Why Is the Left Hostile to Vietnamese-Americans?

On Tuesday, Congress lost its sole Vietnamese-American member, thanks in no small part to efforts by the left to target his Congressional district for pick up. Anh "Joseph" Cao (R-LA), a devout pro-life Catholic, had became the nation's first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress in 2008 when he defeated nine-term incumbent William Jefferson who was facing federal corruption charges. Cao represented a majority-black district in New Orleans that has always been a traditional Democrat stronghold, so his ability to hold onto the seat was always going to be tenuous. But it wasn't hopeless, especially in a big GOP year like 2010.

However, the Democrats and the far left made recapturing Cao's seat a top priority. In fact, President Obama during the 2010 election cycle cut exactly ONE ad for a Congressional candidate, and that candidate was Cao's opponent. This despite the fact that Cao had been anything BUT a partisan member of the GOP and had even voted for the House version of ObamaCare when it still contained the Stupak language banning abortion funding. Cao seemed a caught off guard and hurt by the President's decision to actively campaign for his opponent, given Cao's willingness to reach across the aisle and work with the President and the Democrats on certain issues.

While I understand the Democrat impetus to pick up House seats where they could in a year that was going to be otherwise awfully tough for them, it does raise some questions (at least in my mind) that the President would be so glib about going above and beyond to defeat the country's lone Vietnamese-American member of Congress.

And then there's the case of Van Tran. Van Tran was the Republican challenger to the truly repugnant California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez in Tuesday's elections. He lost to Sanchez, in no small part, because of blatant racial demagoguery. Sanchez, speaking to Spanish-language station Univision about her opponent, claimed that "The Vietnamese are after my seat":

"The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take this seat from which we have done so much for our community — to take this seat and give it to this Van Tran, who is very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.”

You may wonder how Van Tran, who immigrated with his family from Vietnam to the U.S. in 1975, could be "anti-immigrant". Well, that's because to the Democrat Party only certain kinds of immigrants "count" (that would be those who haven't fled from commie hell holes like Vietnam and Cuba). You see, this seat "belongs" to Mexican-American Democrats, which makes you automatically "racist" and "anti-immigrant" if you are trying to win it and you happen not to be a Mexican-American Democrat.

So, to the Democrat mindset, an ACTUAL immigrant fleeing communist oppression in Vietnam is "anti-immigrant" just because he is a Republican, while the pampered American-born child of middle-class Mexican immigrants who came to this country for economic opportunities automatically qualifies for the "poor oppressed me" club just because she is a Democrat.

It seems somewhat odd that the party that calls itself the "party of immigrants" has NEVER had a Vietnamese-American among its Congressional ranks, and that the supposedly "anti-immigrant" party ran two such candidates in the 2010 Congressional elections. What seems even more odd is that the alleged "party of immigrants" would go to such extremes to oppose those two Vietnamese-American candidates. One might think that the left has a problem with Vietnamese-American immigrants. That's because they do.

Recall what religious left icon Jim Wallis said about the Vietnamese Boat People:

Following the 1979 refugee crisis in Vietnam, Wallis lashed out at the desperate masses fleeing North Vietnam's communist forces by boat. These refugees, as Wallis saw it, had been "inoculated" by capitalist influences during the war and were absconding "to support their consumer habit in other lands." Wallis then admonished critics against pointing to the boat people to "discredit" the righteousness of Vietnam's newly victorious Communist regime.

Hmmmm. That's revealing. I can't help but think that the primary reason for the left-wing coolness toward Vietnamese-Americans is that this particular immigrant population serve as a constant reminder to us all of the devastating consequences suffered by the Vietnamese population as a result of the perfidious left's embrace of North Vietnam's communist oppressors who were trying to overrun South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

How dare these Vietnamese immigrants prefer America to the Maoist utopia the left had given so much aid and comfort to creating for them back in Southeast Asia?!?!?