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Republican Candidates Push the Fear Buttons

It's so typical. When candidates are pandering for votes and struggling to keep their candidacies alive, they resort to fear mongering and proclaiming themselves to be the candidate that will be the toughest on crime. In today's world, that means being the toughest on undocumented residents and sex offenders.

Rudy Giuliani has unveiled his new plan for war on the undocumented.

Giuliani said he would require a uniform identification card for foreign workers and students and create a central database to track the legal status of visitors to the country....Giuliani wants a tamperproof ID card that includes fingerprinting for everyone entering the country and a central database to track when they leave.

For an immigrant to get a chance to stay here, he wants a confession and then the undocumented resident will "go to the back of the line." That sounds racistly reminiscent to me of "go to the back of the bus."

What's next, a Giuliani-Tancredo ticket?

Mitt Romney is going with the tried and true: declare war on sex offenders. Never mind that penalties for sex offenders are already astronomically high, Romney will raise them even higher:

[T]he Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor has proposed increased punishment for those who prey on children online -- stringent mandatory prison sentences, followed by lifetime tracking by Global Positioning System for first-time offenders who "use the Internet to sexually assault children." He calls it "One Strike, You're Ours."

Ah, the evil internets. What's next, a Mitt Romney - John Walsh ticket?

Civil libertarians provide this response to Romney's plan:

More...

Civil liberties advocates have no end of concerns about the proposal. They question Romney's focus on the means of predation, saying sexual abuse should be punished whether or not it involves the Internet. They argue that the best way to protect children online is to educate them to watch out for predators. They say mandatory sentences do not necessarily deter offenders who do not believe they are going to get caught. Also, they say such sentences lump together widely disparate offenses and remove the discretion of judges, as occurred recently when a Georgia teenager was sentenced to 10 years in prison after engaging in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl.

I'll provide one more: