Playing Politics

I work with this one guy who loves to talk politics. He’s a nice guy, but loves to spout the conservative rhetoric. Seriously, he comes in with the latest talking points from Sean Hannity or Michael Medved and throws them at us verbatim. I don’t think he even believes a lot of the stuff he’s arguing, but it still gets my dander up. I find myself agreeing more & more with the guy on the other side who argues all the liberal points, tho’ I still claim my position as an unaffiliated moderate with libertarian tendencies.

But the other day the conservative was rambling on about the Right Wing’s current ‘distract-from-Iraq’ topic: Immigration. He’s not opposed to immigration, but he wants all immigrants to enter legally. Fine. But then he goes on to talk about the citizenship test; that it’s not that hard, but that all the liberal college grads (he didn’t go to college) who want to open up the borders have a hard time passing it. So I called him on it: “Hey, I’m a college grad, do you think I’d have a hard time passing it? Seriously, do you think I’d fail the test because I went to college and learned to think for myself? Huh?” Apparently the talk show hosts didn’t tell him what to say when a degree-holder calls bullsh*t, because he just shut up.

So I went online and took a couple citizenship sample quizzes. I scored 18 out of 21. Not too bad for a short white college graduate with critical thinking skills. For the record I was wrong on what year the constitution was written (1787) twice, how many amendments to the constitution there are (27).

Now that I’ve passed the citizenship test my next goal will be to teach my conservative friend how to speak Spanish so he’ll be able to cope with the ever-changing demographic in his Federal Way neighborhood.