QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Muslims in the US are Pakistani and they are Iranian. The Pakistanis tend to vote Republican for Cold War reasons. As for Iranian-Americans... they vote overwhelmingly Republican for the same reason that Cubans do- because there was a weak Democratic president who gave their country to crazy people." -Republican pollster Grover Norquist, surveying the voting tendencies of Muslim- and Arab-Americans, in the Forward. It's a funny quote and I'm with him on Carter, but Norquist's history is a bit off in regards to Cuba: the president of the US when Castro came to power was the very Republican Eisenhower, and I'd hardly call his successor, JFK, "weak" on Cuba- he did, after all, try to have Castro bumped off. And besides, the headline of the piece refers to "Arab-Americans," and neither Pakistanis nor Iranians are of the Arab ethnicity.
Posted by Stephen Silver at March 29, 2003 06:16 PM