"I am not a racialist, but, und this is a big but..."

(Title from an obscure Monty Python sketch)

The Sotomayor debate continues to reveal the absolute worst of human nature, driven by conservative white men with serious issues over race. Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, two of the biggest loudmouths in this debate, share an aide who plead guilty to karate chopping a pedestrian and calling her the N word. For his part, Buchanan called the Supreme Court nominee a quota queen who practices "race-based justice," basing this on a quote and none of the facts of her record (in Ricci she was bound by the law and precedent, and quotas had nothing to do with it, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out to him today). Does everyone remember when Pat Buchanan was radioactive to the party and brought down George W. Bush's hopes in 1992? Now he's on the "liberal" MSNBC more than the peacock.

And now there's a new player in this debate, Manuel Miranda, who you may remember from stealing Democratic files when he was working for Bill Frist. Within the space of a few hours today, he basically called Mitch McConnell gay for resisting a filibuster for Sotomayor, and then he slandered all African-Americans.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.

To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.

Not like those dirty African-Americans, you see.

This is just a disaster for the GOP, and it gets worse and worse.

White Man's Burden

The old crazy uncles that the GOP would rather keep in the basement have all burst to the surface, and the craziest of the crazy if Tom Tancredo. His assertion that the National Council of La Raza is "the Latino KKK" not only offends that organization and all Hispanics, but members of the GOP who have appeared at NCLR events and accepted their awards. We truly are seeing the crackup of the white male conservatives.

African-American and Hispanic conservatives who have questioned her judicial philosophy also note the historic nature of the appointment and praise her triumph over economic hardship. White conservatives, on the other hand, have been far more personal and aggressive in their attacks on Sotomayor's record, repeatedly accusing her of "reverse racism" and questioning her intelligence.

White male conservatives, despite polling showing both the public and GOP insiders disagree, are maintaining that Sotomayor is an unqualified bigot.

Pat Buchanan described Sotomayor in a column Friday as an "anti-white liberal judicial activist" as well as a "lightweight" who "covers up her intellectual inadequacy by bullying from the bench."

John Derbyshire, at National Review Online, took admiration for Sotomayor's life story as an intentional insult to him and all other white people:

I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their "compelling stories"?

There's lots more at the link, including Billo chiming in with how "the left sees the white man as a problem." As a white man, I can say pretty directly that I don't. No, but what does seem to be the case is that the right, in particular the white male conservative right, can't stand that their coded attacks aren't working anymore. They have used this playbook for decades, mostly with success, and now the country has changed, gotten more diverse, more interconnected, more tolerant, and they don't know what the hell to do.

Some people, mainly the ones in charge of electing Republicans, have recognized this. But the loudest members of the party, the media hounds, haven't, and they still think they can call Sotomayor a "reverse racist" or a "twofer" and reap the rewards. And when it falls flat, now that the worm has turned, they figure, this all must be because everyone hates whitey.

Funny, several years ago the Democrats rejecting Miguel Estrada as a circuit court judge was supposed to ruin their relationship with Hispanic voters. But there's a difference between rejecting a conservative judge who happens to be Hispanic and rejecting a Hispanic woman who happens to be a judge. They've foregrounded the race and gender attacks, and this side of the GOP is simply ugly to watch.

The Vise-Grip Made Manifest

For all the talk of the two or three Democrats in the House who have refused to endorse Obama, has anyone taken notice of the couple dozen Congressional Republicans who haven't backed McCain? The Hill has:

Republican members who have not endorsed or publicly backed McCain include Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Reps. Jones, Peterson, John Doolittle (Calif.), Randy Forbes (Va.), Wayne Gilchrest (Md.), Virgil Goode (Va.), Tim Murphy (Pa.), Ron Paul (Texas), Ted Poe (Texas), Todd Tiahrt (Kan.), Dave Weldon (Fla.) and Frank Wolf (Va.). [Wolf contacted The Hill following publication of the article to correct his staff’s error. His staff had said he has “yet to endorse McCain” and did not return follow-up phone calls this week].

Throughout his career in the House and Senate, McCain has been at odds with his party on a range of issues, including campaign finance reform, earmarks, immigration, healthcare, taxes and energy.

Some Senate Republicans were especially irked with McCain’s role in the “Gang of 14” deal on judicial nominations.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who has been sharply critical of McCain on immigration, told The Hill in February, “I don’t like McCain. I don’t like him at all.”

What's amusing here is that McCain is getting the cold shoulder from both Republican moderates AND the hard right, which is a powerful indicator of his vise-like problem courting both factions at once. That's why his policy prescriptions often sound incoherent, such as his calling for increases and decreases in military spending at the same time. He's trying to play both sides at once, and it's just alienating everybody.

Dedication

So Tom Tancredo just got his shot to ask questions in the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing with Petraeus and Crocker, and as he came on I thought to myself, "Now how is he going to fit 'illegal immigration' into this?"

Turns out the way he does it is by asking Gen. Petraeus to comment about reports of MS-13 gang signs in Iraq. The MS-13 reference is a dogwhistle; they are a Salvadoran gang whose presence in the United States is commonly used by anti-immigrant sources as an example of the perils of the Mexican menace.

Petraeus said he never heard anything about that.

You almost have to admire the single-mindedness of someone like Tancredo. It's almost a parlor game to try and come up with a House hearing where he WOULDN'T reference immigration. Fortunately, we won't have to play that game much longer; he's leaving office at the end of his term.

His Work Is Done

Once every candidate started to sound as over-the-top crazy on immigration as he has, Tom Tancredo decided that there was no longer any need for him, and tomorrow he'll drop out of the race.

But it should give pause to these Republicans who think smugly that a fierce anti-immigrant line will lead them to victory in November, that Tancredo never got out of the blocks. If his message is so important, and he's so pure on what is considered the signature issue, how come he never had a chance? How come his message was so easily co-opted by candidates who are riddled with differing positions on immigration in the past? Maybe these so-called smart Republicans are only talking to themselves on this issue.

281 Strong For Fred!

This is hilarious:

According to the Department of Elections, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have been certified to be on the Delaware primary ballot on Feb.5th.

Unfortunately, Fred Thompson fell short of the 500 signature mark, and will not be on the ballot.

I know Delaware is a small state, but seriously? You couldn't find five HUNDRED people?

It gets better:

UPDATE: Jason Bonham at Race42008.com is reporting that the DOE said Thompson only had 281 out of 500 signatures, and that most of their signatures were rejected because they were not registered Republicans.

I think this is a terrible disenfranchisement of such noble Delawarians as Phil McCracken and Oliver Closeoff.

This news will go nicely with the new poll that shows Thompson behind the mentally ill Tom Tancredo in New Hampshire.

Do you get the feeling that Freddie might not be taking the whole Presidentin' thing seriously?

Everything About Tom Tancredo Revealed

Now we know why Tancredo seems so, well, crazy. It's because he likely is.

Last year, it was reported that in 1970, after Tancredo's student deferments ran out, he appealed his 1-A draft status, which would have put him at the top of the list for draft eligibility during the Vietnam War.

Tancredo said he didn't remember it that way. But he said he was given a 1-Y status, which put him at the bottom of the list, when he reported that he had been treated for mental illness as a teenager.

Tancredo said he was diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression.

It's all so clear now.

Turns out Tancredo voted against increasing mental health services for returning veterans. He was one of only 39 Representatives to do so.

Maybe he thinks they should have gotten a cushy way out of the war in the first place like he did?

The Double Bind Of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Despite failure at the polls in 2006 and 2007, the Republicans think they have a magic bullet headed into the next election year with the issue of immigration. If they can only demagogue the issue enough, the theory goes, they can tap into nativist fears of a brown horde sweeping across the nation and eke out a victory. It doesn't matter to them that immigrants actually underuse the health care system instead of "stealing health care" away from real Muricans, or that children of immigrants actually grow fluent in English in the second generation, because they understand that learning the language is the key to economic success. They would rather demonize the other, despite the historical blunder of alienating the record numbers of immigrants entering the country (One in eight people living in this country is an immigrant, the highest percentage since the 1920s).

Most Republican candidates, even the so-called revolutionary ones, are banking on this strategy (Paul is actually much further to the right than the rest of the field, seeking to abolish birthright citizenship - some Constitutionalist). I'm not so sure. I think Republican immigrant-bashers are in a double bind. Their first problem is that the immigrant experience is too tied to America for candidates to wall themselves off from it. And so we get the stories that Tom Tancredo loves Mexican food, and had illegal immigrants renovate his house:

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them.

Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”

There's little way to avoid the immigrant experience, and so these kinds of hypocritical stances are unavoidable. Romney's been caught up in this as well. The other trap the Mittster has fallen into is favoring one set of immigrants over another, which is a political necessity in certain parts of the country, and again raises the charge of hypocrisy.

“I can tell you my inclination would be to say as many Cubans as want to come here should come in,” Romney said in an interview Tuesday with The Tampa Tribune editorial board. […]Romney replied that Cuban Americans are exemplary citizens who have brought “great vitality, skills and energy to the American experience.”

“In my opinion, the more the merrier,” he said.

The problem for these candidates is that, if they take a pure line on immigration, they end up attracting the ugly bigotry of white supremacy.

Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has attracted a primary challenge from former RNC member Buddy Witherspoon, who is running to Graham's right on illegal immigration. As it turns out — and despite Witherspoon's recent denials — he has been a proud member of a white supremacist organization, the Palmetto Scoop has uncovered.

Witherspoon recently said claims that he had been a member of the segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens were "totally absurd" and that he had only ever been to one meeting. But in 1999, he told the Washington Post that he was a member, and that "Everything to me is fine from what I see and hear." Furthermore, this was at the same time as he was a Republican National Committeeman in good standing.

The truth is that voters appear to recoil when these politicians cross the fine line between the so-called "rule of law" and open racism. This is even true on the Republican side.

I was a little bit surprised that both Huckabee and McCain got applause with their relatively human responses on the interminable immigration questions. The debate was in Florida, which probably explains it, but I think it shows once again that even the Republicans are not monolithic on this question [...]It seems to me that if you can get applause (and no boos) for a comment like that on immigration at a GOP debate then Democratic consultants should relax just a tiny bit about the breathless responses they are getting in their focus groups and tell their candidates to sound reasonable too. They aren't going to be able to out-hate the Tancredo wing of the party so there's no margin in helping the Republicans set the political agenda by pushing bad legislation and even worse rhetoric.

That's the key. Democrats have to understand that a little compassion and a little sensibility will win the hearts of what I feel is a silent majority in favor of comprehensive and respectful immigration solutions. Most Republicans are either coming off as liars or racists on this question; those like Huckabee and McCain who sound like rational human beings are rising in the polls. The Lou Dobbs wing of the country is very vocal and very shallow. There's no need to give in to the nativism it promotes.

Doing the Terrorist Attacks Americans Won't Do

On the other hand, this Tancredo ad is shameful:



Immigrant-bashing isn't working as a viable election strategy, so Tancredo's going to Plan B, characterizing every immigrant as a terrorist. It's almost a little heartening that Tancredo is so marginalized, even on the Republican side, that he has to resort to something like this. This is actually a far more progressive country on immigration than anybody realizes.

On DREAMs, Intimidation, and Nativist Jerks

The federal version of the DREAM Act comes up for vote today in the US Senate. The bill would set on a path to legal status those children of immigrants who enlist in the military or enroll in college. Yesterday, college students who would benefit from this program were on Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress for passage. Tom Tancredo, noted jerk, called for the arrest of the students.

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

They eventually held the press conference anyway and nobody was arrested. Tancredo is not only being callous here, he's being ignorant. One of the students has permanent residency status, and another cannot be deported because she exists in a kind of legal limbo. Her name is Tam Tran.

Tam Tran, whose Vietnamese parents came illegally to the US from Germany, has lived in the US since she was ten, is a UCLA graduate who wants to pursue a PhD at USC, but can't because she can't afford further schooling without federal student loans. The government can't deport her family back to Vietnam because her father was persecuted by the communist government there, but the German government won't take them back either. Tran said today she is in "permanent legal limbo."

The last time Tran spoke out in support of the DREAM Act, in an article in USA Today on October 8, her family was detained by the ICE.

Just three days after the article appeared, federal officers entered her home in the middle of the night and forcibly arrested her family. Tran’s family was detained on a “years-old deportation order,” even though they have been in regular communication with immigration officials for almost 20 years since arriving in the United States.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the immigration subcommitee, equated the family’s arrest to “witness intimidation” and accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of targeting the Tran family because Tam “testified before Lofgren’s panel earlier this spring.” Earlier this week, USA Today spoke with Lofgren about the Tran family’s arrest:

“Would she and her family have been arrested if she hadn’t spoken out?” Lofgren said of Tran, who was not at home for the raid but has been asked to report to Immigration and Customs officials next week. “I don’t think so.“

This is shocking behavior for the ICE to undertake, and not only does it show the price for dissent in Bush's America, but it shows how convoluted our immigration system is in the absence of a comprehensive solution. You can punish immigrants, who have no political power, or you can punish companies who hire the undocumented, who have loads of political power. In this case, the solution is clear; allow students who have known no other home to contribute to the country in which they were raised. Brian has the numbers; light 'em up.

Tancredo With A Novel Idea: Deport Entire Cities

Tom Tancredo would be the first President in American history to cede US territory:

Tom Tancredo has pushed hard throughout his career for a fence along the Mexican border. Now that one has been enacted into law, though, actual construction has been thwarted by mayors along the Southern border who don't want the fence disrupting their communities and local commerce.

So Tancredo has an interesting solution: He would "build the border fence north of these communities."

"These mayors have already demonstrated that their hearts and loyalties lie with Mexico," Tancredo said. "Perhaps they'd feel more comfortable if their cities were geographically located there as well."

You see how this could go. Border mayors immediately see how a fence impedes their economic and social progress. Tancredo moves the fence in a bit. Then the new mayors are faced with the same problem. And so on, until America is composed of a sliver of Minnesota and Maine.

It's the new Manifest Destiny!

What's scary is that if he uses this line in the debate tonight, it'd get the biggest cheer imaginable.

Don't Tell Tom Tancredo

But when you expel all the immigrants from your town, it turns out the economy suffers.

A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

I don't think they looked 10 minutes out. They listened to their basest, most nativist desires and decided to make their township hostile to furriners. But their typically 21st-century America service-based economy couldn't find the workers, and their unnecessarily cruel mindset was subject to court challenges. If we stopped to understand how to work with the system that's in place and come up with a broad-based solution, this problem couls be easily solved. But know-nothings like Tancredo would rather shriek about the cost to the economy of illegal immigration, when he has it exactly backwards.

Run Against Bush

That was a STRONG statement by Tom Tancredo right there, in the debate. He said that Rove called him and told him that, because of his criticism of the President, that he was no longer welcome in the White House, and that if he became President, he'd say the same thing to Bush. It got an ovation from the crowd.

Man, I'd love to be in Germany with the President's team right now. They ought to expect more of this for the next 18 months. He's the lamest duck there ever was.

UPDATE: And in a later answer, Tancredo said, "The President ran as a conservative and governed as a liberal."

Here we go again.

This has been going on for some time. Every time a Republican President screws up - or in other words, every time there's a Republican President - the convenient excuse is that he's not really a conservative. Digby has talked about this over and over again.

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.

This is where we're at right now, and Tancredo, an anti-immigrant conservative, is the perfect example of this. The idea is to save the Republican Party by pretending that the guy who's been their standard-bearer for the last 6 years, the guy who they went to the ends of the Earth to defend right up until the moment they figured out that the voters didn't like him anymore, has actually been a closet liberal all these years.

Everything Bush did will be seen as wrong. They'll highlight the immigration issue (called by a few Republicans the "Kennedy-McCain-Bush" bill), spending, even diplomacy (no less than Duncan Hunter questioned the idea that you don't talk to your enemies). Conservatism is not so much an ideology as a series of think tank and magazine jobs that are struggling to stay in business. The movement must be preserved above all else. And so we have a group of conservatives trying to jettison their President, dismissively calling him a liberal instead of what he is, a through-and-through 21st-century robber baron conservative, embodying all of the ideals of fearmongering, profit-taking and patriotism-questioning that you see on display thoughout the GOP.

UPDATE II: Let me unpack this for a second. Tancredo was responding to a question about "what would you have George Bush do for you if you were President?" Brownback essentially said he thinks the President will step aside for him. Thompson said something like he'd have him run a lecture series or something nonspecific. Tancredo shot back with his broadside. That's normally a lay-up question, a chance for everyone in the Party to praise their leader and say a few graceful things. They didn't even want to give the appearance of doing that.

The other thing is that this may be something that works with hardcore conservatives who are always looking for something to believe in to validate pissing away their vote all their lives, someone who is, finally, "different!" But why would this work with independent who are already skeptical of the trashed Republican brand, which is not limited to George Bush but the Congress as well? I guess I don't see this being a workable strategy, but parties are always trying to reinvent themselves.

And the problem with this strategy is that every one of them that has a public record either voted with Bush 90-95% of the time, or supported his policies in soundbite after soundbite. Including Rudy "Thank God George Bush is our President" Giuliani and Mitt "yes we should have sent more troops to Iraq" Romney.