Is The Left Fretting The Kagan Confirmation?

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Update: See below, for Stanley Kutler playing a favorite old card.

Let’s review Mark Greenbaum at Salon, and see what our purported post-term-of-the-week overlords might be saying on closed JournoLists. Summary: the fret level doesn’t seem too elevated, but the article has some nice digs, in any case.

Members of Congress are rarely at a loss for ways to make themselves and their institution look foolish. But, as we were reminded last week, there is no more embarrassing spectacle than a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for a Supreme Court nomination. If the three days of questioning that Elena Kagan endured proved anything, it’s that these sessions have outlived their usefulness.

OK, both the institution the advice-and-consent language, and, by inference, the filibuster are an unfair curb on tyranny. They are, at best, useful in a Republican administration only, apparently.

This is not a novel argument. Since 1987, when Robert Bork failed to gain confirmation in large part because he was too candid in expressing his views, nominees have become completely closed in discussing their opinions. After Bork, White House teams decided they could gain nothing from tapping individuals who might invite a hint of controversy. The result has been a stream of milquetoast, clam-mouthed nominees and, minus the Clarence Thomas saga, completely unmemorable hearings.

Constitutions don’t kill nominations; people like Ted Kennedy kill nominations. However, this appeal to removing safeguards from tyranny can be improved by appealy to blatantly unjust uses of confirmation hearings.

This week’s experience may have been the least noteworthy of all, as Kagan herself is the perfect representation of the emptiness of the current process. With absolutely no written or spoken record on seemingly any issue of significance, the shrewd careerist is the blankest of blank slates. The prevailing assumption was that little that would be gained by her hearings and, as it turned out, absolutely nothing that will affect her chances of confirmation was said. She will sail through the full Senate, something that was never really in doubt. As with most legislative matters these days, nearly every senator knew how he or she would vote on the nomination moments after it was announced.

Since the unjust use of a confirmation hearing against Robert Bork has meant that a useful Constitutional feature has been denigrated, we can now remove that feature. Call it the Gradual Scuttle Doctrine. Note the willingness to alter Constitutional procedure without amendment. Article 5 has been quite an impediment to Progress.

Consequently, neither side acquitted itself well during the hearings. Frustrated by the inevitability of Kagan’s approval, Republicans resorted to harsh questioning that evoked memories of Democrats’ treatment of John Roberts and Samuel Alito — two Republican nominees who the Democrats were powerless to derail. But the GOP’s tactics were more severe. The Judiciary Committee’s Republican members were actually reduced to shamelessly bashing civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall, whom Kagan clerked for, and focusing on Kagan’s position military recruitment on Harvard’s campus when she was the university law school dean. The ROTC issue, of course, had little connection to Kagan’s judicial temperament. It was a pathetic display.

This article can have a fig leaf of fairness by talking about ‘neither side acquitt[ing] itself well’. Then we lead into making Kagan’s nomination seem inevitable. Juxtapose her with some serious legal talent like Roberts and Alito. Declare one of the chief arguments against her confirmation ‘ha[ving] little connection’ to her judicial temperament. Grade the Republicans ‘pathetic’.

Sadly, Democrats were little better, throwing Kagan softball after softball, content to ease her through to a safe floor vote without pressing her on anything. The low point of the hearings may have come when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota asked Kagan about her affinity for the characters in the vampire movie “Twilight.” Klobuchar’s cringe-inducing questioning was reminiscent of Joe Biden’s hectoring of Alito during his hearing in 2006, when Biden ranted against Alito’s alma mater, Princeton, inanely donning a baseball cap to make his point.

Attack a Democrat. Has she gaffed lately?

For her part, Kagan played the role she undoubtedly rehearsed with her White House handlers, pioneering innovative ways to say nothing by uttering something. Despite once writing that Supreme Court nominees should be candid in their Senate testimony, Kagan did precisely the opposite. Her cynical approach was a perfect fit for what these proceedings have become: pointless charades.

This is sublime! Blame the proceedings themselves for Kagan’s swan dive into the Potomac River of hypocrisy! Why should Elena Kagan, on the cusp of admission into an elect group charged with interpreting the Constitution, follow her own published opinion? All of that Joan of Harvard stuff is for kids. Given the opportunity to show some moxy, the first rule of political moxy is that you talk about political moxy, while showing none.

Naturally, the best thing to do would be to abolish all confirmation hearings and ask nominees to fill out simple written questionnaires. This actually happens already, before the hearings start. But alone, it would be more than sufficient, given that senators generally know how they will vote early on. This wouldn’t force nominees to be as candid as Bork, but frankly, there’s no way to push a nominee to answer difficult questions — especially when the nominees are brilliant lawyers who have made a career by fashioning evasive responses.

Asking the Senate not to showboat whenever possible, Mr. Greenbaum, would be like requiring Elena Kagan to show some political moxy. But this is a good distraction from the question: does Kagan merit appointment to SCOTUS?

Both parties could also agree that, barring extraordinary circumstances, all of a president’s nominees should be sent to the floor. This would expand on the famous 2005 deal carved out by the “Gang of 14,” which ended a long fight over a handful of blocked Bush appellate court nominees, acknowledging once and for all that with judicial nominations, elections have consequences.

So, we can admit en passant that the Democrats are the real choke point here. The question remains: should Kagan be approved? No. A broader question beckons: does this administration constitute ‘extraordinary circumstances’, under which none of the president’s nominees should be sent to the floor? I’ll go yes on that. I daresay the crisis administration is so odious that the Senate Republicans should just call a four month time out, until a more representative Congress can be sworn in.

Ultimately, this might be the biggest underlying issue. Both parties have come to use the confirmations process to stymie the other party’s nominees. This ignores the will of the voters and politicizes the judicial branch of government, which is meant to be free of partisanship. For most of the country’s history, judicial nominees were approved with little controversy. Democrats and Republicans should find a way to return to this arrangement, and could well start by dissolving the public nomination process.

Oh, here is a rich one, to declare the SCOTUS un-politicized and the Kagan nomination as representing the will of the voters. In propaganda mode, though, it is crucial to claim the opposite of any inconvenient fact.

Not that our senators will ever do this. There are few better ways for them to get the national exposure they crave than by sitting on the dais of an overflowing hearing room and playing to the cameras. More important, the judicial wars remain an important issue for the Republican base, and given the party’s rightward movement, elected GOP officials don’t want to give up an easy opportunity to connect with their base.

OK, admit that the notion of dispensing with Constitutional process was a feint to get a reader (I bit). Using confirmation hearings to slam Republicans and their base is an unexpected, elitist twist. We can be sure the Democrats would never, ever do something so crass, except for when they do, which is every time.

So even though last week’s hollow spectacle is behind us, another one just like it is already on the horizon.

Anyone who thinks defending the Constitution from the crypto-Marxists who have been slowly, methodically crushing it since Wilson is a ‘hollow spectacle’ merits a one-way ticket to Venezuela.

Overall, this piece doesn’t reveal a very high fear factor on the Left. Perhaps they’ve already shopped enough GOP support.

Update: Stanley Kutler comes through in a big way over at the Puffington Host, getting raaaaacism right out there in the lede:

Elena Kagan’s confirmation is likely if no other reason than the emptiness of the Republican case against here. Her hearing had, in her own well-chosen words, “an air of vacuity and farce.” Nevertheless, the Republicans scored electoral points and solidified their appeal to those whose hostility toward President Barack Obama is rooted in racial basis.

This was an interesting tangent, as well:

Kagan appeared with impeccable credentials, and with smarts and savvy for running essentially a seminar with the senators. Robert Bork foolishly tried to take the lecture senators as if he were in a classroom, but only succeeded in alienating them. Kagan not only demonstrated a learned and supple mind, she showed herself to be a very human, warm individual, with a sense of humor that provided a few spontaneous moments.

So, why the Republican hostility? Their not-so-subtle uses of the Marshall analogy amounted to stump speeches for the electorate back home. The senators well know their constituents’ hostility toward President Obama has powerful racial overtones that fuel the public anger so calculated for the evening television news. The Thurgood Marshall references amounted to a purposeful, well-orchestrated strategy to fire up the “base.”

I hope to meet Bork in person one day and ask if the narrative mixes cart and horse. I’m curious if he knew the handwriting was on the wall, that he was set to receive some serious character assassination, and didn’t just choose to go down in a blaze of glory.

Charles Johnson Uses Twitter to Push ‘Racist’ Smear of Red State’s Josh Trevino

Posted on Comments

Joshua Trevino is a Texan, former Bush administration official and Republican political consultant. In 2004, he co-founded Red State along with Ben Domenech and Mike Krempasky.

A couple of days ago, Trevino was named among the “Top 25 Conservatives on Twitter.” And it was just about then that Trevino and his colleagues began kicking around a Twitter meme, “I’ve been blogging so long . . .” in which they recounted their memories of the medium’s early days. Two of Trevino’s contributions mentioned Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs:


As night follows day, Trevino’s mention of the LGF Grand Lizard provoked a predictable response:


It seems that no one may criticize Charles Johnson without incurring this kind of  attack. Johnson’s Tweet linked a post he had written in April 2009:

The post Johnson Tweeted referred to an April 2009 article in the Washington Independent by David Weigel, recounting the “civil war” among anti-jihad bloggers that Johnson had instigated:

Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.
“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.” . . .
Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom . . . an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.
“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law . . . Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.
“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU . . .”
“Not only that,” said Bodissey, “he made it harder for certain American anti-jihad groups to raise funds if they failed to repudiate his designated ‘fascist-enablers’ like us.”

This article by Weigel — written in April 2009, I remind you — was the first journalistic recounting of Johnson’s estrangement from his former allies and admirers. And when Trevino responded to it (in a post that Trevino seems subsequently to have deleted), he said this:

Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

Note that second sentence, which Johnson omitted when quoting Trevino at LGF. What Trevino appears to be saying is that he felt Johnson (and Johnson’s anti-jihad comrades) were often too extreme in their rhetoric even before Johnson and LGF turned on Geller, et al. And, as Weigel noted in a follow-up post, Johnson’s qualms about Belgian nationalism hadn’t prevented him from lamenting the banning of Vlaams Blok in November 2004:

While it’s hard to approve of every one of Vlaams Blok’s policies, there’s also no denying that this is very much a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups such as the openly radical, terror-supporting Arab-European League — because almost no one else opposes them.

In November 2004, then, Johnson seemed to “get” that far-right groups like Vlams Blok (a precursor to Vlaams Belang) were quite nearly the only active opponents of the Islamicization of Europe. A year later, in November 2005, when this problem was dramatized by Muslim riots in France, Michelle Malkin linked both LGF and Brussels Journal — the latter of which Charles Johnson, in attacking Josh Trevino, has since declared to be a “racist Website” run by an ally of “neofascists.”

Well, what were Josh Trevino’s contributions to Brussels Journal? Was he fomenting anti-Arab racism or advocating some sort of Blut und Boden nationalism? Not in the least.  His first contribution, in February 2006, was a thoughtful consideration of America’s interest in the fate of Europe. His last article, in April 2009, was a rather highbrow analysis of wartime information strategies. In between, he wrote about multiculturalism, about Christianity, about the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, about the Pope’s visit to Istanbul, about the election of Obama, etc.

Go through the entirety of Trevino’s Brussels Journal archives and see if you find anything that could fairly be described as “racist.” You won’t. 

Whatever the errors of Paul Belien and Brussels Journal (which I haven’t bothered to research), Trevino has not committed them, so that Charles Johnson’s “racist” smear is obviously just that — a cheap guilt-by-association smear. And this is of a piece with Johnson’s recent modus operandi: Declare that Person X or Group Y or Publication Z is “fascist” or “ultra-nationalist” or whatever, and then proceed in connect-the-dots fashion, demanding that others denounce and repudiate the target, or else become tainted by association as an “enabler” or “apologist” for the target.

Johnson’s demand for endless purges against his erstwhile allies very much resembles Josef Stalin during the Moscow “show trials” of the 1930s, in which other Soviet leaders were mercilessly liquidated. In his famous 1956 recounting of Stalin’s crimes, Nikita Kruschev made reference to a 1934 meeting of Communist Party leaders when he said:

It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the Seventeenth Congress, 98 persons, i.e., 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38) . . .

Charles Johnson’s mad hunt for “racists,” which now numbers Joshua Trevino among its targets, is akin to Stalin’s accusations that his Communist comrades were “Trotskyites,” “deviationists” and “saboteurs.”

Students of history will recall that, scarcely a year after these show trials ended, Stalin entered into a treaty with Hitler. Immediately upon the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, those American communists who had loudly repeated Stalin’s anti-fascist slogans during the Popular Front years suddenly fell silent about fascism and began denouncing England and her allies as “warmongers.”

This first communist-led “peace” movement lasted 21 months, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. American communists instantly switched to denouncing pacifists and isolationists (who had been their allies just days before) as de facto allies of Hitler, if not indeed Nazi sympathizers.

It was the peregrinations of the Communist Party USA and its allies in that era — first, the “Popular Front” solidarity against fascism, then the advocacy of “peace” while the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was in effect, and then pro-war militancy after the Soviet Union was invaded — which exposed CPUSA as a subversive tool of Soviet power, rather than an independent political movement.

We return, then, to Trevino’s April 2009 statement that “self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.” Be that as it may, we can at least say that some anti-jihadists have been steadfast and sincere in their opposition to Islamicization and dhimmitude.

By contrast, his former colleagues now recognize Charles Johnson as a self-aggrandizing sociopath who attempted to make himself the Stalin of anti-jihadism, dictating a “party line” to which he demanded that others adhere or else be repudiated. I described how I became aware of Johnson’s jihad against Pamela Geller in an e-mail last week to the Blogmocracy:

It was the day after the 2008 election and Charles Johnson decided that the way to mark the occasion was to lash out at his idee fixe. I called him on it:
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/11/pam-geller-nazi.html

“Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has apparently decided that the problem with the conservative movement is that it needs more purges, and Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs seems to be his designated scapegoat. . . . Pam is a good person and I would suggest that this guilt-by-association ‘urge to purge’ is antithetical to the best interests of conservatism. You can’t build a movement by the process of subtraction.”

Given everything that conservatives had to worry about on Nov. 5, 2008, how did Geller’s association with Belgian nationalists rate such attention?

This is the point, you see: Amid all the woes that afflicted conservatism in November 2008, Johnson made his year-old feud with Geller the top priority. As I also explained to the Blogmocracy:

Johnson can’t tell the difference between his pet peeves and genuine dangers, and people who don’t share his pet peeves are suspected of being in league with the enemy.
I’ve studied Johnson’s modus operandi and, what’s more, I know the type: People who seek to impress others by a pretended expertise, and who become enraged when it is pointed out that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

Read the whole thing. Beware of those who exhibit the “urge to purge,” who are furiously intolerant of disagreement and error, who are so insistent on the infallibility of their own judgment as to demand that anyone who criticizes them must be condemned and ostracized. It is more dangerous to be such a person’s friend than to be their enemy because they will eventually turn their paranoid rage upon their closest allies.

At the time of his death in 1953, Stalin was persecuting suspects accused of complicity in the (wholly imaginary) “doctors plot,” a purge that threatened to implicate even Kruschev, Beria, Malenkov and Molotov. The targets of Stalin’s “doctors plot” purge were mainly Jews.

Sic semper hoc.

UPDATE: Apologies for further extending a long post, but Trevino sends along a link to the post that inspired Johnson’s rage. The weird part? Trevino actually criticized Geller, and wrote:

As a rule of thumb, the policy preferences of the anti-jihadists range from thoughtless support of neoconservatism at best, to strange and unworkable schemes of Muslim exclusion at worst.

True to form, however, rather than seeing in Trevino a potential ally, the narcissistic Johnson only cared that he had been criticized, evidently decided that Trevino was therefore an enemy, and attacked.

Interesting Point From Across The Pond

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Daniel Hannan, British MEP, pondering US independence:

Thomas Jefferson, whose bust stares at me as I write this blog, had wanted to include a touching phrase in the Declaration, but his fellow authors excised it: “We might have been a great and free people together”. Indeed. Everything I have done in politics has been an attempt to apply Jeffersonian principles to British political conditions. Decisions should be taken as closely as possible to those they affect, and decision-makers made accountable through the ballot box. Everything else – autonomous local councils, referendums, recall procedures, tax cuts, withdrawal from the EU, elected sheriffs, the Great Repeal Bill – follows from those two simple precepts.

Rule 5 Sunday

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Independence Day brings forth the patriotic in Rule 5.

Rule 5 Sunday salutes America on her 234th birthday! And, my 6th wedding anniversary.

Jimmie Bise Jr. Explains Why Economic Freedom Makes America Great

Posted on Comments

“Now, those of us who get the origin of wealth understand that prosperity only happens when people own the fruits of their labor. The principle that what you produce belongs to you and you have the absolute right to dispose of it as you wish is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. . . . Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have.”

Gulf Cleanup Pussy Just Pluckered Out

Posted on Comments

by Smitty (via HotAir)

We heard Anderson Cooper’s tale of woe regarding the mostly opaque level of transparency set by the Hopium and Changeeba Administration.

Reacting quickly, and noting that the 65′ First Amendment FTW zone applies to humans, we dispached Sissypuss the Blog Kitty. Sissypuss, we discovered, had been hanging around Philadelphia, thinking to pick up a billet in the New Black Panthers, not realizing there was a slight species issue holding up matters.

An oil-soaked Sissypuss collapses in exhaustion

Sissypuss’s report is shocking:

These jokers just keep on pluckin’ that chicken, seagull, and albatross. If they could but operationalize the leadership vacuum, they could grab all the oil from the plume lickety split. They’re between stages 3 & 4 on the standard project continuum. The guilty, of course, are long gone, and the bag holders know this is the ecological equivalent of an inoperable tumor. So we’re basically going through a ride-it-out ritual. Look for lots of retirements and disappearances from the org chart over the next few weeks.

The certain knowledge that even the stupidest segment of the electorate isn’t going to buy the ‘blame Bush’ shtick is sinking into the remaining apparatchiks. Reality, unlike people, yields poorly to propaganda. If only watching Anderson Cooper’s slow realization that he has sold his soul to Cthulhu could provide some belly laughs.

The US has had enough. The question to play out is whether the current Administration can successfully kneecap the country’s energy production, or whether the Administration is replaced with an organization capable of balancing economic and environmental concerns in a non-suicidal manner.

For a good roundup, see Obi’s Sister.

Update: Whoops! Neglected to link my cat photo source.

Immigration, Assimilation and Sovereignty

Posted on Comments

Michelle Malkin writes about “the unhyphenated, the law-abiding, the gratitude-filled sons and daughters and grandchildren of legal immigrants” and supplies a  brief history of the Founding Fathers’ views on immigration and assimilation.

As I’ve often said, the way liberals (including some Republicans who think they’re conservative) talk about immigration, you might get the idea that Emma Lazarus had written the Constitution. Contrary to nonsensical emotional gush about the “wretched refuse,” the Founders were quite sensible and, dare I say, conservative about immigration.

Above all else, their Lockean understanding of government meant that they understood that politics is about the pursuit of legitimate self-interest. They expressed this without apology in saying that they had ordained the Constitution to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” James Madison explained this principle in Federalist No. 10:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

Nothing could be more predictable, Madison was saying, than that the poor and the rich should disagree in politics, or that farmers and merchants should come into conflict over economic policy. The pursuit of self-interest is perfectly natural and legitimate.

The aim of the Constitution was to establish a national government that was limited and balanced in such a way that no one faction might impose its self-interest on everyone, and that competing factional interests might be reconciled peacefully, without the resentment that favoritism would inspire. Modern liberalism is subversive of those goals in three key ways:

  • Unlimited Federal Power — Throughout the 20th century, liberals strove to undermine the Constitution’s limits on the federal government, centralizing power in Washington and effectively rendering the states mere administrative districts of the whole. This is why our political life has become so polarized and divisive: Whichever faction controls D.C. can now dictate policy everywhere, so that control of the federal government is the only game that matters.
  • Identity Politics — Especially since the 1960s, liberals have sought to divide the population into identity groups, and to exacerbate conflicts between blacks and whites, Latinos and Anglos, women and men, etc. The transparent purpose of this liberal activism is to create a Coalition of the Perpetually Aggrieved as a vehicle to restore the Democratic Party to the political dominance it enjoyed 1933-46.
  • Redistributionist Policies — FDR’s fixer Harry Hopkins once explained the political rationale of the New Deal very bluntly: “We’ve going to tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect, elect, elect.” In other words, “Vote for us, and we’ll tax the rich to give you stuff” — bribing voters with money plundered from the wealthy. Such a policy can only gain political ascendancy by the incitement of economic envy, convincing voters that the wealth of the rich is illegitimate, and that the poor somehow have a right to pick the pockets of the rich. Ronald Reagan described this attitude in 1964: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

Borrowing the terms Thomas Sowell employed in The Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, we might say that liberalism requires the belief that the self-interests of some people (“targets”) are illegitimate, while the self-interests of other people (“mascots”) are sacred. And perhaps nowhere is this attitude more transparently displayed than in liberal rhetoric about immigration.

Liberals evidently believe that the only interest which merits consideration in discussion of immigration policy is the “rights” of immigrants — the scare-quotes necessitated by the dubious nature of the implicit assertion that being born outside the U.S. automatically confers some distinct set of “rights” which (naturally) Americans are accused of scheming to violate.

On what grounds can a Swede or a Somali or a Salvadoran assert any “right” to emigrate to this country? The United States, like every other country in the world, has laws and regulations prescribing the procedures by which people may seek permission to enter as tourists or on business, to become residents, to seek employment, to become naturalized citizens, etc.

 Only by the decision to come here do they become subject to U.S. rules. If they don’t want to abide by these laws and regulations, they can just stay home, with their rights unimpeded — no harm, no foul. Finish this sentence:

The purpose of U.S. immigration law is . . .

C’mon, take a wild guess.

The purpose of U.S. immigration law is to protect the interests of the United States and its citizens.

Liberalism subverts this purpose, by telling us that immigration laws instead are, or ought to be, designed to advance the interests of immigrants. Their interests are legitimate. Your interests are not. 

In this sense, immigration is just another redistribution scheme undertaken for the benefit of another identity group in the Coalition of the Perpetually Aggrieved. If you worry that  illegal immigration harms the United States, liberals want to make you feel guilty for having such concerns. In effect, liberalism tells Americans:

“Screw you. You’re a bunch of greedy, rich, lazy xenophobes who are only concerned about out-of-control immigration because you hate foreigners.”

So you’re a “target,” as Sowell would say, and illegal immigrants are “mascots.” Therefore you have no  interests that are not automatically trumped by the “rights” of illegals, who are presumed to be in need of protection, lest they be victimized by you evil, oppressive Americans. Liberalism sabotages U.S. sovereignty, by attempting to deny Americans the ability to enact and enforce laws that protect our own national interests.

The immigration debate is horribly distorted by this liberal mentality, so that Malkin feels compelled to ask:

Must every response to even the most modest of immigration enforcement measures be “RAAAAACIST”?

Read the whole thing.