no habla

The (very) Junior Senator from Illinois must be holding some Rosetta Stone stock

so anyway, Senator Obama believes that instead of immigrants learning English, you should learn to speak Spanish instead. Then everything would be peachy-keen and everyone gets a shiny new pony.

No, really. As Dave Barry would say: "I'm not making this up".

I don't know where to start on this one, so I'll kick the can over to those who have more time to blog than I.

The first reference to Senator Obama's remarks that I saw today was over at Ace's place:

When Barack Obama says that speaking Spanish will help your kids get a job, he's telling the truth -- but the jobs he's talking about are fronting a McDonald's cash register, or working at Wal-Mart, or even just pumping gas.....

.....Most jobs previously required no facility in any foreign language at all. But now many jobs increasingly demand Spanish as a skill, due to the large and ever-growing of domestic Spanish-only speakers.

He's not talking about forcing your kids to learn Spanish to open up additional job opportunities. He's talking about forcing them to learn Spanish to simply be more competitive at jobs for which a second language was never previously a requirement, nor even much of a benefit. What you could do yesterday with just the native tongue at English, you now increasingly need some Spanish to do.

You're not gaining any new opportunities or benefits; you're just having to expend time and effort to do what you used to take for granted.

[I didn't do a word count to see if I've exceeded the concept of "Fair Use"; I'm hoping that Ace grants me some slack. I'm not the AP, after all, so I think I'm being consistent with Ace's quoting policy.]

Rachel Lucas (doG, it's good to be quoting her again) rants on a similar vein:

..... Like I said, I love Spanish and wish to speak it fluently, and maybe some day I will. Because I want to. Not because I’ve capitulated to the fact that my state is being overrun by folks who only speak that language. Obama’s insistence that we all learn Spanish tells me a few things, not least of which is that he has no intention of doing anything about rampant immigration.

Amen, Sister.

I reserve the right to revise and extend. But you knew that.

Late, tired, etc. More soon.