McCain, his mind wonderfully concentrated by Hayworth, is now saying things about illegal immigration he once called people xenophobes for saying

Brenda Walker writes at Vdare:

McCain Makeover: The Voter-Amnesia Campaign

The wonders of a primary election! As a result of a credible challenge by JD Hayworth (now within five points), the former maverick is now listening to the voice of the people, and they want border anarchy to end. So he has conveniently turned over a new leaf.

Indeed, Senator John McCain now accurately discusses in detail the border issues that affect his state: crime is up, the Mexican cartels are doing as they please and the good citizens are endangered by violent rampant lawlessness flowing north from Mexico. Who knew he knew?

His April 22 sit-down with Greta van Sustern included a fact about border porosity that was new to me; e.g. that cartels now use ultralites to deliver their drug loads, plunking them down in the U.S. for easy pick-up.

What’s refreshingly, hypocritically new is McCain’s sudden conversion to border security. He told Greta that “Our border is completely out of control” (4:59), and described cartel smuggling as “organized crime at its worst” (6:00). The Senator rattled off an array of illegal alien statistics to illustrate his cred. The revised narrative is that criminality in south Arizona is now far worse than when Presidential candidate McCain was the Pied Piper of alien amnesty, leading a diverse throng toward the destruction of American sovereignty. That’s his excuse, and he’s sticking to it.

The whole thing is like a visit to a parallel reverse universe—but in a good way, sort of. The redesigned McCain is at once hilarious and disturbing. Only a fool would think that his campaign persona would survive as improved voting if he is reelected, but the tapdance is quite a spin.

See Johnny act!

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In connection with the above, here’s an e-mail I sent to Byron York at the Washington Examier:

In your article on the complex issue of Sen. Graham, you write:

Even the famously pro-reform GOP Sen. John McCain campaigned for the presidency in 2008 by repeating thousands of times that he “got the message” that the U.S. should “secure the border first.” Now in a primary fight with hardliner J.D. Hayworth, McCain won’t be touching a Democratic immigration reform plan.

This is correct as far as it goes, but it leaves out the fact that AFTER McCain loudly and famously “got it,” declaring over and over in the second half of 2007 that border control had to come before reform, and thus saving his candidacy from the dead, he then just as clearly “un-got it,” indicating several times during the fall 2008 campaign that immigration reform would be his first priority on assuming the presidency. He repeated this pledge in his final appearance of the campaign. He thus turned his hundreds of iterations of “I got it” into one of the biggest lies in American politics. The media, including the conservative media, never pointed this out.

As for McCain’s current anti-reform position, he will drop that stance one micro-second after his primary race with Hayworth is over.

I should add, however, that there’s a small possibility that McCain has actually turned against amnesty, as a result of his miserable showing among Hispanics in the 2008 election. McCain doesn’t give a damn about America except as an ever-globalizing project, but he does love himself very much. So, when Hispanic voters gave him—America’s most passionate and committed champion of open borders! the man who had gone to the mat for them time and again! the man who had endured near political death for their sake!—a measely 31 percent of their vote, that got to him, as comments he made at the time indicated. With McCain, everything is personal. So, just as he flirted with abandoning the GOP after Bush beat him in the 2000 primaries, he may well have had at least the thought of abandoning his advocacy for the Hispanicization of America after the 2008 election, or, rather, his advocacy for the greatly speeded up Hispanicization of America. We’re already Hispanicizing plenty fast as it is. It is important to remember that there are just two positions on immigration in mainstream American politics: the left’s position and the right’s position. The left supports the extremely rapid de-Europeanization of America. The “right” supports the moderately rapid de-Europeanization of America.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 26, 2010 01:34 AM | Send