Recently, tea party profiteer and FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey has taken a more vocal stance against anti-immigrant rhetoric. In an interview with Charlie Rose that aired late last week, Armey went as far as to list former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) as representing part of the “tea party tent” that he feels “uncomfortable” with due to his “harsh and uncharitable and mean-spirited” immigration positions:

ARMEY: I tell you, I was for example not really happy to see Tom Tancredo calling himself a tea party guy.

ROSE: Because?

ARMEY: His harsh and uncharitable and mean-spirited attitude on the immigration issue.

ROSE: But what do you say to that? Do you speak out against that?

ARMEY: Absolutely have, and I’ve taken a lot of heat for it too. But first of all, we’re a nation of immigrants and a wonderful tradition. People have marched with their feet to America looking for freedom. Our biggest problem in immigration is we have a dysfunctional INS. If the government would do its job with some degree of efficiency –

ROSE: So the enforcement idea is what you would like to see more?

ARMEY: I mean look you drive by any INS office in America, and the one I see is mostly in Dallas, Texas. At 5:00 in the morning you see a line of four blocks long of people who want to be here and be here legally that are having the window slammed in their face and callous indifference by an inept agency.

Watch it:

In 2006, Armey referred to Tancredo as the “cheerleader of jerkiness in the immigration debate.” Nowadays Armey has to worry about Tancredo associating himself and his immigration jerkiness with a movement that Armey credits himself with creating. Tancredo isn’t Armey’s only problem. The anti-immigrant group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC has started urging its members to attack Armey’s immigration position and make their voices heard. According to ALIPAC, Armey has been fighting to “keep the illegal immigration issue out of the Tea Party movement.”

Armey shouldn’t be surprised. The Southern Poverty Law Center warned that hate groups and “nativist extremists” would begin exploiting the anger of tea baggers in an effort to recruit more hateful supporters. While it might seem that Armey would be glad to receive tea baggers of any kind, the long-term viability of the right-wing movement largely rests on its ability to embrace a more inclusive immigration approach and score much-needed political points with the growing Latino electorate. The majority of Americans, including Republicans and independents, support a solution to the nation’s broken immigration system that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Chances are, many would also be turned off by ALIPAC and Tancredo’s impractical “deport them all” strategy and nativist vitriol.

As he identified other groups he’d like to see kicked out of his tea party tent, Armey also described the LaRouchers as “an embarrassment” and the John Birch Society as “historically” having a “good deal of people that have regretted them.”

Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Face the Nation yesterday stating his view that Gitmo and waterboarding make Americans less safe:

GRAHAM: We will never win this war until we understand the effect that Guantanamo Bay has had on the overall war effort.[...]

One reason it drives my train, I know how images are used against our troops in the Mideast. When you talk about waterboarding here at home, it may get some applause and make you feel good and make you feel tough, but it spreads like wildfire in the Mideast. If you’re a young soldier walking the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq, you’ve just been put in danger.

It says a lot about the state of American conservatism that his opposition to waterboard torture and support for closing Guantanamo Bay prison is enough to make Graham a “moderate.”

but while it’s great that Graham, unlike the majority of the GOP, agrees with our top military commanders that waterboarding and Gitmo hurt American national security, unfortunately Graham also shares the Cheneyite obsession with being “at war,” something he repeatedly came back to in yesterday’s interview:

The president is getting unholy grief from the left, but Bob, I think we’re at war. [...]

We need a legal system that gives due process to the detainee, but also understands they didn’t rob a liquor store. We’re at war, and some of this information is very sensitive and classified. [...]

We have got to win this war within our values system, but understand that it’s a war. [...]

[W]hen you talk about closing Gitmo or giving these guys constitutional rights as an American citizen and losing the fact that we’re at war and reading them their Miranda rights as soon as we capture them, you lose the American people.

We are at war in Afghanistan. We are at war in Iraq, though thankfully bringing that to an overdue end. But this whole “we’re at war” against “the terrorists” thing is so 2002. Lots of people who do things worse than “rob a liquor store” get tried in civilian court. Mass murderers, for example — like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. He and his cohorts are not soldiers, and don’t deserve the recognition that being treated as “combatants” bestows.

Former General Wesley Clarke wrote in 2007 that, by treating such terrorists as combatants, “we accord them a mark of respect and dignify their acts.”

And we undercut our own efforts against them in the process. Al Qaeda represents no state, nor does it carry out any of a state’s responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens. Labeling its members as combatants elevates its cause and gives Al Qaeda an undeserved status.

If we are to defeat terrorists across the globe, we must do everything possible to deny legitimacy to their aims and means, and gain legitimacy for ourselves.

Being “at war” with terrorism obviously plays to Republican political advantage, but I’ve never heard Graham, or anyone, explain what being “at war” actually gains the U.S. in terms of practical advantage against terrorists. The evidence suggests that, like Gitmo and waterboarding, framing America’s anti-terrorism efforts as a “war” actually hampers those efforts by bolstering the legitimacy of those we should be seeking to discredit.

A 2008 RAND study confirmed Clarke’s view, concluding that the use of “at war” terminology for counter-terrorism efforts actually “encourages others [extremists] abroad” and “elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors.” RAND’s analysis of the data also suggested that the “at war” approach “alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment.”

The “at war” approach elevates terrorists’ status and complicates partnerships with governments whose populations are understandably unenthusiastic about their countries being transformed into new fronts in America’s war. On the upside… well, I’m not really sure what the upside of this approach is, other than helping Republicans win elections.