"Rice ready" cars

It isn't surprising that O.C. Welch hails from South Carolina. South Carolina is the great state that gave us Strom Thurmond and now Jim DeMint.

What's one more racist from Carolina south?

Welch runs a Ford dealership near Hardeeville. He's angry because his car sales have taken a dive. He decided the way to deal with that was to place an ad on local radio stations blasting people who dare buy cars from Toyota.

"All you people that buy all your Toyotas and send that money to Japan, you know, when you don't have a job to make your Toyota car payment, don't come crying to me. All those cars are rice ready. They're not road ready."


Rice ready? Is that an accusation of shoddy workmanship? Hopefully not, as Toyota manufactures 60% of their vehicles in the U.S. of A. Toyota puts 36,600 Americans to work building their cars.

Rice ready? Every Ford vehicle I've had was nothing but trouble, starting with a new hardtop in 1957! By the 1980's I was sick of dealing with American-made cars that fell apart on the road. My new 1996 Toyota Camry was a dream. After seven years it still looked and drove as good as new.


Floyd Mori, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, was not too happy with Mr. Welch, and noted that Welch's "rice ready" remark was "a blatant, ignorant, racist remark from somebody who should know better."

Yup!

If Mr. Welch is angry that fewer people are buying his Ford vehicles, he might want to put at least some of the blame on the Ford company which, like Chrysler and GM, keeps building cars that people don't want to drive.

But, again, Mr. Welch is from South Carolina, so you can't expect much.