McCain is back to supporting amnesty

Michelle Malkin reminds us that she wrote this on January 23, 2008:

After spearheading a disastrous, security-undermining illegal alien amnesty bill last year with Teddy Kennedy, “straight-talking” GOP Sen. John McCain claims he has seen the light. In TV appearances, he vows to put immigration enforcement first. On the campaign trail, he offers a perfunctory promise to strengthen border security and emphasizes the need to restore Americans’ trust in their government’s ability to defend the homeland.

“I got the message,” he told voters in South Carolina. “We will secure the borders first.”

But how can McCain cure citizens’ distrust when his own credibility on the issue remains fatally damaged? He doesn’t believe his own election-year spin. And he knows we know it. This is cynicism on steroids with a speedball chaser.

Not all of us have forgotten how the short-fused Arizona senator cursed good-faith opponents in his own party (“F**k you!” and “Chickensh*t” were the choice words he had for Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn during a spat over enforcement provisions). Not all of us have forgotten that he voted against barring felons from receiving amnesty benefits under his plan. Not all of us have forgotten the underhanded, debate-sabotaging manner in which McCain/Kennedy/Graham/Harry Reid conspired to ram their package down voters’ throats.

His admission of the shamnesty failure is grudging and bitter. While he now tells conservative voters what they want to hear about the need to build the southern border fence, he takes a contemptuous tone toward physical barriers when talking to businessmen. “By the way, I think the fence is least effective,” he told executives in Milwaukee, according to a recent Vanity Fair profile. “But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.” Straight talk? Try hate talk.

For all his supposed, newfound enlightenment about what most Americans want—protection against invasion, commitment to the rule of law, meaningful employer sanctions, an end to sanctuary cities, enforcement-by-attrition plus deportation reform, and an end to special illegal alien benefits that invite more law-breaking–The Maverick remains a Geraldo Rivera Republican. Like the ethnocentric cable TV host who can’t string a sentence about immigration together without drowning in emotional demagoguery, McCain naturally resorts to open-borders platitudes when pressed for enforcement specifics.

She then goes on to note that McCain has reneged on his pledge to oppose amnesty and support a stand-alone border security bill:

And, now, straight from the campaign trail with Arnold “Move Left” Schwarzenegger, McCain has shed every last pretense that he “got the message” from grass-roots immigration enforcement proponents and is back to his full, open-borders shamnesty push. No surprise to any of you. But his complete regression back to the “comprehensive immigration reform” euphemism is a notable milestone.

Here is the question that all of you McCain kool-aid drinkers have to ask yourself. If McCain can't even pretend to be a conservative until this November then what is he going to be like after next January, assuming that he wins the election?

Is there anyone out there who still thinks that McCain is going to be some kind of "bulwark" against the Left?

PS - How long do you suppose that it will take McCain to call Malkin an "Asian whore"?