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Crooks and Liars' David Neiwert Slices, Dices Ruben Navarratte's Latest Work of Fiction

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At Crooks and Liars yesterday, our friend David Neiwert eviscerated columnist Ruben Navarratte’s latest column for trying to rewrite the history and politics of immigration. Dave, who follows the issue very closely, is having none of it. You have to read the whole thing to fully appreciate Dave’s work, but here’s how it begins:

Ruben Navarrette, the conservative Latino columnist who has been struggling for some time with the nature of the beast with which he finds himself in bed, was pondering the other day how — after 71 percent of the Latino vote in the USA went for Barack Obama and other Democrats — Republicans might possibly turn around their image problem with Hispanic voters. They are, after all the demographic time bomb that just went off in the GOP’s face.

In his newest column, he appears to have hit upon the solution: Lie like a dog about Democrats, pretend that the raging nativism in the Republican Party doesn’t exist, and in general invert reality by introducing a new viral right-wing Planet Bizarro meme — to wit, that Democrats are the reason comprehensive immigration reform will run aground in the coming sessions of Congress.

That’s right: In Navarrette’s up-is-down recasting of the immigration universe, the Republican hysterics — led by Rush Limbaugh and the Minuteman faction, who nowadays fancy themselves the Tea Party — who were responsible for shooting down the 2007 immigration-reform bill, having declared it “dead on arrival” at the moment of its introduction — have been airbrushed entirely out of the picture.

But in order to paint a picture of venal Democrats secretly conspiring to keep Latinos in thrall by only pretending to support comprehensive immigration reform, Navarette has to lie. A lot.

Dave doesn’t hold anything back, and he has the facts to back himself up.  Read it all.  Seriously.