DENIAL: STILL A RIVER IN THE BELTWAY

You may have seen this, from Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo:

Right Realizes It Can’t Kill Immigration Reform Without An Excuse

While Republicans settle on a least-bad immigration strategy, it's dawned on reform opponents and their conservative allies that if the effort dies in the House, they'll need to bring a plausible excuse to the public -- that is, if they hope to sidestep at least some of the blame for the debacle.

And they think they've found one.

Specifically, they hope to draw a connection between the White House's recent health care reform implementation decisions and border security measures in the Senate's immigration bill to claim their opposition to comprehensive reform stems not from substantive objections but from a sense that the Obama administration will ignore parts of an immigration law it doesn't like....

The Washington Examiner ... sums it all up "Immigration reform is dead and Obamacare implementation killed it." ...

The notion here is that the evil president will suspend the border-security provisions of the law, declare the border secure, and just let the brown horde overrun America. Or something like that.

In response to this, DougJ writes:

... The details of the excuse don't matter much ... what matters is that it's something that ... the "Morning Joe"/David Brooks serious conservative crowd will be happy to repeat if and when the bill fails....

... I tend to think that establishment media is intrinsically conservative in terms of its structure: listen to what some rich old white man, grandpa Schieffer or Dancin' Dave, tells you to think.... I wonder how much the whole system encourages viewers to think conservatively.

I think what I usually think: yes, the mainstream media will accept this excuse as reasonable, and will describe it as the real reason Republicans blocked reform (rather than blame Republicans' newfound conclusion that they don't need to give a crap about non-white voters) -- but I think the media will accept the excuse primarily because, yet again, it spares journalists from having to consider the possibility that American politics has a Republican problem.

I don't see the insider media world as overwhelmingly conservative necessarily, but I do think the vast majority of insider journalists have a vested interest in the notion that Republicans are reasonable people who are sincerely looking out for the best interests of this country, rather than sociopathic obstructionists who are destroying the country gradually through intransigence and obstructionism simply because they haven't been given the opportunity to take full control of the government in order to dismantle every law passed for the benefit of ordinary citizens in the last century.

Refusal to consider the notion that Republicans are crazy is to our political culture what refusal to consider heliocentrism was in Galileo's world.

So, yes, the Beltway will take the GOP's excuses at face value.