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Another Howie column!

Amnesty bill could derail McCain’s train
By Howie Carr | Monday, January 7, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com

John McCain is old - very old.

Which may explain his abject confusion about whether he supports amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens. When you’re 71 years old, short-term memory loss can be part of the package, along with the delusion that Wilfred Brimley’s endorsement is big with the iPod generation.

Last spring McCain and the hero of Chappaquiddick, with the help of La Raza, put together a grandiose scheme to grant amnesty to millions upon millions of foreign invaders. It was so outrageous they refused to hold hearings on it. The bill went down in flames, twice, and so did McCain’s campaign for almost a year.

Now McCain is back, sort of. But his “amnesty” bill is still political poison. So when he’s called on it, as he was by Mitt Romney Saturday night at Saint Anselm College, he speaks with forked tongue:

“It’s not amnesty. And for you to describe it as you do in the attack ads, my friend, you can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it still won’t be true.”

You can understand his hysteria. It’s now or never for the grumpy old man. If he wins tomorrow, he goes on to Michigan and South Carolina. If McCain loses he heads straight to the dogtrack. Wonderland, here’s Johnnnnnny!

Amnesty could kill him. Nobody remembers the Keating Five scandal. But amnesty? Have you been to a hospital emergency room lately? Or read the police log in the Nashua Telegraph?

This is why McCain so loathes Mitt Romney. Romney is calling him on it, and McCain, who has never been too tightly wrapped, is about three 30-second spots on WMUR away from a Caine Mutiny-like meltdown.

Did you see what happened at the debate Saturday night, when he tried to zing Mitt on flip-flopping? Before McCain got to the punch line he began giggling - always a bad sign. When he delivered it - “I agree, you are the candidate of change” - hardly anybody laughed, and then just out of embarrassment.

Here’s one of the McCain money quotes on amnesty, from the Tuscon Citizen in 2003: “I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people.”

That was McCain then. This is McCain now: “The fact is that I’ve never supported amnesty.”

Even his greatest supporter, the Manchester Union-Leader, said in an editorial that the Kennedy-McCain bill “would encourage border jumping.”

One of the more odious parts of the bill was the insistence that illegals should receive Social Security credit for work they did while in the country illegally. Illegals can’t have a Social Security number, so there are only two ways they can have a job here. They can work under the table, which is tax fraud, or they can steal a citizen’s number, which is identity theft.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) put in an amendment to stop the illegals from benefiting from their felonies. McCain, along with Obama and Hillary, voted to kill it.

To which Ensign responded: “There was a felony they were committing, and now they can’t be prosecuted. That sounds like amnesty to me.”

This morning McCain runs neck-and-neck in New Hampshire with Romney. But what may doom him is that the independents he’d been counting on to pull a Republican ballot to vote for him, as they did in 2000, are now going to vote on the Democrat side, to finish off the Clinton machine. Like Hillary, McCain was caught flat-footed. He never saw Barack Obama coming.

Both of them must feel like Bobby Vinton and Connie Francis and Chubby Checker in January 1964. One day, they were on the top of the Billboard charts, just like they had been for years, and the next day . . . the Beatles. From the penthouse to the outhouse.

Barack Obama is the Beatles. John McCain is Perry Como with an attitude.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1064993