HotAir is reporting that the mangler in chief was shocked… SHOCKED… that conservatives took offense to being called fear-mongerers over his amnesty bill.

“He was surprised by the reaction,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said of Mr. Bush’s speech in Glynco, Ga., last week. “The speech in Georgia was, ‘We’ve got a serious problem and we need to fix it.’ It was not in any way designed to be pointed at Republicans.”…

What? Are you fucking kidding me? Here’s what he said…

GLYNCO, Ga., May 29 — President Bush today accused opponents of his proposed immigration measure of fear-mongering to defeat it in Congress, and took on his own conservative political base as he did so.

President Bush spoke at a training center for border enforcement agents located in Glunco, Ga., on Tuesday.

“If you want to scare the American people, what you say is the bill’s an amnesty bill,” Mr. Bush said this afternoon at a training center for border enforcement agents located in this town in Georgia’s southeastern corner. “That’s empty political rhetoric, trying to frighten our citizens.”

Someone should ask Tony Snowjob if at any point a Democrat or, as he calls it, the “open border crowd” has complained that this bill is amnesty. I don’t know of one. The President has also compared people who are against the amnesty bill to those who opposed civil rights legislation in the Jim Crow era:

“If you’re viewed as anti – in other words, if people think that a party is against somebody or some group of people, you’ll pay a political price for it,” the president says. “If you’re viewed as anti-civil rights, in the past, the party paid a price,” he adds, putting in a nutshell Republicans’ continued lack of traction among black voters. “If you’re viewed as anti-immigrant, no matter how innocent our people may be, or well-meaning our people may be, if you get labeled as a result of not being thoughtful and considerate and pragmatic, not dealing with the problem, it could cause serious long-term political consequences.

Bush went on to say, in the aforementioned Glynco speech:

“People in Congress need the courage to go back to their districts and explain exactly what this bill is all about,” Mr. Bush said. “The fundamental question is, will elected officials have the courage necessary to put a comprehensive immigration plan in place that makes it more likely we can enforce our border and, at the same time, uphold the great traditions of —— immigrant traditions of the United States of America.”

Again, who is he admonishing here? I doubt he’s trying to rally Democrats.

Tony Snow is either an idiot, or he thinks everyone who listens to the mangler in chief is.

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