This morning, FOX & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade featured Phil Kent of Americans for Immigration Control (AIC) — a designated hate group — to help promote the myth that undocumented immigrants will receive taxpayer-funded health care if health care reform passes. Kent also took the opportunity to insist that cracking down on undocumented immigrants won’t alienate Latino voters — a claim which was widely discredited last November:

KENT: The mask has fallen and the liberals actually want have the illegal immigrants to get the health care. And of course who’s this going to hurt? It’s going to hurt seniors and baby boomers. The care will be rationed on their end so they can cover on the other end the illegal immigrants. That’s the tool — that’s the force the Democratic Party wants to have as citizens and voters.

KILMEADE: Is the theme then if you start alienating — if you start cracking down on illegals you lose the Hispanic vote and the Democrats will not be caught doing that?

KENT: That’s the biggest myth of all of this illegal immigration problem. Polls consistently show — black, white, liberal, conservative, Anglo, Hispanic — everybody wants illegal immigration stopped period. End of discussion.

Watch it:

That might be the end of a discussion between a reporter who complained that Americans keep “marrying other species and other ethnics” and a spokesperson whose Executive Director claims that America is plagued by “europhobia” — racism that “targets Americans of European descent.” However, there’s a lot more to the debate that they left out. To begin with, both the House and Senate bills explicitly exclude undocumented immigrants. And while Kilmeade and Kent moan and groan about Democrats voting down amendments that proposed stringent verification mechanisms, the lawmakers actually had other reasons in mind.

In the House, the Heller Amendment would have given private insurance providers unprecedented access to the sensitive income and identity information, and the Deal Amendment would have “narrowed the categories” of legal immigrants who would be eligible for benefits. The language of the House bill currently suggests that the Health Choices Commissioner will be in charge of establishing a verification mechanism after the bill is passed, so that the one chosen best matches the finalized underlying process for receiving benefits. Given the stage that the health care debate is currently in, it’s actually too early to say at all whether lawmakers will ultimately accept or deny the inclusion of a verification mechanism during the legislative process in the first place.

Kent acts as if he’s looking out for the interests of seniors and baby boomers, but his organization is ultimately more preoccupied with safeguarding the “the racial and cultural composition of the United States.” Otherwise, he’d be more worried about Medicaid’s strict verification requirements which have cost taxpayers millions of dollars, blocked thousands of eligible citizens from receiving benefits, and netted only a few undocumented immigrants. AIC is the 501(c)(4) arm of the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF). Kent is a spokesperson for AIC and sits on the board of AICF which is headed by John Vinson — a founding member of the white supremacist League of the South who has called for the “secession of the former Confederate states in order to protect the racial purity and economic viability of the white middle class.”

It’s not surprising that Kent and his hate group are so out of touch with the American people that they think demonizing immigrants through antagonistic policies and vicious vitriol won’t cost politicians any votes when in fact it has already cost Republicans multiple elections. Most Americans from all different backgrounds do want something done about immigration — but in the form of legislation that legalizes the undocumented workforce and requires them to pay taxes; levels the playing field for workers and employers; and restores the rule of law.

David Broder’s argument against an investigation of Bush administration torture practices seems to me to be the definition of elite corruption:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

I think it is that kind of prospect that led President Obama to state that he was opposed to invoking the criminal justice system, even as he gave Holder the authority to decide the question for himself. Obama’s argument has been that he has made the decision to change policy and bring the practices clearly within constitutional bounds — and that should be sufficient.

In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

As if trying to discredit himself, Broder writes this after admitting that he “had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and…called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.” The U.S. also faced huge challenges at those time — and the alleged criminality of the Bush administration far surpasses Nixon’s, and is obviously of a far more serious nature than Clinton’s philandering.

As a purely legal question, it is, of course, not nearly “sufficient” that President Obama has reaffirmed U.S. obligations against torture. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse wrote, “the Bush administration has admitted to waterboarding captives. The corpus delicti of that crime exists. For there to be investigation now is unexceptional.”

The only exceptional thing is the parties involved: the former vice president of the United States, his counsel David Addington, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo and their private contractors Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, psychologists who designed the torture program. But in America, high office does not put one outside the law. Indeed, it borders on unethical for a prosecutor to refuse to investigate the corpus delicti of a crime because of concern as to where the evidence may lead.

Given the evidence that’s already public, there’s little question that a wider investigation is warranted. While it’s true that such an investigation could and probably would create serious political difficulties, that in and of itself is no reason to avoid one. Broder’s argument against a wider investigation — which even he seems to recognize is warranted — is that it would create a whole big ugly, untidy scene in front of the kids.