpressive candidates. Mediocrity, thy name is current American politics).
How do you expect Ramesh Ponnuru to sell his book if doesn’t make up his own half-truths? The very *title* of his book is a half-truth. Accuracy and truth do absolutely nothing for his schtick.
I would like to offer some high-quality alternatives to reading Ramesh Ponnuru’s editorials:
1. Scratching one armpit.
2. Yawning for a full minute
3. Scratching the other armpit .
I think that comment was not referring to spanish-speakers in general, but foreigners in general. And he seems to only be describing reality–which is that only a rudimentary knowledge of English is necessary to participate in several peripheral sectors of our economy and one can become quite wealthy without knowing enough to write a paper on why Gatsby sucked ass. To this day, some relatives who have lived in the US for over 15 years, consistently do not use the words expressing the sentiment they wish to get across (and then get it right in Tamil at low volume). They are not low-literacy English speakers, in fact they have substantial vocabularies, but they’ll never speak it with the bloody arrogant composure that I use to freeze xenophobes in their tracks.