The Gary Null Blog

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_ruinous_rant_of_john_mccain_20110626/

Posted on Jun 26, 2011

By Joe Conason

The decline of the Grand Old Party into an angry mob is gaining momentum, with crackpot rage displacing common sense on every major issue from public finance to marriage rights.

An ominous signal of this transformation emanated last week from John McCain, who has been a sometime voice of rationality on such sensitive partisan matters as torture, climate change and immigration. Now he, too, has descended into demagoguery by falsely claiming that illegal immigrants are behind the spread of destructive wildfires in Arizona.

Insisting that there is “substantial evidence” to support his racially inflammatory accusation, the Arizona senator could produce none, and neither could his staff. Instead, there is, as The Washington Post noted, not even a shred of evidence that immigrants set those fires. Nobody knows yet why the borderlands blazed, but the U.S. Forest Service has blamed an “escaped campfire”—and indicated clearly that there is no reason to believe that illegal immigrants are to blame.