Watch The Approval Ratings Hit 20%

...once the Freepers and the immigrant bashing-base figure out that Bush is allowing defense contractors to recruit Border Patrol agents for duty in Iraq (h/t Think Progress):

Wanted: current and former U.S. Border Patrol agents to train others in border enforcement.

Good pay and benefits, room and board included. Exotic locale: Iraq.

That's essentially the pitch a Virginia-based military contractor made in Tucson this week as it recruited people with Customs and Border Enforcement experience for a new mission in the Middle East. The company, DynCorp, has been asked by the U.S. State Department to find 120 people to train Iraqis in the security of their country's border.

But the recruiting drive comes as the United States wrestles with its own border security. Calling the DynCorp hirings a contradiction of that effort, Gov. Janet Napolitano wrote President Bush this week to say the deal "makes no sense."

Is it a positive step to train Iraqis to police their own border? Perhaps, although any time a contractor like DynCorp is involved, I'm skeptical about the outcome. But this is part of a trend of Bush skimming off the Border Patrol and not replacing them. Half of the National Guard troops sent to the border have been withdrawn, and a scant few of them have been replaced by new Border Patrol agents.

But all of that is irrelevant. The imagery to an anti-immigrant conservative of Bush taking agents off the border and sending them to Iraq is likely to be enough to make them swear off the Republican Party for good. Bush's new rhetoric on immigration, when he bothers to say anything, is to stress toughening up the border as the primary priority, only to be coupled afterwards with workplace enforcement and earned legalization and a guest worker program. The idea that he's sending the Border Patrol to Iraq (which is a blunt way of putting it, but not entirely untrue) flies in the face of that, and will simply enrage anyone left in his corner on the far right.

"We should be focused on supporting our nation's security efforts along the Mexican and Canadian border instead of hampering (Customs and Border Patrol) by sending our best agents to a war zone in Iraq," Napolitano, along with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, wrote Bush [...]

"The issue isn't the numbers," Napolitano spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer said. "(DynCorp) basically has a contract to skim off Border Patrol agents."

Bush has already alienated a vast amount of the anti-immigrant right. This ought to finish it off.