Are YOU a Real American?

It’s a question that’s worth asking because it seems like the McCain/Palin ticket has a definition of who is a real American and who isn’t.  They haven’t cared to define what it is explicitly, but here are some comments from the Republican Party, members of McCain’s staff and some McCain/Palin supporters that shed some light.

Some of the ideas I’ve found around the web (multiple sources: Miami Herald, TPM, MSNBC.)  I can’t believe I found this many with a two-minute search.

- “A real American is the average person who works 9 to 5 for an average paycheck”
- “It means being normal, having a mom and pop making it in a business, paying their fair share of taxes”
- “[Real Americans] all did the same thing. They wanted to get their hair done on Saturday and go to dinner Saturday night. They were all ethnic and minority groups, and they just wanted to live a good middle class life… Obama is a Harvard elitist.  He never grew up in a middle class environment”
- “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea”
- “Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish and achieve”
- “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation”
- “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America”

George Washington, who, unless I missed something recently, is widely considered a “real American,” warned America to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”  It is a sad day when people from every ethnicity, religion, gender or parentage no longer look to the United States as the land of opportunity.  It is a sad day when we forget that we are a nation of immigrants and instead become a nation of bigots engaging in repetitive witch hunts to isolate the “pure” from the rest.