Earlier today, while former National Republican Congressional Committee communications director Karen Hanretty and former Dick Gephart campaign manager Steve Murphy agreed that more enforcement measures should be put in place to make sure undocumented immigrants don’t benefit from health care reform, Fox News anchor Greg Jarrett took a more practical stance. Hanretty, who is opposed to even letting undocumented immigrants purchase health insurance with their own money at full cost, was in accord with Murphy who would like to see the government “expand the background check” on undocumented immigrants in the workplace. Jarrett pointed out that it doesn’t really make sense to hurt American taxpayers out of a spitefully stubborn commitment to making undocumented immigrants suffer:

HANRETTY: What this represents are two really big problems that this White House has. First of all, the idea that Democrats are out there suggesting that this particular health care bill should provide health care to illegal immigrants flies in the face of what President Obama said.

JARRETT: Let me just stop you there. Two points to be made. First of all, the government isn’t going to pay for it. The illegals would have to pay for it themselves. We would simply allow them access to it. And second of all, taxpayers, in the long run, would save money. Now, I gotta tell ya, I betcha most of our viewers right now are saying — wait, I can save money? That’s worth exploring.

HANRETTY: Your viewers are not saying that. I wish we had a live poll right now. I guarantee you that if you went out there right now and polled the American public and said should we allow illegal immigrants to buy into a government health care program, there would be a resounding no throughout America. This is a political noose around the necks of Democrats.

MURPHY: I completely agree. We’re not going to allow illegal immigrants to buy into this health care plan. So we should simply expand the background check into a universal background check and solve the problem once and for all…

HANRETTY: I can agree with Steve on on that.

JARRETT: I can’t believe you guys agree and I disagree. I’m on the side of taxpayers saving money.

Watch it:

He may be outnumbered, but Jarrett is actually right. As Christopher Beam of Slate points out, taxpayers are already paying for undocumented immigrants to get health care, but in the least efficient way. Currently, sick undocumented immigrants (or anyone else who’s uninsured) have little recourse other than the emergency room. That means that minor and treatable conditions are neglected until the patient is at death’s door. It also means that taxpayers pay millions and millions of dollars for costly emergency visits that could have been prevented. Furthermore, if undocumented immigrants were allowed to participate in the exchange and purchase affordable private health insurance at full cost with their own money, it would also pool risks and lower the premiums of everyone else participating in the health care system. Most immigrants are healthier and incur less health costs than US citizens, so their self-financed participation wouldn’t just save money, it would make health care cheaper for those who need it.

Murphy’s proposal to drag employment verification into the health care debate would involve sidetracking health care reform with a conversation about how to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. Most lawmakers who discuss something along the lines of a “universal background check” are referring to some sort of national ID system like the one tenuously set up by the REAL ID Act, or a web-based verification system like E-Verify. REAL ID might be repealed, and E-Verify is estimated to have a 4% error rate which could accidentally leave millions of US citizens not only uninsured, but also unemployed.

Besides the purely sensible argument there is to be made against denying consumers the ability to purchase something they need and are willing to pay for, ultimately, there’s also a humanitarian argument to be made in favor of providing affordable health care to those who need it. However, regardless of whether lawmakers want to make the lives of undocumented immigrants easier or harder, the debate should take place in the context of immigration reform instead of being used as a wedge to weaken and block health care legislation. Though it should be noted that in the case of health care and beyond, the more undocumented immigrants are brought into the system, the more they will be allowed to contribute to it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of Sen. John “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain’s favorite bons mots was that “There is only one thing worse than military action [against Iran], and that is a nuclear armed Iran.” As with so much else that McCain said during that campaign, it’s really not clear that this is actually true, but its tone of belligerence posing as analysis was very much in keeping with the sort of “tough and stupid” foreign policy that Fareed Zakaria refers to in his op-ed this morning. (“Tough and stupid” was, I believe, one of the taglines originally considered for The Weekly Standard.)

For all the conservative bluster being leveled at Obama’s engagement policy, you’d think that we hadn’t actually just come off of eight years wherein their ideas were tried and shown to be a complete failure, but of course we have. The administration of George W. Bush, especially its first four years, was about as pure an application of hard line conservative foreign policy principles as one could ever hope for, and it was a disaster. It resulted in an Iran that was far more dominated by hardliners, far less inclined to compromise, in a far more secure and influential position in the region, and much closer to a nuclear weapons capability.

Former ambassador John Bolton, who works in this vein of clueless conservative bluster the way some artists work in oils or watercolors, told Fox News this morning that “the only real way to be sure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, unfortunately, is the unhappy alternative of military force against its nuclear program.”

I don’t see the Obama administration doing that. I think that leaves the decision with Israel. I think President Obama is committed to diplomacy and I think the outcome of that strategy is a world where Iran has nuclear weapons.

As with McCain’s claim about nuclear Iran, Bolton’s isn’t true either. Military strikes would not ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, they would, in even the best case scenario, merely delay it. But what’s more disturbing is the way Bolton raises, with obvious relish, the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, something that is becoming increasingly common among the Cheneyite set.

In an op-ed on Saturday, Anthony Cordesman focused on the difficulties that the Israelis would face in a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities (as well as the difficulties that Iran would create for itself by choosing to create a nuclear weapon.) What Cordesman doesn’t discuss, and what has been far too little discussed in the debate over how best to deal with Iran, are the likely consequences that a military strike on Iran would have for the region, and the world.

During remarks at the New America Foundation earlier this month, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni gave a very good — and chilling — overview of those consequences. Zinni said that he liked to respond to advocates of such strikes with “And then what?”

After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles, the [unclear] full of mines, and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? The MOIS, the intelligence service — what happens if another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S. and Israel, they fire up the streets and now we got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, okay?

Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.

The Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour has also said that he thinks that “Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would actually welcome a military strike; it may be their only hope to silence popular dissent and heal internal political rifts.” It’s hard to think of a more efficient way to extinguish Iran’s reform movement than by either an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.

These are, to say the least, very serious consequences. But given the way they have resolutely ignored the catastrophe that ensued the last time their foreign policy ideas were tried, we probably shouldn’t expect conservatives to honestly address them as they prepare the ground for their latest war.

On Saturday, Mike Huckabee gave the keynote address at Phyllis Schlafly’s How To Take Back America conference. Huckabee praised Schafly, calling her book “Choice not an Echo” an inspiration when he was a teenager.

Huckabee spent a considerable amount of his address railing against the United Nations, calling it the “international equivalent of ACORN” and demanding that America should withdraw. As Dave Weigel noted, the crowd greeted Huckabee’s anti-UN rhetoric with a standing ovation:

HUCKABEE: It’s time to get a jackhammer and to simply chip that part of New York City. Let it float into the East River, never to be seen again. [STANDING OVATION] [...]

It’s time to say enough of the American taxpayer dollar being spent that may have had a noble idea, but it has become a disgrace. It has become the international equivalent of ACORN, and it’s time to say enough.

Listen here:

The UN and other international diplomatic organizations have been a popular boogieman for Huckabee and his followers for years. During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee scored the endorsement of evangelical leader Rev. Tim LaHaye, whose books predict that the end-times will be accelerated by the secretary-general of the United Nations. During the campaign, Huckabee also — falsely — boasted that he had been consulted on foreign policy by John Bolton, who has made a career out of bashing the UN.

In August, Huckabee traveled to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and rejected a two-state solution. As Matthew Yglesias has noted, Huckabee also called for an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to be removed from the region.