To our neighbors in Mexico: The people of Louisiana do not hate you, despite the way that John N. Kennedy acts in the U.S. Senate.
It seems the senator has embarrassed us once again, by launching into an over-the-top rant against Mexico while deploying his phony “Foghorn Leghorn” accent, as it was rightly described by Gambit in New Orleans.
It’s not the first time the highly educated lawyer and politician pretended to tug on overalls and stick a verbal pitchfork into whatever issue might agitate his supporters, whom he obviously sees as racist hicks. In this case, he causes an international incident.
Kennedy derisively argued that without the United States, the people of Mexico “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.”
He told the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration at a Capitol Hill hearing that Mexico, a friend of this country, should be threatened: “Call President López Obrador and make him a deal he can’t refuse to allow our military and our law enforcement officials to go into Mexico and work with his to stop the cartels.”
The Mexican president was not amused, nor was Mexico’s ambassador to the United States: “I don’t think the people of Louisiana feel represented by the vulgar and racist words you used,” Esteban Moctezuma tweeted to Kennedy.
López Obrador described Kennedy’s rant — in the supposedly dignified environs of the United States Senate — as “this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality.”
That it is. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this shtick before. Familiarity only breeds more contempt, and not just across the border.
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