Erin Rosa of Campus Progress reports that NumbersUSA, a “mainstream” immigration restrictionist group with troublesome ties to hate groups, hosted a public conference call last night to discuss “a variety of tactics to thwart an upcoming march on Washington DC by immigrant rights supporters.” One tactic proposed on the call involves portraying women from Mexico as the “new welfare queens”:

CALLER 1: I would like to speak out on something. I feel the new welfare queen in America today is women coming from Mexico with a bunch of babies. So I feel they’re all coming over here and having all these babies, they are the new welfare queen in America….

New people in America today with a lot of babies, ’cause they coming from Mexico having a bunch of babies. And our tax dollars is taking care of them babies, ’cause the mothers are illegal. So to me, we need to speak out about letting them know they’re the new welfare queens in America.

CALLER 2: That was well said brother!

MACDONALD: We will make a note of that. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER 3: One piece of information would be, they aren’t babies, they’re dependents. Don’t use babies. It’s emotional to them. They have dependents. We have babies.

Callers also complained that tea party organizers are “for the illegals.” Despite acknowledging that FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey funds and inspired the movement itself, Armey was dismissed as not being a “true Tea Party patriot” due to his pro-immigration views. Another caller indicated that tea party organizers specifically asked her to put immigration within the movement’s focus — limited taxation — and asked for more advice on “putting it in their terms.” Roy Beck, Executive Director, responded that “we’ll be a whole lot better off if when [sic] we talk about illegal immigrants we leave off the Hispanic-Latino stuff” and agreed that the tea party’s narrative was the “best way to talk about this.”

However, as long Beck as counts on the support of activists who want to equate Mexican mothers with welfare queens, he may have a hard time disassociating his movement from the “Hispanic-Latino stuff.” It says a lot when even Armey perceives anti-immigrant groups as toxic. With his eye quietly on the growing Latino electorate, Armey has explicitly stated that he’s not interested in associating with folks like former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), citing his “harsh and uncharitable and mean-spirited” immigration positions as his number one reason.

Armey isn’t alone. Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) and Fox News host Glenn Beck are two tea party darlings who have also expressed a need for a more humane immigration policy. Nonetheless, anti-immigrant nativists have done their best to exploit the tea bagger rage that folks like Armey, Palin, and Beck have nurtured. As a result, groups like NumbersUSA have achieved at least some success in recruiting a number of vocal supporters who seek to define both immigrants and “tea party patriots” on their own terms.

Coinciding as it does with the backlash against Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney’s shameful Karl Rove-style attacks on the Department of Justice, the release of Karl Rove’s spin-tastic memoir provides an opportunity to remember the central lesson that Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, and Liz Cheney learned from 9/11: 9/11 is good for Republicans.

In a 2007 article analyzing Rove’s failure to create a durable Republican majority, John Judis wrote that Rove’s focus on expanding the Republican base did contribute to Bush’s victory in 2004, but, in both 2002 and 2004, it took second place to the effect of the September 11 attacks, which scared the hell out of the American people”:”

As political psychologists have recently discovered… that fear made Americans more susceptible to the kind of charismatic appeal Bush could provide. It also widened and deepened the appeal of social conservatism. What Rove did was to recognize the full extent to which Bush and the Republicans could politically take advantage of this fear. [...]

As Rove explained in a January 2002 address to a Republican luncheon in Austin, “We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America. Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe.” [...]

Without September 11, Rove would not have had a base to expand or constituencies to target. Republicans would have been faced with an electorate that was moving to the center-just as it had begun to do in 2000-and would have had to fight for the voters in the middle. As it was, the electorate of 2004 split roughly in half, and the Republican half was sustained chiefly by the spell cast by September 11. As voters’ perceptions of the war on terrorism vied with their growing awareness of the disaster in Iraq, the spell began to lift, and what Rove took to be a permanent majority began to disintegrate.

Rove understood fairly quickly, as Cheney and Kristol and the current GOP leadership also understand, that Keeping America Scared is essential to preserving Republican political power — even if that means affirming Al Qaeda’s own propaganda in the process. On the actual national security substance, the Rove-Cheney-Kristol faction lost the debate over the war on terror. They’re now trying to win the political debate through blatant fear-mongering and McCarthyism. Unfortunately, thanks both to the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats who seem unable to take their own side in an argument, they seem to be making progress in that debate.