Liberals are perennially keen on leniency in sentencing, except of course when it comes to political opponents guilty of nothing more than thought crime. Old habits like that are hard to shake.
The news that former Florida governor and presumptive GOP candidate for president Jeb Bush checked off "Hispanic" on a voter registration form provides an example of this perverse tendency on the left.
Thom Hartmann, one of the top-rated liberal radio hosts (and you're right, there aren't many) wasted little time on his show Tuesday accusing and convicting Bush (audio) --
So, an interesting question for the day -- Jeb Bush, back in 2008, 2009 committed voter fraud. It is a crime, it's a third-degree felony in the state of Florida, five years in jail, for lying on your voter registration form. And Jeb Bush claimed that he was Hispanic.
Now, did he do that because his wife is Hispanic? Did he do that because he wanted to shout out to Hispanics who might vote for him? Did he do that because he wanted to mess with the statistics? Did he do that because he was sort of only half paying attention? That seems kind of tough, but in fact, actually what he clicked was Hispanic, not white.
Why did he do that? That's one question. But the bigger question is -- should he be in jail?
I mean, let's start with his surname, shall we ...?
Doesn't take long for Hartmann to make a muddle of things -- first he claims that Bush committed "voter fraud" by "lying" on his voter registration form.
Blink of the eye or two later, Hartmann asks why this happened -- was Bush, to cite one possibility raised by Hartmann, "sort of only half paying attention"? In other words, this may well have been an error without intent to deceive -- and if there's no deception, there's no fraud. Even MSNBC dismisses this as a "harmless mistake."
Another possibility comes to mind, as outlined by Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson in a column titled "Who's to say Jeb Bush isn't really Hispanic?"
Bush made light of the "mistake" on Twitter. But it's hard not to think there's something more to it.
Bush lived in Venezuela as a young man and speaks fluent Spanish. He is married to a woman from Mexico and converted to her religion, Catholicism. His children are Hispanic. The population of Miami-Dade, where he resides, is two-thirds Hispanic. If you never met him -- and didn't know that his grandfather was Sen. Prescott Bush of Greenwich, Connecticut -- you might assume from the above description that Bush is, well, Hispanic.
And who's to say he isn't? After all, isn't "Hispanic" partly a contrivance -- a bustling corner where the bureaucratic drive for categorization meets the mongrel realities of the New World?
Wilkinson cites the U.S. Census Bureau definition --
Hispanics or Latinos are those people who classified themselves in one of the specific Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino categories listed on the Census 2010 questionnaire -- 'Mexican', Puerto Rican', or Cuban' -- as well as those who indicate that they are 'another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.'
Pivotal phrase here -- "who classified themselves." If Bush checks himself off "on the census the same way he classified himself on his 2009 voter registration form," Wilkinson points out, "the Hispanic population in the U.S. would officially increase by one."
Until Hartmann can demonstrate that Bush actually benefited from his action, he should hold off on shabby claims of fraud.
