Pounding on the wedge

The immigration issue has roiled the Republican base to the point of fury. As a result, the money is drying up to the point where the RNC has fired all of its telephone solicitors.

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times. Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times. [Ed. Note – classy to give these people zero notice BTW].

[Snip]

There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.

"Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.

This is what happens when rightwing noise machine pushes a big portion of your Party to the Homer Simpson position on immigration. The estimable Mr. Simpson:

Did you know that every day Mexican gays sneak into the country and unplug our brain-dead ladies?

After years of portraying illegal immigrants as the only rival to terrorists for the title of America’s Biggest Threat, guess what. People will actually start to believe that Mexicans are the harbinger of the end times; an army of zombie gardeners hell-bent on unplugging our brain-dead ladies.