Michelle Malkin

As the House is set to vote on the DREAM Act, right wing commentators and politicians are going into overdrive to disparage and vilify the bill. The DREAM Act provides a pathway to legal status to students and military servicemembers to the children of illegal immigrants who were not born in the country. Individuals considered for citizenship under the latest proposal cannot be older than 29; must have lived in the US for at least five consecutive years, have a clean record, and “would limit individuals from being able to sponsor family members for U.S. citizenship, among other changes.” According to the National Immigration Law Center, the bill won’t lead to preferred treatment for illegal immigrants, affect tuition rates, or have an impact on college admission rates.

Michelle Malkin blasted “the entitlement mentality” of students supporting the DREAM Act, as only in the world of right wing fear-mongers like Michelle Malkin can students who lack legal status be considered privileged and entitled:

Open-borders radicalism means never having to apologize for absurd self-contradiction.

The way illegal alien students on college campuses across the country tell it, America is a cruel, selfish and racist nation that has never given them or their families a break. Yet despite their bottomless grievances, they're not going anywhere.

And despite their gripes about being forced "into the shadows," they've been out in the open protesting at media-driven hunger strikes and flooding the airwaves demanding passage of the so-called DREAM Act. This bailout plan would benefit an estimated 2.1 million illegal aliens at an estimated cost of up to $20 billion.

Like Malkin, radio talk show host Roger Hedgecock used bogus figures and claims in his WorldNetDaily tirade against the DREAM Act:

With "comprehensive immigration reform" dead because of voter awareness that this is code speak for blanket amnesty for "undocumented Democrats," the new amnesty is called the DREAM Act. Democrats are determined to push for congressional votes on the DREAM Act this week.

…

As WND reported last week, the cost to taxpayers for the "student amnesty" could reach $44 billion. That's because the estimated 2.1 million new "students" (and it will be many more than this administration estimate) qualify for student assistance under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Republican lawmakers tempted to follow the liberal ethnic group playbook and vote for the DREAM Act to placate Latino radical groups need to look at the actual election results, too.

Iowa Congressman Steve King, who will soon chair the main subcommittee on immigration policy, called the DREAM Act an “affirmative action program for illegals” and said Congress should oppose the law since “sitting in the classroom next to some of them if the DREAM Act passes, will be inevitably a widow or a widower or a son or a daughter of someone who has lost their life in Iraq or Afghanistan defending our liberty and our freedom.”

At lunch yesterday, I was having a conversation with a colleague about the apparent merging of various factions of the right-wing movement under President Obama, noting how right-wing supergroups like the Freedom Federation were bringing together organizations like Concerned Women for American and the Family Research Council with outlets that they had never really aligned themselves with before, like Americans for Prosperity and Morning Star Ministries.

We also commented on the fact that the Heritage Foundation is sponsoring this year's Values Voter Summit, which is a first, as far as we can recall, and that James Dobson has started having people like Rick Scarborough on his radio show, which was also a rather new development.

But I didn't realize how fully integrated the right-wing movement was becoming until I saw this:

This is actually just the first part of a scheduled two part interview. You can listen to part one here or here.

In the post I wrote earlier today about the Right’s incessant use of the fact that David Hamilton worked as a canvasser for ACORN for one month some thirty years ago, I gave credit to obsessive ACORN-hater Michelle Malkin for refusing to take the bait and make a big deal out of the supposed connection.

Of course, just twenty minutes after my post went up, guess what was posted on Malkin’s blog?

This teaches an important lesson: the next time I am inclined to give Malkin credit for anything, I just need exhibit a little patience and wait for her to demonstrate that she doesn’t deserve it.

Somehow, over the course of the last several years, loud voices on the Right have managed to convince huge numbers of Christians in thriving congregations that they are somehow under attack by all things secular -- from progressives, feminists and the culture in general to the government and the courts.

A key technique in this bogus "us-against-them" rabble-rousing is planting the idea that Christians are victimized on every front. Right-wing activists, pundits, and leaders seek to spin any and all developments in a manner that suggests they and all Christians in America are being constantly discriminated against and harassed.

At Vision America’s “The War on Christians and Values Voters” conference in 2006, right-wing activists spent two days telling one another horror stories about how people were supposedly being arrested simply for sharing their faith or losing their jobs for standing up to a government hostile to Christianity, citing ousted Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore and ousted Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt as the two most high-profile examples – Klingenschmitt ever went so far as to compare himself to Abdul Rahman, the man who faced a potential death sentence for converting to Christianity in Afghanistan.

Since then, the idea that Christians are under attack has been a standard rallying cry for the Right, cropping up most recently in their opposition to hate crimes legislation which they claim will lead to “open persecution” of Christians and pastors being dragged from the pulpit and thrown in jail.

So ingrained has this idea become on the Right that they are always on the look-out for new evidence that Christians are being victimized – and columnist, pundit, and blogger Michelle Malkin claims to have found the latest example in the group of South Korean Christians being held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan:  

Across Asia, media coverage is 24/7. Strangers have held nightly prayer vigils. But the human rights crowd in America has been largely AWOL. And so has most of our mainstream media. Among some of the secular elite, no doubt, is a blame-the-victim apathy: The missionaries deserved what they got. What were they thinking bringing their message of faith to a war zone? Didn't they know they were sitting ducks for Muslim head-choppers whose idea of evangelism is "convert or die"?

I noted the media shoulder-shrugging about jihadist targeting of Christian missionaries five years ago during the kidnapping and murder of American Christian missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham in the Philippines. The silence is rooted in viewing committed Christians as alien others. At best, there is a collective callousness. At worst, there is outright contempt -- from Ted Turner's reference to Catholics as "Jesus freaks" to CBS producer Roxanne Russell's casual insult of former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer as "the little nut from the Christian group" to the mockery of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormon faith.

So the fact that media coverage has been round-the-clock in Asian nations but not round-the-clock here in the US has less to do with the fact the victims are, you know, from South Korea than it does with the fact that US media is openly hostile to Christians? 

You really have to marvel at the Right’s ability to use the kidnapping and murder of South Korean Christians in Afghanistan in order to suggest that it is really Christians here in America that are under attack.