Repug presidential campaign has gotten uglier

Wouldn't you know it, after slappin around Willard M. Romney a little yesterday, Sam Brownback, an appropriate name for a mudslinger, challenges Tom "If'n thar's anythin Ah hates more'n a Mexican, it's TWO Mexicans" Tancredo bono fides on abortion in this morning's Des Moines Register:

Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo on Monday said that an automated phone call to Iowa anti-abortion voters, paid for by Sen. Sam Brownback's campaign, that questions Tancredo's commitment to anti-abortion politics is "despicable."

Brownback's campaign, in the phone call, questions Tancredo's financial ties to John Tanton, a physician who helped found the Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood Association, which provides women's health services that include abortion.

Brownback's campaign last week issued a news release citing a memo published in a 2003 Washington Post article in which Tanton reportedly wrote that whites stood to surrender their majority status if the United States' borders aren't controlled.

John Rankin, Brownback's Iowa communications director, questioned Tancredo's commitment to the anti-abortion movement, given his acceptance of donations from Tanton.

It seems this Tanton fellow is something of a racist, that at least Brownback gets right. Here's what Tanton's Right Web Profile says:

Today, Tanton stands in the center of a web of anti-immigrant and official English groups. As the founder and publisher of Social Contract Press, Tanton has published books that have helped shaped a nationalist ideology focused on the threat of immigrants to the white, English-speaking population. Social Contract books also stoke fears about immigrants taking over the United States, with research that highlights the rapid rise of Spanish-speaking residents and related socioeconomic problems, while ignoring research that points to the positive contributions of immigrants. In addition to FAIR, where he still is a board member, Tanton has been a central player in an array of anti-immigrant, nationalist groups and institutes, including Pro English, U.S. Inc., Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), U.S. English, and Numbers USA. Funding for these and other organizations in which Tanton is a key figure, often flows through the organization, U.S. Inc. (7) (8)

So what raised the ire of the Brownback camp is that Tanton, back in his salad smoking days in the Seventies, was the organizer and president of the Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood Association and active in the Zero Population Growth movement before becoming a fulltime English-only-anti-immigrant lunatic. But, then again, there is more than a modicum of truth to Brownback's charges.

It's nice to see the Republican Party forming the circular firing-squad for a change.