Betsy Markey (D, CO-04) speaker is kind of… strange.

I had to cut this down quite a bit, but below is the highlight of a clip of former Energy and Transportation Secretary Frederico Pena, who apparently thinks that internment camps (presumably stuffed to the brim with Latinos) are in our future if Cory Gardner beats Betsy Markey in November.

Along the way, he gets the historical record fairly badly wrong.  Expanded text after the fold, but let me summarize my annotations to the clip real quickly: the exclusion laws targeted Chinese-Americans (they don’t actually all look alike, Pena); the GOP fought those laws; it was a Democrat who put Japanese-Americans in detainment camps; it was a Republican who apologized for those camps; there is a difference between enforcing immigration law regarding non-citizens and throwing American citizens into detainment camps; and the term for people who think that we’re about to have more detainment camps in our immediate future is ‘black-helicopter nut.’

Just saying.

You know we’ve seen in this country historically, when strange things happen because people get carried away with the media, and they get carried away with myths, and they get carried away with fear. We saw what happened to Asian Americans in this country, very very long ago with the Asian exclusion laws, and everybody thought that was the right thing to do. And then during WWII, we put Japanese Americans in camps all over the county, thought it was the right thing to do. Everybody got carried away with the emotion of the day. We thought they were somehow, you know, terrorists. Of course, years later we had to pass a law apologizing, and paying all the families $20,000, for the fact that we violated their rights. And we see this happen in other countries, I won’t give you the history. And that’s happening in our country today. There are a lot of people out there saying some very dangerous things. And people are kind of listening to plots, and listening to these very short news clips and getting persuaded by that. We’ve got to stand up, we’ve got to stand up and say, ‘not in this county, not in this state, and not in this country. We’re going to stop that negative stuff now, today. And that’s what this is about. So please tell all of your friends, go door to door, we’ve got just a few weeks left before this election. Get everybody fired up to vote. Explain to them why this is so important to their lives and to the future of this country. And if we do that, I’m supremely confident we’re going to reelect this wonderful person as the next continuing member of congress in the fourth congressional district. Can we do that? All right lets go one, go “si se puede!” Thank you.

Hey, I didn’t write it.

Moe Lane (crosspost)