Each time the Republicans launch a new hate campaign, over the long haul the targeted group ends up benefitting, and the Republicans end up, well, toxic. The young, who are comfortable with the diversity of modern life, are invariably repelled by the antiquated, bigoted bile that spews forth, and each day another racist old coot tips over, probably while watching Glenn Beck.  One can say that anti-Black racism has enjoyed a resurgence of late, but given that we have an African American President I wouldn’t call it that much of a success over time.  Anti-gay bigotry and the mainstream acceptance of gay rights marched together hand in hand, the former nearly always paradoxically helping the latter, as well.  In so doing, Republicans probably permanently lost the vote of the two groups, by more than 90%-10%, but they considered the effort worth it.

Now, after a decade or more of right-wing demonization of “illegals,” which really just means “brown hordes,” the ever-escalating hate rhetoric of the Republican Noise Machine has driven Arizona to just go ahead and go Nazi, leaving the Republicans in something of a spot.  The media voices from FOX and talk radio will of course want to turn Arizona’s bizarre and race-conscious new law into a mariachi Turner Diaries, whereas politicians who wish to get elected in a darker America simply can’t afford to drop another, much larger and growing, demographic group into the permanent “D” column.  Once again, the Noise Machine, so lovingly tended all these years, has grown into a Little Shop of Horrors man-eater, and Lindsay Graham’s tantrum and John McCain’s pathetic waffling on the subject make clear that Republicans are lying harder than ever to get this thing out of the way, and for good reason.  Republicans just love hate campaigns when they work, electorally at least, but they’ve surely seen how these things have played out in the past, and must have access to Karl Rove’s “math” that showed that with Hispanic votes at Black or gay levels, the Republicans might want to take up golf for something to do.  They’d have hated their way into oblivion.