John S. McCain, Will You Please Go Now?

John S. McCain, Will You Please Go Now?
Michelle Malkin
Friday, April 23, 2010

I need a Dramamine to cover GOP Sen. John McCain's re-election bid. With his desperate lurch to the right, he's inducing more motion sickness than a Disney Land teacup. McCain's campaign represents the same self-serving political cynicism that American voters have grown tired of stomaching from the current White House. We need choices, not carbon copies.

After decades of embracing the liberal media moniker "maverick" for his frequent derision of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, McCain has now abandoned the label. He told Newsweek magazine earlier this month: "I never considered myself a maverick." But countless YouTube videos show McCain and vice-presidential running mate Sarah Palin invoking the "m" word. Here's a typical bit of self-puffery from a McCain stump speech on Oct.14, 2008:

"It's well known that I have not been elected Miss Congeniality in the United States Senate, nor with the administration. I have opposed the president on spending, on climate change, on torture of prisoner, on … on Guantanamo Bay. On a … on the way that the Iraq War was conducted. I have a long record, and the American people know me very well, and that is independent and a maverick of the Senate, and I'm happy to say that I've got a partner that's a good maverick along with me now."

With veteran tough-on-illegal-immigration GOP challenger J.D. Hayworth (whom I support) just five points behind McCain in the latest Rasmussen poll, Not-Maverick has now abandoned (or rather re-abandoned) his notoriously long-held open borders stance. Just a few short years ago, Not-Maverick was attacking Rush Limbaugh as a "nativist" for opposing the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty plan. When GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment to bar illegal aliens from receiving the earned income tax credit, McCain likened it to Jim Crow laws.

Sessions: "…I do not believe we should award people who have entered our country illegally, submitted a false Social Security number, worked illegally… I do not believe we should reward them with $29 billion of the taxpayers' money. That is a lot of money."

McCain: "What's next -- are we going to say work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?"

When Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico called for a cap on the number of visas for legal permanent residents at 650,000, McCain called it un-American and accused Bingaman of "discriminating" against poor foreigners (never mind that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill itself had a visa cap of 290,000). Like the true progressive he is, McCain never lets the facts get in the way of playing the race card. Unless it's an election year, that is.

When McCain's friend GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma put forth an amendment to "require the enforcement of existing border security and immigration laws and congressional approval before amnesty can be granted," McCain refused to take a position and sat out the vote. The amendment failed 42-54.

Just how beholden and deferential were McCain and his illegal alien shamnesty Republican twin Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to Teddy Kennedy? During floor debate on an amendment that would have required illegal aliens who get legal status to have a minimum level of health insurance, the Washington Times reported, the pair scurried over to check with Kennedy before voting to ensure their votes all matched. The amendment went down.

Actions speak louder than the pro-enforcement, strong-borders rhetoric McCain adopted for his failed 2008 presidential run -- and which he has now resurrected to save his seat in his border violence-plagued state of Arizona.

More words you can't believe in: In a fundraising e-mail sent out this week, McCain pledged that he's "determined to return to the Senate to continue fighting against the massive expansion of government under President Obama." Yet, to this day, McCain refuses to admit his own individual responsibility for supporting the pre-socialization of the economy started under George W. Bush and continued under Obama. McCain has never admitted he was wrong about his support of the $700 billion all-purpose, earmark-stuffed TARP bailout; the $25 billion auto bailout; the first $85 billion AIG bailout; and his proposed $300 billion mortgage entitlement bailout (which dwarfed Obama's plan).

His latest McLame-est excuse for supporting TARP? He was "misled." But all the warning signs and red flags about Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's incompetence and untrustworthiness were there before McCain joined the Chicken Little crowd. McCain is trying to have it all ways -- refusing to admit he was wrong, blaming Paulson for duping him, and creating the illusion that he'll be competent enough to resist the next inevitable bailout temptation when the feds hit the panic button.

Asked by a conservative constituent at a recent town hall meeting why the four-term senator deserved to be elected, McCain stammered before giving his best argument: He had more "standing" than anyone else. Entrenched incumbency is not an argument for more entrenched incumbency. Stop this ride. It's time for McCain to get off.
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To read another article by Michelle Malkin, click here.

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The Hidden Agenda of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Tom Tancredo
Friday, April 23, 2010

With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, many liberals exploited the actions of one deranged individual to tar millions of patriotic Americans as extremists and potential terrorists.

Bill Clinton said that it was legitimate to draw "parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today."

The mainstream media and liberal commentators are awash with news stories like “Hate: Antigovernment extremists are on the rise—and on the march” in Newsweek.

In an excellent piece “What's behind the anti-Tea Party hate narrative?” the Washington Examiner’s Chief Washington Correspondent Byron York notes that “Many of the claims that extremism is on the rise in America originate in research done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that for nearly 40 years has tracked what it says is the growing threat of intolerance in the United States.”

The SPLC is not only taken seriously by the liberal media, but also by the Department of Homeland Security. When they issued their now infamous report on “Right Wing Extremists” that warned “disgruntled” military veterans will become potential terrorists, they quoted a SPLC report entitled "A Few Bad Men" that claims racists are infiltrating the military.

Coincidentally, "A Few Bad Men" appeared as the SPLC attacked the American Legion for its support of immigration enforcement, which they called "Legionnaires' Disease."

This is indicative of what the SPLC is really about. Instead of monitoring “hate” and “extremism,” they are concerned with tarring patriotic Americans who oppose their left wing agenda as haters and extremists.

As a vocal opponent of uncontrolled immigration, I am a frequent target of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their website contains over 60 articles that attack me.

Last year, I spoke at a college in New York State. After my speech, a student handed me one of his text books entitled Understanding Human Differences: Multicultural Education in a Diverse America. Given the title, I didn’t expect sympathetic treatment.

However, I was still shocked to see myself quoted as saying, "illegal immigrants were 'coming to kill you and kill me and our families.'"

While illegal aliens disproportionately commit violent crimes, I would never make such a blanket assertion. I contacted the publisher who gave the source as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hysterical smear piece against the immigration control movement creatively titled "The Nativists."

The SPLC purported that I said this at a 2004 speech in Illinois. What I actually said was that our open borders policies allow terrorists to sneak into our country. And yes, terrorists want to "kill you and kill me and our families." But the SPLC’s intentional misrepresentation is now repeated across the internet and even in college textbooks.

In an excellent report put out by the Center for Immigration Studies, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jerry Kammer detailed the smear tactics used by the Southern Poverty Law Center to silence those in the immigration debate.

Kammer shows that the SPLC’s attacks on immigration control organizations were carefully coordinated with the National Council of La Raza. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. The SPLC recklessly listed the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a hate group, just as La Raza began its “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign aimed at pushing FAIR from being quoted by the media or testifying at Congress. FAIR’s board of advisors includes such right-wing racists as former Democratic Governor of Colorado Richard Lamm and the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus foundation Frank Morris.

Kammer shows that the SPLC even sees racism in the Lord of the Rings, which one of their columnists called “little more than a glorified vision of white patriarchy” in which the heroes “are manly men who are whiter than white” and “are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good.”

The SPLC not only sees no problems with left wing racists, they also have no problem with left wing terrorists. Their “Teaching Tolerance” magazine fawningly interviewed Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who they described merely as a "civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author" who "has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection." They did not mention that Ayers set off bombs in the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and the New York City Police Department. Unrepentant, he told the New York Times in 2000 "I don't regret setting bombs…I feel we didn't do enough."

Gabrielle Lyon, a fellow with the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project co-edited a book with William Ayers and was director of his School Change Institute at the Small Schools Workshop.

That’s the SPLC in a nutshell. The Lord of the Rings is racist, but a group called “The Race” is not. Patriotic Tea Partiers are potential terrorists, but actual terrorists like Bill Ayers are civil rights organizers.