Dear Republicans,

Rallies in support of immigrants around the country have attracted crowds that have astonished even their organizers. More than a half-million demonstrators marched in Los Angeles on Saturday, as many as 300,000 in Chicago on March 10, and — in between — tens of thousands in Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee and elsewhere.

One of the most powerful institutions behind the wave of public protests has been the Roman Catholic Church, lending organizational muscle to a spreading network of grass-roots coalitions. In recent weeks, the church has unleashed an army of priests and parishioners to push for the legalization of the nation’s illegal immigrants, sending thousands of postcards to members of Congress and thousands of parishioners into the streets.

The demonstrations embody a surging constituency demanding that illegal immigrants be given a path to citizenship rather than be punished with prison terms. It is being pressed as never before by immigrants who were long thought too fearful of deportation to risk so public a display.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Partha Banerjee, director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, who was in Washington yesterday to help plan more nationwide protests on April 10. “People are joining in so spontaneously, it’s almost like the immigrants have risen. I would call it a civil rights movement reborn in this country.”

Isn’t that fucking cool?

Go on, motherfuckers, mess with the poor people that outnumber you some more. You’d think, with the black bag searches, the indefinite detentions, the giant fences, the eagle-eyed redneck sentinels, and warrantless access to the whole fucking internet, it wouldn’t be quite so easy for a million plus people to just sneak up on you like that. Especially since it seems to keep happening over and over again, doesn’t it? You fat little shitheads all grabbing for the money in the water and hey, whoah, this raft is kind of tippy, and nobody said there were sharks in the water, just mermaids. Almost like there’s some kind of cycle going on. Some kind of wave.

Paraphrasing George Peppard, I love it when a giant, angry, highly motivated voting bloc (grass roots, spontaneous, exponential, virulently anti-GOP) comes together. Especially when that bloc’s been kicked around for, like, ever, and it’s all your fault, you and your racist bedfellows. And you were trying, on the ludicrous basis of a shared love of pickup trucks, to get them to LIKE you? To vote for you? How’s that going?

And they’re Catholics! That has to sting. I mean, they love Jesus, you love Jesus, you love Bush, them not so much. After all the work you put in, really, ow.

Maybe I’m overestimating this: it’s a a momentary arc of activism and Bush, in his magisterial compassiontude, will remember Spanish and defuse the situation. George Will thinks there has to be a first time for that, right, the (objectively) Worst President Ever not totally fucking blowing it? Maybe, not kidding this time, for really reals, it’ll backfire and HELP the GOP! Like you’ve always wanted! Just gotta start working the phones, the blowdryers. Or maybe, if you’re a pudgy, yearning young conservative activist, watching those massed throngs in the streets, Americans, somehow, in American streets, you feel like maybe there is a wave coming. A wash of acid worry that cuts right through the smarm and self-satisfaction, lapping at the insults, the slights, the past you’d hoped to put behind you. A wave portending an eerily familiar future, where nobody listens to you anymore and you’re back to nodding along to Art Bell in your basement, plotting against Hillary, as you iron your red ties again and again and again, just, you know, in case you need them.