In November, President Obama and NATO proposed a new timetable for the end of combat missions in Afghanistan. The White House has said it will begin a gradual withdrawal starting in in July of this year. According to an Afghanistan Study Group survey, two-thirds of Tea Party voters believe that “Washington should reduce troop levels in Afghanistan or withdraw from the region altogether as soon as possible.” 67 percent of Tea Party supporters worried that the war would hamper deficit reduction.

However, after a weekend trip in Afghanistan to be wooed “away from the Tea Party” by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Tea Party victors Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have all decided to ignore the Tea Party and rebuke the idea of any timetable for withdrawal as “artificial”:

– Toomey: Though a “budget hawk” elected on platform of less wasteful spending, Toomey said that, “despite record budget deficits, a skeptical public and corruption within the Afghanistan’s government, the United States can’t afford to shortchange the war effort.” “This is the country from which al-Qaida launched the most devastating attack on America since World War II. The Taliban wants to take control again. Al-Qaida wants to have a safe haven. And that’s what would happen, I’m afraid, if we had a precipitous withdrawal,” Toomey said in Kabul.

– Ayotte: Supporting President Obama and NATO’s withdrawal date of late 2014 as an “aspirational goal,” Ayotte told reporters that “having now been here and visited, an artificial time line for withdrawal is not something we should have. … We’re making progress here and that [sic] we should obviously continue to assess the conditions on the ground.”

–Johnson: While the trip left Johnson “extremely optimistic” about U.S. progress in Afghanistan, the Wisconsin senator said “it was a mistake to announce a withdrawal timetable of 2014.” “We cannot set artificial deadlines,” he said in a conference call. “We’ve got to be committed to this.”

– Rubio: Though believing the U.S. is “on the timeline this year to have some real good news and make some significant progress” in Afghanistan, Rubio rebuked NATO’s withdrawal timeline for U.S. troops as “artificial.” “I think if you attach a date to it…you are really creating a difficult situation. The bad guys, the Taliban and even al-Qaida, must know all they have to do is wait.”

While Ayotte supported a withdrawal timetable as a candidate, it appears she is now reversing her stance, even though a timetable is supported by Gen. David Petraeus, the Pentagon, and NATO forces.

For all their anti-spending rhetoric, these senators’ desire to stay longer in Afghanistan would significantly expand the deficit. As it stands, both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have cost the U.S. over $1.21 trillion and could top $1.3 trillion in FY2011.

Last Friday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) addressed the 2011 Inaugural Conference of the Hispanic Leadership Network — an event that was “billed” as a forum for the 2012 Republican presidential field to speak directly to Latino voters. The main topic of Cornyn’s speech was immigration. Rather than taking responsibility for his party’s obstructionism on the issue, Cornyn proceeded to lay all of the blame for the lack of immigration reform squarely at the feet of President Obama and the Democratic Congress:

They [Democrats] have controlled Congress for four years, have occupied the White House for two years, and yet they’ve broken every promise to lead on immigration reform. During his campaign, President Obama promised both LULAC and the National Council of La Raza that immigration reform would be a top priority during his first year in office, but all that changed. [...]

I would say it’s pretty easy to see that there are not many alternatives to his [Reid] party which has cynically misled on a repeated basis the Hispanic community about their good faith in moving forward and their leadership in this important issue. [...]

You have to wonder if President Obama and Senator Reid could muster 60 votes for the health care bill, why couldn’t they show similar leadership and muster support to move an immigration reform bill. One that I believe would be supported on a bipartisan basis.

Watch it:

During his speech, Cornyn additionally accused Democrats of “poison[ing] the well” with the passage of the stimulus and “Obamacare.” Yet, he acknowledged the need for a “credible and compassionate solution” that addresses the situation of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. According to Cornyn — who co-sponsored an immigration reform bill in 2007 — he will continue to work on the issue. “One thing I assure you that hasn’t changed is my own commitment to help fix our broken immigration system,” said Cornyn.

Cornyn presented Latinos with a pretty distorted perspective of what has happened over the past several years with immigration. While it’s true that Obama over-promised and under-delivered on immigration, I’ve repeatedly argued that pinning too much blame on Democrats fails to capture the political limitations the Obama administration has faced and distracts attention from the real culprits of the immigration debate.

From the time he took office, Obama always qualified his “promise” by noting that immigration reform stood in line behind health care reform, energy legislation, and financial regulatory changes. Republicans, meanwhile, have pulled every to stunt to block — or at the very least delay — the entire progressive agenda. Following the passage of health care reform, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — the only Republican who was open to co-sponsoring an immigration bill — simply decided to pull out, similarly stating that the “well has been poisoned.” Republicans continued to rail on immigration reform and trumpeted border security and overturning the 14th amendment to deny the American-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship. In December, Republicans blocked the DREAM Act. If Republicans couldn’t accept a bill which would help undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents, it’s hard to imagine they’d be open to anything more ambitious.

Cornyn should know all of this because he was at the center of the debate last year. For a while, immigration advocates and Democratic leadership seemed to be lobbying Cornyn in hopes that he would join Graham as a second Republican co-sponsor. Ultimately, Cornyn backed away, accused Democrats of playing politics with immigration, and decided his party should single-mindedly focus on securing the border.

Cornyn is no stranger to pandering on immigration. Back in 2006, he received a lot of flack for speaking at a conference entitled “Defending the Homeland: America’s Immigration Crisis.” The event was hosted by the Rockford Institute — an organization described as “xenophobic, racist, and nativist” by its own ex-director. The conference was moderated by the group’s current president, Thomas Fleming, who once wrote, “Whatever we may say in public, most of us do not much like Mexicans, whom we regard as too irrational, too violent, too passionate.”

In a recent interview with Hannah Rosenthal, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, here’s how Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin relayed Rosenthal’s answers about two recent TIME magazine stories:

Is a Time magazine cover story that asserts Jews in Israel only care about money or another article that analogizes the current climate in Israel to fascism in the 1930′s over the line? [Rosenthal] said without hesitation, “That is absolutely over the line.” Those types of assertions, she said, “are made by people who do not know history or misread history.“

A quick read reveals Rubin’s rendering of both the articles as deeply distorted. The first, from September 2010, claims that “Israelis are no longer preoccupied with” the peace process because “they’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer.” One can agree or disagree with that claim, but the idea that it’s “anti-Semitic” to suggest that Israelis are more interested in living life and having a good time than in worrying about foreign policy — which is to say, acting like most people — or that such a claim amounts to “Jews in Israel only care about money,” is extremely tendentious.

As for the second article, which examines several new right-wing measures in Israel, including a law to investigate human rights groups critical of the government, the reference to 1930′s fascism was made by an Israeli, Ron Pundak, a historian who runs the Peres Center for Peace. Pundak “said he sees the current atmosphere of Israeli politics as the ugliest in the nation’s history“:

“It’s totally abnormal,” [Pundak] says. “From my point of view, this is reminiscent of the dark ages of different places in the world in the 1930s. Maybe not Germany, but Italy, maybe Argentina later. I fear we are reaching a slippery slope, if we are not already there.”

The point of the article is that Israel’s rightward lurch is scaring even some conservatives. This was made clear by the headline “Israel’s Rightward Lurch Scares Some Conservatives“:

Even inside Netanyahu’s coalition, minister without portfolio Benny Begin, the arch-conservative son of Menachim Begin, told Israeli Radio that the measure broke from the conservatism he knew: “This decision sends a warning signal — here is darkness.”

Considering all of this, I wondered if Rosenthal had read the articles, or if she’d actually intended to address them in the manner that Rubin reported. It turns out the answer to both questions is no.

“We did not discuss the substance of the articles and I clearly told her that I didn’t read Time,” Rosenthal said via email. “I reacted to the headlines only that depict stereotypes of anti-Semitism and that seek to compare policies to the Holocaust.”

According to Rosenthal, Rubin blatantly misrepresented Rosenthal’s answers as a condemnation of specific articles Rosenthal made clear she hadn’t read. This should raise serious questions about the veracity of the rest of the interview. At the very least, the Post owes a correction to its readers, and an apology to Rosenthal.