Amidst the political upheaval in Egypt, conservatives are scare-mongering about the possible Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt. But leading neoconservative Frank Gaffney is taking Muslim Brotherhood fearmongering to new heights. This past weekend, Gaffney was a featured speaker at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, an annual gathering of social conservatives. Gaffney used the opportunity to discuss how the Muslim Brotherhood is not only poised to implement a new theocracy in Egypt, but is also operating in the United States under “front groups” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties group dedicated to “protecting the rights of all Americans, regardless of faith.”

After his speech, ThinkProgress caught up with Gaffney to probe his conspiracy further. Echoing the McCarthyist anti-communist rhetoric of the 1950s, Gaffney told us that there were already people in the federal government doing the bidding of “stealth jihadists.” When we asked Gaffney to name names, he pointed to President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

TP: Do you think [Sharia law] has already infiltrated the federal government?

GAFFNEY: There are questionable people who are sympathetic to the program of the stealth jihadists who have influence with the United States government. Some I think are actually working for it, but for sure people who are persuaded that the folks that they need to work with to reach out to the Muslim-American community, for example, who incessantly turn to Muslim Brotherhood organizations for that purpose, are a very real problem.

TP: Can you name a few names, for instance in the federal government?

GAFFNEY: John Brennan. John Brennan is the Homeland Security Advisor for the President of the United States

TP: He’s complicit in this creep of Sharia law?

GAFFNEY: He’s absolutely daft on what the nature of the threat and is insistent upon using Brotherhood-front organizations as sources of information and as vehicles for reaching out to the Muslim-American community. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that these sorts of groups are “sources of wisdom,” as he puts it, to the United States government. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is incessantly meeting with Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and I think has in the past, if not today, employed people who are associated with them.

Watch it:

Unfortunately, Gaffney’s fearmongering over the Muslim Brotherhood is hardly new. Earlier this month, Gaffney declared that the American Conservative Union, which hosts the influential CPAC gathering, had been “infiltrated” by “Islamism” and accused one of its board members, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, of doing the Muslim Brotherhood’s bidding. Similar statements in the past led Norquist, who is extremely well-regarded in conservative circles, to reprimand Gaffney in an open letter for his “racial prejudice, religious bigotry [and] ethnic hatred.”

Gaffney’s paranoia also led him to call for the U.S. military to “take out” the Arab news network Al Jazeera during the Iraq War. Al-Jazeera has been widely praised this month for providing some of the best coverage of the democratic movement in Egypt.

Today, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report with new estimates and trends for the national and state undocumented immigrant populations in the U.S. in 2010. Pew traced back how long the undocumented parents of U.S.-born children had been in the United States before having babies. According to the group’s data, an overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants — 91 percent — who became the parents of U.S. citizens between March 2009 and March 2010 came to the U.S. before 2007:

According to the analysis, 9% of these unauthorized immigrants who had babies in 2009-2010 had arrived in the U.S. in 2008 or later. An additional 30% arrived from 2004 to 2007, and the remaining 61% arrived in the United States before 2004. [...]

The implications of these findings pretty much invalidate the argument that is at the center of the birthright citizenship debate. This past summer, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) crassly claimed that “people come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.” In other words, according to Graham, a slough of immigrants are coming to the U.S. for the express purpose of having a child who will reap the benefits of U.S. citizenship.

Just about every Republican lawmaker who supports reinterpreting or changing the 14th Amendment to eliminate the guarantee that all persons born in the U.S. are automatically citizens agrees with that logic. However, Pew’s data essentially disproves it.

It’s hard to imagine that 91 percent of undocumented immigrants made the perilous journey to the U.S. to have children and then risked detection and deportation for several years before fulfilling their supposed goal of having a family of U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether the nine percent who did end up having a child shortly after arriving in the U.S. came here for that purpose.

What is clear is that denying those children citizenship would only exacerbate the nation’s immigration problems. According to Pew’s report, “among births from March 2009 to March 2010, 350,000 newborns had at least one unauthorized parent.” Changing the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause would essentially amount to increasing the nation’s undocumented population by a couple hundred thousand people every year. And since an overwhelming amount of evidence shows that immigrants come to the U.S. to work, not to have U.S. citizen babies, those undocumented immigrants wouldn’t be leaving the U.S. any time soon.

Today, more than a million Egyptians appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the Mubarak regime and call on the long-time autocrat to step down from power and hold free and fair elections.

This morning, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) — fresh from joining a ceremony for a newly built illegal Israeli settlement — called in to Fox & Friends and discussed the situation in Egypt. He complained about the Obama administration’s response to the protests, saying that it showed that the United States has “abandoned a 30-year ally” and said that there are concerns that the protests “could have cascading effects across the Middle East.”

This took Fox host Gretchen Carlson by surprise, who said that she thinks “there’s a difference in supporting a country like Israel as a friend and supporting a country like Egypt as a friend.” Coming to the defense of a dictator, Huckabee responded by saying that he wanted an acknowledgement that Mubarak “had, in fact, not done everything wrong,” and that he had brought “stability” to the country:

HUCKABEE: Well, I had a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday. And I met with about 15 Knesset members, had breakfast with about 20 European Parliament members. The overall consensus is two-fold. First, real shock and surprise down to the average on the street Israeli citizen at how quickly the Obama administration abandoned a 30-year ally and a long standing friend to peace and stability President Mubarak. I don’t think anybody is trying to defend everything he did as President, but they would’ve liked to have seen at least an acknowledgement that he’s been a friend these years. [...] The second concern is that this could have cascading effects across the Middle East.

CARLSON: But I do think there’s a difference in supporting a country like Israel as a friend and supporting a country like Egypt as a friend. I mean I know that Israel obviously wants Mubarak to stay in power because it’s been good for them in that situation. But I’m not so sure — can you really blame the Obama administration because didn’t the Bush administration handle Egypt the same way, and didn’t the Clinton administration handle it the same way?

HUCKABEE: There’s been a long-time concern from the part of Americans as to some of the heavy-handed ruling of Mubarak. I don’t think anyone was expecting there to be a wholesale endorsement or even an indication that they hope he stayed. But just simply an acknowledgement that he had, in fact, not done everything wrong, and had brought stability, and had kept a strong even keel to the peaceful nature of the border between Israel and Egypt.

Watch it:

To start with, it isn’t true that the Obama administration immediately washed its hands of Mubarak. Vice President Joe Biden denied that Mubarak was a dictator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually did refer to Mubarak as a long-time “partner” to the United States and a force of “stability,” to the chagrin of Egyptian activists like Mohamed ElBaradei, who want to see the administration completely withdraw its support from the Mubarak government.

Secondly, it’s odd that Huckabee is citing concerns of “cascading effects” across the Middle East and the toppling of other autocratic regimes like Jordan given that such an effect is exactly the point. Egypt’s protests were originally inspired by demonstrations that brought down the Tunisian dictatorship, and similar protests have broken out in countries like Jordan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. It appears that Huckabee is above all else concerned with maintaining a status quo which serves the self-interest of countries like the United States and Israel in the short-term, but unjustly denies basic freedoms and rights to people over the long-term.

President Obama and his administration are in a tough public position on Egypt. The trajectory of the situation seems clear – Mubarak is done. But the question then becomes, does the White House try to get out in front and be seen as aiding the demonstrators and the transition? Or does it hold back and be seen as pursuing a cautious course that attempts to show support for democracy, while also remaining respectful of a once close ally? They are clearly choosing the latter. The problem is that this is a very hard needle to thread, and it doesn’t appear that they are threading it.

By carefully parsing their words, the Administration appears to be pleasing no one. Instead, they are angering jittery allies in the region and failing to satifisfy demonstrators in the street. For instance, Mike Huckabee, who is in Israel, said this morning, said that Israelis felt that the White House had “abandoned a 30-year ally.” While, as Think Progress’ Zaid Jilani noted, this is patently ridiculous claim, even if Huckabee were right, that Obama was throwing Mubarak under the bus, Obama clearly isn’t getting credit for doing so by the Egyptian people. Mohammed El Baradei attacked the parsed nature of the Administration’s response, and many interviews with Egyptians have expressed the same feeling.

Yet, the cautious public statements likely camouflage an Administration that is very active and influential behind the scenes. When the Green Movement erupted in Iran, the Iranian state could follow the standard dictators playbook: expel media, turn off communication networks, deploy troops to violently, and brutally crack down. Egypt started to follow this as well. But importantly, and essentially, large scale violence wasn’t used to suppress the protesters and international media were not intentionally targeted or evicted. There are likely several reasons for this, and one of the most important is probably that Mubarak is less secure in his position witin the Egyptian state than the leaders in Iran and therefore is not powerful enough to initiate such violence.

But the United States, behind the scenes, has almost assuredly used its considerable leverage with Mubarak and the military to play an important role in constraining the Egyptian response to the demonstrations. In a conversation with his Egyptian counterpart, Admiral Mullen publicly:

“thanked them [Egyptian military] for their professionalism” up to now, and emphasized “that’s the kind of behavior we’d like to see.”

We can pretty clearly assume that Mullen was less passive in the private conversation, not just thanking, but urging, if not demanding, restraint. The Administration is also urging an “orderly transition” to democracy by encouraging negotiations between the parties.

This is likely why Israel and other Arab allies are critical of the Administration for undercutting Mubarak. They are paying attention to the private actions, as well as the public. And they see that the White House has not only likely constrained Mubarak’s ability to suppress the demonstrations, and have therefore ensured that the demonstration has turned into a revolution, but are actually involved in trying to bring about an “orderly transition” to democracy that entails Mubarak’s departure.

I bet in a few years, when the documents are declassified or when WikiLeaks dumps another tens of thousands of pages of State Department documents, the role of the US and the Obama administration will likely be seen by historians as much more transformative and influential than it is perceived currently. But the question the White House needs to be asking itself now is whether its cautious public stance, which likely masks its larger roll, is in the best interests of the US. If Israel and other allies in the region believe we are currently throwing “Mubarak under the bus,” why don’t we at least get some credit for it with the Egyptian public?

To look at it another way, should the Mubarak regime fall and the US maintains its current public stance, Mubarak would have seemed to have fallen despite the actions of the US. If that occurs, what leverage would the US then have on a new popularly elected regime? What would attitudes in Egypt be toward the United States then? The current US approach could easily prompt a new Mubarak-less Egyptian government (and people) to be more anti-American than it otherwise would or should.

But if the US were to now call for Mubarak’s departure — if President Obama were to say its time for legitimately free and fair elections — the US would be seen in Egypt and the region as contributing to the effort to bring about democratic change. As Matt Duss explained, Obama would be seen as making good on his Cairo speech and any new Egyptian government would therefore likely be more pro-American than they otherwise would have. As Mohamed El Baradei noted, “It’s better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, it’s time for you to go.”

Former Bush Ambassador John Bolton has been one of the few defenders of the Mubarak regime in Egypt after massive anti-government protests broke out there last week. Yesterday on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio program, Bolton continued his defense of the authoritarian regime, noting the “substantial economic growth” under Mubarak’s reign, and warned that the dictator’s downfall would “speed” the timetable for what he views as an inevitable war with Iran:

HANNITY: Do you think that the Israelis are going to have to strike — they are going to have to take action. … As you pointed out, ElBaradei, you know, ran cover for the Iranians for all those years that he was with the IAEA. And, I just don’t think the Israelis have much longer to wait…they’re going to have to act in fairly short order.

BOLTON: I think that’s right. I don’t think there’s much time to act. And I think the fall of a Egyptian government committed to the peace agreement will almost certainly speed that timetable up.

Listen here:

Bolton has long been an advocate of bombing Iran, exploiting any convenient development in international relations as further cause to fuel up the bombers. Of course, any military action against Iran by Israel would likely drag in the U.S. as well, as Bolton himself has pointed out. On Friday, a “diverse” panel of experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos strongly warned against an Israeli attack on Iran, agreeing it would spark a “devastating counterattack” with wide-ranging negative consequences.

Bolton’s message reflects a growing trend among the right to use the Egyptian protests to scare monger about Iran, especially after Mohamed ElBaradei, the former International Atomic Energy Agency chief weapons inspector, returned to his native Egypt following the protests. ElBaradei had a very contentious relationship with Iran while he was tasked with monitoring the country’s nuclear program on behalf of the international community. Nonetheless, Hannity and a host of other right-wing personalities have baselessly smeared ElBaradei for “r[unning] cover for the Iranians for all those years that he was with the IAEA.”