On this morning’s “These Days” program on KPBS, Escondido City Councilmember Sam Abed told host Tom Fudge that “95 percent” of the people of Escondido support the ordinance the City Council passed last night that would ban landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants. Does this guy think we’re all idiots?
I have no doubt that a majority of the citizens of Escondido support this racist, likely unconstitutional law (here’s what I think of it, in case you care). So, why wouldn’t Abed simply state that a majority of people support it? Why would he exaggerate by using such an absurdly high number? Not even 95 percent of Mississippians voted for a ban on gay marriage. Only 86.1 percent of those slack-jawed yokels voted to keep the homos from marrying each other, which I believe is this country’s high-water mark for intolerance.
I wanted Fudge to ask where Abed had gotten that number, but, to Fudge’s credit, he’d already established earlier in the questioning that Abed is notoriously kooky with figures. Abed states as fact that there are 35,000 illegal immigrants in Escondido. Only upon questioning does he say that he gets that number by extrapolating from a federal study of the city of Vista stemming from Voting Right Acts lawsuit. You’d think he’d know this, but Vista and Escondido are two totally different places. Again, all the guy has to do is say, “Well, I don’t know how many there are in Escondido, but the feds say there are this many in nearby Vista.”
I guess extremists like to be extreme.