Even liberal populist like myself, finds a great deal to appreciate about Lou Dobb's appealing lunch-bucket, everyman’s populism on CNN. Even if Dobbs sometimes strays into xenophobic right-wing clap-trap in his commentaries, he is a voice in the wilderness committed to telling the truth. At least that's what I thought until the New York Times reporter David Leonhardt discovered that Dobbs has been playing fast and lose with the truth on his show.
http://www.nytimes.com/
In addition, Leonhardt uncovered Dobbs' cult popularity among white supremacist websites and his use of racist guests on his show as uncovered by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In fact since the SPLC has pointed out Mr. Dobbs' ongoing flirtation with the white supremacist movement, I've been switching over to MSNBC when his show comes on CNN. Sorry about that Lou, but your quirky populism falls flat when you start acting like a spokesman for a Christian identity militia.
http://www.splcenter.org/...
Three Examples of Lou Dobb's Misrepresentation of the Truth
1. Dobbs falsely claimed that immigration had caused 7000 new cases of leprosy in the past 3 years in the United States, when in fact there have been 7000 cases reported over the 30 years in the USA. The long term rate of leprosy is actually declining with only 398 cases of leprosy in the past 3 years.
http://hrsa.gov/...
The line graph chart above from Health and Human Services proves Lou Dobbs to be a liar on statements about the increased incidents of Hansen's Disease (Leprosy) in the United States.
2. Dobbs has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are non-citizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.
3. According to David Leonhardt," Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a "North American union" — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a "Mexican military incursion."
I'm personally disappointed that Lou Dobbs needs to misrepresent the truth and a maintain relationships with white supremacist groups that's a bit to cozy for my own comfort. He undercuts his own credibility as a reporter by such actions. To make matters worse Mr. Dobbs has yet to acknowledge his errors and labels the New York Times report "offensive."
I appreciate a great deal of Dobbs' blue collar political perspective on beltway politics. As Dobbs constantly reminds his viewer, the middle class is in a war and our enemies are corporate lobbyists, greed executives, wimpy journalist and corrupt politicians. He doesn't have to embellish the truth on those issues to make his case.
But Mr. Dobbs' flexible relationship with the truth that mixes "untruth with editorializing" should not be tolerated because it ventures into a darker region of homegrown populism inhabited by vigilante and racial hate groups like the Aryan Nation, the Minute Men and the Posse Comitatus.
Most Americans believe that sensible compromises on immigration can be made without undercutting the moral fabric our own culturally diverse America that has been built on the dreams of the very immigrants that Mr. Dobbs lives in fear of.