Posts on Lou Dobbs

As Chip noted earlier, there is nothing like opening the Values Voter Summit with Lou Dobbs blasting the "liberal bias of the national media" for supposedly savaging Sarah Palin, then mocking celebrities like Matt Damon, before confessing that he's a "petty and venal person" and saying that Keith Olbermann is "hanging by a highly medicated string" ... before threatening him:

Good as You has more.

Newscaster Lou Dobbs, known for his fiery anti-immigrant stance, primarily presented a calm and placid speech to the 2008 Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC this morning. Avoiding immigration, Dobbs targeted "orthodoxy" in the "liberal media," stating that the exclusion of the views of people of faith in the media was "outright censorship." Dobbs also was critical of Hollywood stars who were attacking Repulican VP candidate Sarah Palin.

“We're going to win South Carolina,” said a confident Mike Huckabee last week, even as he saw his solid lead in the polls dissipating. Perhaps hoping to broaden his base beyond those looking to elect pastor-in-chief, Huckabee is once again repositioning himself further to the right on immigration.

Huckabee’s first rightward stab on immigration last month caused quite a bit of confusion. He adopted a plan from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies and announced the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minutemen. Dozens of anti-immigrant activists soon denounced Gilchrist’s endorsement—Chris Simcox, the other Minutemen co-founder, called Huckabee’s plan “duplicitous.”

Last week, Huckabee made another attempt by convincing Gilchrist that he supported a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship. This, too, was met with confusion, as Huckabee quickly denied that he would push such an amendment, but left open the claim that he would advocate a fringe interpretation that simply writes it out of the Constitution.

Now Huckabee has signed a “no amnesty” pledge from another right-wing group, Numbers USA (through its advocacy arm Americans for Better Immigration). From the Washington Times:

The pledge, offered by immigration control advocacy group Numbers USA, commits Mr. Huckabee to oppose a new path to citizenship for current illegal aliens and to cut the number of illegal aliens already in the country through attrition by law enforcement — something Mr. Huckabee said he will achieve through his nine-point immigration plan. …

yesterday's pledge — signed at a press conference with Numbers USA Executive Director Roy Beck — was an effort to provide answers. It's a major reversal from less than two months ago, when Mr. Beck told The Washington Times that Mr. Huckabee was "an absolute disaster" on immigration during his time as governor. Americans for Better Immigration, another group Mr. Beck runs, has rated Mr. Huckabee's record as "poor." …

But Mr. Beck yesterday said Mr. Huckabee has made a number of key promises going forward, including to not grant illegal aliens long-term legal status; to reject a guaranteed right of return for those who go home voluntarily under his nine-point plan; and to not increase green cards as a way of allowing them to come back more quickly.

"Probably, this is the strongest no-amnesty, attrition plan of any of the candidates," Mr. Beck said.

And as part of a tag-team effort, Gilchrist is back defending his endorsement, similarly promising that Huckabee supports “no amnesty whatsoever.”

These efforts may help Huckabee in South Carolina against John McCain, who continues to take heat for supporting comprehensive immigration reform in the past. But they are still not enough to convince William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, who has been a leading anti-immigrant critic of Huckabee. Gheen has launched an attempt to draft Lou Dobbs, the CNN host with some far-right views on immigration, as a candidate. The dim possibility of a Dobbs candidacy was talked about back in November, but Gheen said his group is prepared to “camp outside his office” to make it happen.

According to the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, what it needs is Lou Dobbs.

Fake news host Stephen Colbert couldn’t get his presidential campaign off the ground. Will real news host Lou Dobbs make the cut? In an online commentary last week, the populist CNN host, who has come to be the television voice of the anti-immigrant movement, wrote:

I believe that independent Americans will demand a far better choice than any of the candidates now seeking their party's nomination. I believe next November's surprise will be the election of a man or woman of great character, vision and accomplishment, a candidate who has not yet entered the race.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, Dobbs is talking about himself as that candidate, on a third- or even fourth-party ticket. (Via Ross Douthat.)

If the Family Research Council intended its Values Voter Summit to be a demonstration of the persevering influence of the Religious Right on the Republican Party, the group can claim some success: “all 9 major Republican candidates” came to pander to the activists, as they have for most of the past year. And, despite the best efforts of Gary Bauer to cool the waters, some leaders still hold out their threat to bolt the party—and, we are to presume, sabotage the election—if fellow Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani. “[T]his is not a bluff. If Giuliani is the nominee there will be a third party,” Richard Land told Newsweek this week.

So what in the world is an FRC senior fellow doing claiming that a totally different right-wing faction will “decide” the 2008 election?

Christopher Gacek, writing in the Politico, identifies “Lou Dobbs voters” as the critical bloc, the politics of whom

are still fluid, because neither party has moved to gain their support. The Democrats are too busy kowtowing to immigration interest groups as they look to import future voting blocs, and the Republicans are too beholden to big business globalists, trade ideologues and open-border libertarians.

If the CNN host is indeed their spokesman, we can probably pin them down as people worried about immigrants starting a leprosy epidemic, immigrants attempting to “reconquer” western states for Mexico, and of course, the secret plan to create a North American Union.

“If you continue to believe that the illegal alien invasion is the biggest threat to America, you will never understand that there is something far more dangerous to our country called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” said Daneen Peterson at a small rally in Washington, D.C. last Friday. Peterson explained that “the overwhelming human tsunami of illegal aliens and MS-13 gang members” will cause “complete anarchy,” which in turn will “allow the shadow government to step forward and visibly take over this country. They will use martial law to install a fascist One World Order, dictatorial government in plain sight instead of operating clandestinely as they do now."

Peterson’s warning is familiar to a significant faction of the anti-immigrant movement, who believe that President Bush, an obscure college professor, and the Council on Foreign Relations are secretly plotting to create a European Union-style government in North America. While the supposedly well-advanced march to a “North American Union,” featuring a new flag and a unified “Amero” currency, has not been taken seriously outside of far-right and nativist web sites and news sources, the theory has had major backing from “Swift Vet” co-author Jerome Corsi, CNN host Lou Dobbs, Phyllis Schlafly, Judicial Watch, Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and the grandfather of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, the John Birch Society.

And while Peterson called the immigration debate a “diversion” from the “North American Union” scheme, many activists see them as of a piece: Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia), who has introduced a resolution to oppose the vaporous plot, has also stated that immigration reform is just the first step: “It will lead us on a path to likely have a North American currency, will further break down the borders between our countries, and it really undermines the concept of the United States of America in favor of something called North America.”