Perpetrating Acts of Actual Journalism

Dana Milbank's piece on the Arizona immigration debate (out early on the WaPo site)  is an important read.

Jan Brewer has lost her head.

The Arizona governor, seemingly determined to repel every last tourist dollar from her pariah state, has sounded a new alarm about border violence. "Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded," she announced on local television.

Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they're also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.

But those in fear of losing parts north of the neckline can relax. There's not a follicle of evidence to support Brewer's claim.

The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona's border counties and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer's press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply.

Brewer's mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world's No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong. 

If this sounds familiar to readers, that's the reason why this is an important story. I mentioned it last Friday when TPM's Rachel Slajda reported the story back on July 1.  As Dana does point out, this all happened back at the end of June.  Only now is the Village paying attention to the idea that Jan Brewer is lying her ass off in order to try to scare Arizonans into supporting her little "papers, please!" law.  Milbank does find the larger point, however:

This matters, because it means the entire premise of the Arizona immigration law is a fallacy. Arizona officials say they've had to step in because federal officials aren't doing enough to stem increasing border violence. The scary claims of violence, in turn, explain why the American public supports the Arizona crackdown.

Last year gave us death panels and granny killings, but compared with the nonsense justifying the immigration crackdown, the health-care debate was an evening at the Oxford Union Society. 

You think?  Only took you Village assholes what, a couple of months to figure out that this was all a plan to target all Latinos, to play the race card, to suppress the Latino vote in November and to fire up the GOP base with yet another scapegoat they can blame?

It's important that somebody up there has finally put two and two together.  Milbank of course dings John McCain for the same lies, but tosses blame for that back on Brewer (which explains a few things) but the fact of the matter is this should have been said back in May, and the people whose job it is to say it once again dropped the ball and even worse, advanced the lies both Brewer and McCain told without challenging them...until only now.

And there's a real problem with that.