Yesterday in an appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show, John McCain said among other, more important things, that he supports Arizona's tough new immigration bill (not yet a law) because "the people whose homes and property are being violated. It's the drive-by that -- the drivers of cars with illegals in it that are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway." You can watch it here: peekURL.com/vztpe5h

It's the last that has caused various low-level leftwing bloggers to be confused (or pretend to be confused). A list of them is below. Rather than trying to figure out what McCain was referring to - and instead of doing even basic research or asking smarter, more experienced friends - they pretended like McCain was engaging in crazy talk. Not only that, but almost all of those who commented on those bloggers' entries were as bad as those bloggers, launching into cheap jokes rather than trying to think things through.

While McCain is definitely a piece of work, in this case he's referring to crimes that have been going on for decades where people will stage an auto accident in order to obtain insurance money. In a similar type of crime, criminals will intentionally bump a car and then, when the driver gets out to exchange information, will rob or carjack that person. Any police department in any good-sized city will have had cases like this, and those involved will probably have some sort of bond, such as all being immigrants or of one ethnicity.

For more on this topic, see the page insurancefraud.org/staged_accidents.htm

Note that those on the board of that organization include representatives from Allstate, Farmers, John Hancock, Mass Mutual, and other insurance companies as well as from the National District Attorneys Association, and even the National Urban League.

Some of the clueless leftwing bloggers who chose to act like children instead of doing basic research include:

Steve Benen of Washington Monthly
washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_04/023423.php

Alex Pareene of Gawker
gawker.com/5520748/john-mccain-immigrants-are-crashing-cars-on-purpose

John Aravosis of AmericaBlog
americablog.com/2010/04/mccain-illegal-immigrants-intentionally.html

"GottaLaff" of Political Carnival
thepoliticalcarnival.net/2010/04/video-john-mccain-illegal-immigrants.html

Huffington Post (no byline)
huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/john-mccains-strange-clai_n_544559.html

UPDATE: Here's one more:

John Byrne of RawStory
rawstory.com/rs/2010/0421/mccain-illegal-immigrants-intentionally-causing-car-accidents