Yesterday, I said that...

Not only was John McCain the driving force in the Senate behind the amnesty bill, he is one of the two remaining candidates in the race (the other being Giuliani) that still supports amnesty.

What that means is that if John McCain wins the nomination, the spin will be, without a doubt, that conservatives are no longer opposed to amnesty. Would that be true? No. If McCain wins the nomination, his pro-amnesty stance will be the biggest hurdle he would have to overcome.

While McCain is making a run at the nomination, expect the amnesty talk from his supporters to be kept to a minimum, but if he wins, expect the same old amnesty and open borders crowd that pushed the immigration monstrosity last year to get cocky and start planning their next big push for 2009, whether McCain wins or not.

Guess what, folks? It has already started. Here's Michael Medved's column from yesterday,

"Meanwhile, the long-standing support for immigration reform that was supposed to kill him among conservatives, may actually work in his favor. Obviously, conventional wisdom greatly overestimates the impact of this issue on the electorate in general: if pushing a hard-line against illegal immigrants represented the top priority for most (or even many) Republicans, then Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter would be fighting for the GOP lead, rather than dropped-out and irrelevant, respectively. All polls indicate that among both the nation at large and among self-identified Republicans, clear majorities favor a path to legal status for some immigrants who entered this country illegally. Even if you discount all such surveys, it's still obvious that some of us in the GOP back a more realistic line on immigration than the simplistic "send-‘em-all-home" demagoguery that has so far dominated the campaign.

...With four other major candidates (Romney, Thompson, Giuliani and now Huckabee with his laughable "I'll get rid of all 12 million in a 120 days" proposal) competing for the support of immigration extremists, McCain offers an alternative that will appeal to those who crave more than slogans and posturing (not to mention the crucial 45% of Hispanic voters who supported President Bush in 2004). In any event, his new emphasis on "border security first" has helped to satisfy most voters, excepting of course those angry hardliners who'd never consider backing McCain under any circumstances.

There you go. Being pro-amnesty is working "in his favor" -- and despite the two huge political fights that the amnesty and open borders crowd lost last year, what the country really, desperately wants is amnesty and a little insincere happy talk about securing the border.

Let me tell you exactly what a John McCain victory in the primaries would signal to the mainstream media, the Chamber of Commerce crowd, the Democratic Party, and the rest of the amnesty and open borders crowd:

* It would be a signal to start up another push to make 12-20 million illegal aliens into American citizens.

* It would be a signal that Republicans really aren't that serious about the illegal immigration issue so they can go ahead and leave the border open for another decade or two while the politicians in Washington pay a little lip service to the issue to keep the rubes happy.

* It would be a signal that Americans don't really want the wall to be completed. They'd just write that off to a bunch of "xenophobes" and "nativists" and they'll quietly call the whole thing off.

So, you want amnesty?

Vote for John McCain.

You want the fence, or as John McCain has publicly referred to it "the godd*mned fence" to be quietly mothballed and never be finished?

Vote for John McCain.

You want 12-20 million uneducated, non-English speaking manual workers who came into this country illegally and laughed in contempt at Americans and our laws to become citizens so that they can start collecting welfare, Social Security, and Medicare?

Vote for John McCain.

You want to be told in another 20 years that there are 20-30 more illegal aliens and that we have to make them citizens, too, because the last batch of 12-20 million illegal aliens can vote now and they're demanding that we do so?

Then vote for John McCain because what I've written above is ultimately, exactly what you will get.