I guess he really does wants to alienate the pro-border GOP base in time for the 2008 election. After all, spewing insults at the party's front-line troops certainly isn't a wise move if he has any interest in party-building.

President Bush took on opponents of immigration legislation again today, accusing some of them of fear-mongering and prodding members of Congress to act despite their worries of a backlash at home.

While not saying so explicitly, some people “certainly allege or hint that probably the best way to deal with 11 to 12 million people is to get them to leave the country,” Mr. Bush said, referring to estimates of the number of illegal aliens in the United States.

“That’s impossible,” Mr. Bush went on. “That’s the kind of statement that sometimes happens in the political process aimed to inflame passion. But it’s completely unrealistic. It’s not going to happen.”

The president said the time for comprehensive immigration reform is at hand, with a sweeping bill emerging in the Senate, and with the House expected to take up a bill next month. “This is a good piece of legislation,” he said of the Senate work in progress.

Mr. Bush favors immigration reform that calls for more secure borders, allows for a guest worker program and offers illegal aliens an eventual path to citizenship.

Unfortunately, what most of the GOP base wants is the promised fence, border enforcement, and a road back to their home country for the border-jumping immigration criminals. I talk to Democrats all the time who want the same thing -- but we all seem to be ignored by the Kennedy-Bush axis in favor of amnesty.

Maybe that has a lot to do with the need to lay off the staff of the GOP fundraising call center.

Or posts like this one on blogs that generally favor the GOP.

But sometimes I'm just an old softie at heart. Like, for example, earlier today, I went over to GOP.com to give the Party a quarter, because I figured they might need it to call someone who cared. There's a saying, "even a whore has her pride," and so it is with the GOP. They wouldn't take my quarter. The minimum donation they would accept was four quarters. Being the old softie I am, I went ahead and gave them four quarters, so now they can call four people who care.

And now they know that, whatever the reason they're not getting any real money from me, it's not because I forgot about them, or because I'm just too lazy to make a donation. Now they know that I've put some thought into just how much I value their efforts out in Washington, and I went out of my way to contribute accordingly.

Michelle Malkin offers this option for disaffected GOP supporters to send in instead.

And Peggy Noonan offers this little gem in explaining why the GOP needs to start moving beyond George W. Bush immediately.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill—one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible.

The 2008 election is not that far away -- maybe it is time to find a leader to represent what the GOP base really believes.

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