Sweeping a few things under the rug via Cody Simms.

Kudos to Josh Marshall for spotting this:

An interesting tidbit from the end of a piece in the Politico on McCain’s 8 homes. (They’ve decided it’s eight.) From 2006 to 2007, the McCains’ budget for household staff went up roughly 50% from $184,000 to $273,000 …

Wow. The McCains’ household-staff budget alone went from nearly four times the US median household income to nearly six times the US median household income. Yet McCain’s defenders in the elite media, the comfortably-well-off ones who passed on bogus GOP "elitism" smears used against the self-made Bill Clinton in the past and now pass on these same smears against the self-made Barack Obama in the present, think it’s oh-so-unfair that these smear chickens have come home to roost to John Sidney McCain III, who can’t even remember what car or cars he drives — no doubt because with chauffeurs at his beck and call, he need never touch a steering wheel. But despite their efforts to run interference for Ol’ Silver Spoon, those actual average Americans that have heard about this story don’t like what it tells them about John McCain.

I look at that household-staff budget and keep thinking: How many of those persons are citizens, or documented workers of any sort, and are they all being paid living wages?

Let’s put it this way: It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them weren’t.

The Republican Party has been banging the nativist anti-immigration gong for decades now, but large swatches of American industry have grown addicted to cheap, easily-exploited labor. The corporate anti-union wing finds itself at odds with the racist base, which leads to amusing sights such as the 1996 Republican National Convention in sunny San Diego, where speakers raved on and on about the Scary Brown People taking away American jobs while undocumented workers served them their food, cleaned their hotel rooms, and set up the stages from which they emitted their ravings. (Expect to see more of the same in Saint Paul a week from now, when anti-immigrant conventioneers will find themselves riding in taxis driven by Somali refugees.)

The two major wings of the modern Republican Party, the corporate anti-tax wing and the bigot "nunnah mah tax dollars are goin’ to black people" wing, are usually in sync. But they find themselves increasingly drastically at odds over immigration — and the Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.

Poor widdle Republicans, reaping the whirlwind? Tough bounce, kiddoes. They and their corporate sugar daddies hath sown the wind, in the form of two decades of increasingly virulent hate-radio programs made possible by their dismantling the Fairness Doctrine back in 1987, the coddling of bigots like Jerome Corsi, the transmission of vile smear e-mails designed to fly under the radar and be hard to track down to their sources, and generally creating an atmosphere where a sitting Member of Congress, Michele Bachmann, can spew Bizarro-World stuff like this, where it is claimed that the mortgage bailout is secretly funding "La Raza":

"At the same time that the American taxpayer was being asked to bail
these companies out, Barney Frank, the chairman of the Financial
Services Committee, instituted a sort of tax on Freddie and Fannie,
and that tax goes into what’s called an affordable housing trust
fund," explains Bachmann. "It’s a really a taxpayer-subsidized
housing fund, but that money will go to organizations like La Raza
and…ACORN. " Both groups — "particularly ACORN," says Bachmann –
have been found to be involved in "activities where they have
perpetrated voter fraud," she contends.

As the gold-trimmed velvet reality of McCain’s plush life intrudes on the media-protected Regular Guy image, those anti-immigration folk who never liked McCain much anyway have got to be wondering who it is that he has as his butlers and maids and nannies — and actual Regular Joes and Janes are wondering why the fact of McCain’s stratospherically-rich existence was never emphasized by the same media that dutifully repeats against the self-made Barack Obama the same attempts to project Republican elitism that are done against every Democrat no matter what.

Related posts:

  1. CIA Torture Briefings: McCain Owes Pelosi an Apology
  2. Will Feinstein Team Up with DeMint and McCain to Destroy CARS?
  3. Michele Bachmann Compares Progressive Taxation to Slavery and Says Lots of Other Crazy Shit
  4. McCain is a Clunker, Can I Trade Him in?
  5. Hung Out to Dry: One Former VP Chief of Staff