With the US congressional elections fast approaching, the campaign is heating up, and hence ads like these are popping up to stoke the fear of the foreigner.
One explores the theme of shifty Orientals taking over the world - made possible by Obama introducing universal healthcare, of course. The other is all about the marauding Mexicans, and prompted Joy Behar on The View to describe Senate candidate Sharron Angle as "a bitch" who "is going to hell."
Of course, no one should be surprised that the Repubs and their friends would resort to stirring up xenophobic sentiment in order to get elected; it's actually their stock-in-trade, as anyone who has followed the way they have been depicting Barack Obama for the last few years would be well aware.
Some interesting coverage of these ads around the net... Spin Season analyses Sharron Angle's ad and looks at what makes the Chinese professor ad so effective in playing on the audience's fears, and Angry Asian Man has a post describing how the Asian-American extras in the Chinese professor ad were not aware of the nature of the ad they were filming.
UPDATE: Also check out Jeff Yang's article at NPR entitled Politicians Play the China Card.
No comments:
Post a Comment