Lou Dobbs Goes After Hispanic Chamber of Commerce ... a Step Too Far for His Corporate Masters

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 1:22 PM on March 25, 2009.

As you may know, I get my cable news fix on the treadmill at the gym, where CNN is always on, just waiting to bring down my IQ by a few points. I watch the bottle-blonde babes and pasty white guys who bring us the news without sound, gazing at their shiny dents as they flap tonelessly and obsessing on the little tidbits that crawl on the ticker beneath their over-sized heads.

And, frequently, there's Lou Dobbs. I have a bizarre love-hate relationship with Dobbs. The only broadcaster to hammer at the status quo on issues like trade and executive compensation -- which I love -- he's also an immigration hardliner's hardliner, spewing the kind of right-wing pseudo-populism that seems to me to be little more than a distraction from the real issues Dobbs' beloved middle-class faces.

Recently, though, it seems that Dobbs' scattershot hit a poorly selected target: the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. And, stunningly, Lou actually backpedaled.  

I'll leave the details to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Question: What’s the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce?

A)    An organization that seeks “to foster Hispanic economic development and to create a sustainable prosperity for the benefit of American society.”
B)    An organization that “is interested in … Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States.”

If you chose a), chances are you’re a perfectly sensible person with a reasonable familiarity with the issues and organizations of the day. After all, the Hispanic Chamber is well known as a relatively conservative, pro-business organization that represents the interests of more than 2.5 million Hispanic-owned businesses.

If you chose b), you’re almost certainly Lou Dobbs, the insult-spewing Latino-basher who hosts CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” five times a week.

Dobbs, of course, is known for regularly pushing defamatory falsehoods about undocumented immigrants — they fill one third of American prison and jail cells, they’re part of a secret Mexican plan to “reconquer” the American Southwest, they are largely responsible for a spate of 7,000 recent leprosy cases… Even when Dobbs isn’t hosting his own show, his fill-in hosts spew such racist propaganda as the lie about subprime housing loans going to 5 million “illegal aliens.”

But Dobbs may have outdone himself on March 10, when he launched into a furious tirade against President Barack Obama, who earlier that day gave a major speech on education reform from the Hispanic Chamber’s Washington, D.C., offices.

“I don’t know what’s happened to this White House, but the wheels appear to have come completely off here over the last several days,” Dobbs fulminated. “Making a decision to talk about a national initiative on education from the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which is effectively an organization that is interested in the export of American capital and production to Mexico and Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States. This is crazy stuff.”

And how. So much so, in fact, that this Tuesday the man who has in the past utterly refused to retract false allegations, actually offered up a “correction.”

A correction from Lou Dobbs. Wow.

So, what lesson have we learned? Well, if you're going to blame all of the country's ills on devious brown foreigners, try to avoid lumping affluent, conservative brown foreigners who run businesses and buy advertising on your network in with the rabble. Makes corporate uneasy.

Tagged as: immigration, dobbs, hispanic chamber of comme

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.