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Conservative columnist George Will on Sunday told Republicans that they should get behind immigration reform because "conservatism begins with facing facts."

During a panel segment on ABC's This Week, Will said that he understood immigration reform opponents -- like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) -- who think allowing a path to citizenship would be "rewarding lawbreaking."

"However, conservatism begins with facing facts," he explained. "The facts are that of the 11 million people who are here illegally, two-thirds have been here a decade of more; 30 percent, 15 years or more. They're woven into our society, they're not leaving and the American people would not tolerate the police measures necessary to extract them from our communities."

"Therefore, the great consensus has to be on the details of a path to citizenship," Will insisted, adding that "even if the system weren't broken, even if we had no illegal immigrants, we'd still need to do something about this because we need the workers as the baby boomers retire and as the birth rate declines, we need something to replenish the workforce to sustain the welfare state."

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that conservatives were more likely to contort facts to justify their beliefs.

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If anyone didn't think this guy was quite insufferable enough during his interview on Piers Morgan last month, you're in luck. You can be treated to almost an entire hour of his whining about how liberals are keeping the poor conservative white man down.

This was a talk he gave at Jim DeMint's wingnut Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, Breitbart protege Ben Shapiro has got a book to sell, so naturally he's being promoted by the likes of C-SPAN, which sadly leans way, way to the right with their Book TV series. They ended up treating their viewers to what was one long exercise in projection, claiming that liberals just want to silence conservatives, making ridiculous claims that conservatives are somehow shut out of the political debate in the United States, and are being oppressed by some secret liberal cabal out there who makes sure no one can hear their message.

[Insert laughter here.]

In Shapiro's world, Media Matters has a whole lot more influence than I'd give them credit for. Plus, there's some grand conspiracy to keep conservatives out of Hollywood and our educational institutions. And you can't dare call a conservative a racist ever... never, ever... and don't dare call voter suppression racist or mention anything about their policies being racist, because then you're just pandering and trying to pick on them and YOU JUST BETTER SHUT UP.

And heaven forbid someone picked on poor ALEC and forced them to run away from the "stand your ground" laws. Yes, and Al Sharpton is a big bad meanie who, along with the rest of the "liberal media," tried to frame George Zimmerman.

I don't know if anyone's got the stomach for the rest of his pity party, but you can watch the entire event here. I'll leave everyone with a quote from one of my fellow contributors here at C&L, Mugsy, who relayed his feelings on this pity party of Shapiro's by email:

As noted, classic "projection". I've been saying for years that "if a conservative accuses you of something, it's only because they either did the same thing themselves or would if they were in your shoes."

Ding, ding, ding, ding... give that man a medal. That's exactly what we had here -- in such blatant form that it's almost laughable, or it would be, if not for the fact that there are still people who consider this guy some kind of "serious" conservative thinker.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new fresh face of the Republican party -- which, oddly enough, looks just like the old face of the Republican party.

If they need any help with their "rebranding" effort, I sincerely hope they give this guy a call. I'm sure it will work out just as well for them as the recent efforts by Eric Cantor and Bobby Jindal.

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Someone needs to explain the definition of insanity to Bloody Bill Kristol. During a discussion on Fox' Special Report With Bret Baier, Kristol was asked about the Republicans and their recent efforts to "rebrand" the party, and it seems Kristol believes if they just start obstructing President Obama again and vote for things like repealing "Obamacare," they won't have to worry about how they look!

Of course, no one on the panel pointed out to him that that is exactly what they've been doing already for the last four years and it hasn't gone so well. Not that what the others want to do -- keep the same policies but just try to make them sound more palatable to the public -- is going to work, either.

And note to Kristol: Your party doesn't care about doing anything to improve access to health care, making it more affordable or regulating the banks. We don't need to hear their words or yours to know that. All we have to do is look at their voting records to see what their priorities are. The notion that the GOP has any alternatives to fixing anything that is not more of the same is laughable.

Here's more from Real Clear Politics: Kristol: GOP Should Worry Less About Looks; Act On Conservative Principles:

BILL KRISTOL, WEEKLY STANDARD: If I hear another politician talking about rebranding the party or changing the image, why don't they just advance policies? Republicans control the House of Representatives, right? They very much dislike Obamacare. Fine, pass a bill repealing Obamacare or delaying it and then pass a replacement. It's not going to pass the Senate, President Obama's not going to sign it, but it will show how Republican policies help.

Republicans dislike the financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, pass different regulations that help community banks. If you can't pass the whole thing, pass bite-sized pieces of legislation that would help the country. I mean, I really think they should talk less about rebranding themselves and actually pass some legislation, either big legislation or medium-sized bites that which embody conservative principals.

JOHN ROBERTS, FOX NEWS: Why have they been losing so badly on messaging, Bill?

KRISTOL: They haven't been losing that badly on messaging. They lost the presidential election by 3 points, they held the House of Representatives, the Democrats got 1 million more votes for the complete House out of 110 million cast, or something like that. And if they simply govern effectively, if they do their best in the House and they oppose President Obama, they'll do fine. They should worry less about how they look and they should just act according to conservative principles.

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They grow up so fast...

via Politico:

Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party. Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.

“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”

So is he now a - *gasp* - liberal? Well, no, not quite he says. But this little checklist indicates he's headed in that general direction.

Krohn won’t go so far as to say he’s liberal, in part because his move away from conservatism was a move away from ideological boxes in general. [...]

But a quick rundown of his current political stances suggests a serious pendulum swing away from the right.

Gay marriage? In favor. Obamacare? “It’s a good idea.” Who would he vote for (if he could) in November? “Probably Barack Obama.” His favorite TV shows? “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” His favorite magazine? The New Yorker. And, perhaps telling of all, Krohn is enrolling this fall at a college not exactly known for its conservatism: New York University.

Dave Neiwert at Crooks & Liars remarked at the time (2009) that he thought young Jonathan's appearance at CPAC made perfect sense.

After all, conservative thought (as it were) has always reflected the way a 13-year-old would view the world: like a highly dualistic, light-and-darkness morality fable, filled with heroic patriots and defenders of freedom contending against the slithering forces of puling liberal evil.

Now that he's left The Dark Side, Krohn will be on with Lawrence O'Donnell tonight on MSNBC.

I will be on THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O'DONNELL tonight at some point...so check it out at 10PM on MSNBC. Can you dig it? #BlackDynamite

— Jonathan Krohn (@JonathanLKrohn) July 2, 2012

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Chris Matthews was apparently completely enamored with Mitch Daniels and his response to President Obama's State of the Union Address this Tuesday night and all I can say is thank goodness Rachel Maddow was there to at least beat back at part of Matthews' fawning praise.

She didn't really have much time to respond to Matthews since they were coming up on a hard break for a commercial, but it's too bad she also did not point out that one, there was nothing honest about Daniel's speech. It was full of one lie after another. And means testing "entitlements", and I hate that word by the way, but means testing Social Security and Medicare is nothing but a way to turn them into welfare programs and to later have an excuse to eliminate them. It's a terrible idea.

And this best kind of "honest" "fiscally conservative" Republican was George W. Bush's OMB Director that helped get our economy into this mess, who has no right to be criticizing that Obama didn't fix Bush's mess quickly enough and is in the middle union busting and pushing right to work in his state and is not looking out for the working class. He's just another Republican governor doing their best to make the economy as terrible as humanly possible at the bidding of the Koch brothers and the richest among us in order to keep President Obama from being reelected. Sadly if this was Matthews' immediate response, we'll surely be hearing more of this sort of ridiculous praise of Daniels' speech from the rest of the Villagers in the beltway media.

MATTHEWS: You know, I really liked that speech by Mitch Daniels. I thought it was really a Midwestern conservatism of the best kind, honest, fiscally conservative or course, but recognizing that we have to protect our safety net and we have to recognize that the rich cannot get all the pension money and all the entitlement money. There's not enough to go around. We're going to have to have means testing. We're going to have to close the loopholes.

A very responsible kind of look at fiscal conservatism that recognizes that the rich can't plunder the poor any more, that if you're going to have a true conservatism, in other words a society that will sustain itself, a society that will be at peace with itself, you need to help the people to get a break and that means it's not Libertarianism at all. There's nothing of Ron Paul in what that man said.

It was a responsible social policy of the right, which was really I think cast in old time Midwest, Bob Taft conservatism, except for some of the bromides, the idiomatic crap that he threw in there to make everybody happy. There was a seriousness to this speech. And now I understand why people like Mitch Daniels.

MADDOW: Chris I am very glad that we area all talking about this together because I could not disagree with you more about the speech. This was just my impression of it but I don't have time to go into that...

MATTHEWS: Why?

MADDOW: We're going to go into that in a moment.

MATTHEWS: What's wrong?

MADDOW: I think that Mitch Daniels there to say the world is on fire. Be afraid. Run to Republicans. I mean, he's talking about America as a country that... America adrift, quarreling and paralyzed going over Niagra. I mean this was a “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid” this guy's trying to murder the country speech.

MATTHEWS: But he also had solutions. He had gutsy solutions. He wasn't afraid to take on the rich and that's so rare today in the Republican side.

MADDOW: I will take you on that Chris, absolutely.

It's time for your weekly Driftglass and Bluegal podcast. This week we get to take a trip down memory lane from last January while Bluegal is traveling. Hope you're having a nice trip Fran!

You can listen to past editions here and at http://dgbgpodcast.blogspot.com/, and the podcast is also available on i-Tunes. If you enjoy these as much as I do, donations are greatly appreciated. Please consider throwing five bucks in the hat.

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While discussing the success of Sarah Palin's book Mike Murphy echoes David Brooks with his statement that "the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do". Murphy needs to tell that to those sour-grapes Palin voters hitting those tea bag protests across the country. I also wonder if he thinks there's a difference between the "conservative media machine" and Fox News?

Rachel Maddow rightly points out they're not going to be able to dismiss Palin that easily and need to answer for the brand of conservatism that has elevated her to the position she has in the party, 2012 nominee or not.

MURPHY: No, she will sell a lot. I'm, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to wait for it to get spell-checked, but then I'm going to buy it.

GREGORY: Right. And she's number--I should point out, I mean, number one on the best-seller list for Amazon.

MURPHY: Yeah. No, no, look, she has a constituency. She'll never be the nominee, I totally agree with David. I agree with Steve Schmidt, it would be actually a disaster if she was the nominee. I do wish my friend Steve felt that a year ago when a lot of people were asking John McCain to put her on the ticket. But the truth is--and I'm going to agree with David here, too--the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do. These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination. And you can case study that out in the last election. So I--the question is whether or not our party will learn, when we have a pretty good midterm victory due to Obama's mistakes this time, that turning up the volume is not the reason that we're going to do well, I believe, in the midterms. And the fact is to get all the way, there are a lot of things we have to do to modernize conservatism to be successful.

MADDOW: I, I do think that there's a little bit of reckoning that needs to happen on the right for Sarah Palin's success. I mean, she was the vice presidential nominee, she is going to sell a kazillion books and she is the biggest brand name in Republican politics still right now. And she's chose--the person who's writing her book, her last--the last person who she co-authored a book with was called "Donkey Cons" and it was co-authored with a guy who's widely believed to be and I believe him to be a white supremacist. So she's chosen Lynn Vincent, who's written a book with a white supremacist, to write her book, and she's the biggest name in Republican politics.

MURPHY: Oh, but, Rachel...

MADDOW: And you can dismiss her and say she's not going to be the nominee, but I do think the right needs to sort of answer for what's happened to conservatism.

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Fox News' Bret Baier asked Sen. Lindsey Graham to elaborate on his opinion that Glenn Beck is a "cynic" Sunday.

"What I am saying, he doesn't represent the Republican Party," said Graham.

"But at the end of the day, when a person says he represents conservatism and that the country's better off with Barack Obama than John McCain," Graham continued. "That sort of ends the debate for me as to how much more I'm going to listen."

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Howard Kurtz asks his panel of the editor of The New York Times Week in Review and The New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhaus, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly what they think of the right wing's preemptive freak out over President Obama's speech to school children last week.

Tanenhaus says it is an indication of what he calls "the death of conservatism" which is the theme and name of his book.

Brody thinks the President has a "perception problem". Hmmmm.... I wonder what might have contributed to that. The media overplaying the right wing screechers that should otherwise be dismissed couldn't have possibly contributed to that, could it David?

And Ceci Connolly says the "media are addicted to conflict". And don't blame them for feeding us crap on a daily basis since that 24 hour news cycle is so hard to fill up. Well here's a thought. Why not fill it with something besides crap? Somehow Amy Goodman manages to find an hours worth of news every day that you guys can't find the time to report on in that 24 hour cycle. Imagine that. I would imagine that a good deal of our readers here at Crooks and Liars could recommend more stories that are worth reporting on than there would be time for in the 24 hour news cycle, even on a "slow day".

I'd like to think that Sam Tanenhaus' observation is the correct one and that this over the top rhetoric does mean the death of the conservative movement, but our "mainstream media" along with a lot of other powerful forces are going to do their best to make sure it doesn't happen any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

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I thought it was distasteful enough that Chris Wallace asked Juan Williams to have to explain why Ted Kennedy wasn't given the "Jesse Helms" treatment by the New York Times in their obituaries of the two men, but it also turns out that he was showing NewsBusters a little love as well. I'm glad Media Matters reads NewsBusters, so I don't have to.

Also, I'm sure I won't be the only one that thinks Chris Wallace or anyone at Fox complaining about "media coverage" is laughable on its face.

Wallace: I also want to talk about the "media" coverage of Ted Kennedy's death this week. Not only the amount of it, which was extraordinary, but also the tone of it, and I want to put up the first paragraph of The New York Times obituary on Ted Kennedy's death. This is the first paragraph this week.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night.

Now, here's the first paragraph of the Times' story on the passing of Jesse Helms last year.

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

Bill Sammon, I'm sure some people will be offended that I'm even making the comparison between these two men, but that is a frightening difference.

Sammon: It is and there are two ways to rectify that double standard. One would have been for the New York Times to find something nice to say about Jesse Helms substantively, other than this mossy drawl. The other, if you're going to go the, and I think that's the preferable way to do it, because you want to, when someone dies, you want to find something nice to say.

The other way if they wanted to be fair would, they would have had to put something in Ted Kennedy's about Chappaquiddick, about his demagoguery Robert Bork, the, you know, lunch-counter America, the back alley abortions, all those kind of things, but they didn't, so either way you do it it's unfair, and that was a striking example.

Wallace: Juan, do you think that there's a striking difference in the way those two men were sent off?

Williams: Well, I think you should be nice to people at the time of their death in general, no matter what their sins, but in fact I think it was good journalism. I think in fact that if you look at the public impact that Jesse Helms had on the country, it was to stand in opposition to civil rights and all the gay rights and all this. If you look at the public impact of Ted Kennedy...

Wallace: But wasn't he for something?

Williams: Yeah! He was for stopping those things and that's what the lead said. I don't have any problem with that and in fact Chappaquiddick has been mentioned prominently throughout this whole period.

Sammon: Not in that lead.

Williams: Not in the lead but in the story. It's not like anybody's hiding Ted Kennedy's flaws. We know them.

Of course, par for the course, it's always alright to politicize a eulogy if you're a Republican. From our own Jon Perr-- Jesse Helms and the Partisan Eulogies of George W. Bush:

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