Sure, Ralph Peters has said a lot of mean and hateful things over the years, but they may not have prepared you for the barking-mad insanity of his April 2 column at David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.

It could technically be described as criticism of comprehensive immigration reform, but it's really just one long screed against giving undocumented immigrants voting rights -- something no one has proposed doing:

President Barack Obama's greatest crime against our flag and the republic for which it stands isn't his administration's health-care theft bill. That's mere shoplifting compared to what's coming next.

Obama and the leftwing of the Democratic Party intend to turn ten to eleven million illegal immigrants into voters as expeditiously as possible, giving them a permanent national electoral majority based upon a beholden Lumpenproletariat. If they succeed, our country will face mob rule.

No individual who broke the law to enter this country should ever be allowed to decide who becomes our president, governor, senator -- or town council member. If there is one message patriotic Americans must act upon during the remainder of Obama's reign, it's this: No voting rights for illegals.

No other issue of our time matters remotely as much -- not our lukewarm struggle with Islamist terror or even our metastasizing deficits. This isn't about tax increases or where to hold terror trials. It's about preserving our democratic institutions for law-abiding citizens.

Again: Nobody, let alone Obama, is proposing to allow undocumented immigrants to vote. Peters barely attempts to make the argument that creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, who would then be allowed to vote, is a bad thing. But Peters is on a roll: No voting rights for illegals! Mob rule! Never mind that President Reagan's granting amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants didn't exactly result in “mob rule.”

(Keep in mind that Peters is also a Fox News strategic analyst whom the network hosts to discuss terrorism on a regular basis.)

Peters goes on to insist that his opposition to this nonexistent plan is not racist, claiming, “This is not a matter of nuance, and it isn't color-coded.” Yet Peters goes on to describe La Raza as a “hate-group” and as one of the “organized protest mobs” used by Democrats, and his column is accompanied by this image:

Because to the folks at FrontPageMag -- and, one can argue, to Peters as well -- illegal immigration = heavily tattooed Hispanic gang-bangers coming to terrorize your neighborhood.

Peters goes on to advocate the creation of a new class of residency for people who would be allowed to work in the U.S. but couldn't vote or obtain citizenship:

What's the right answer to the illegal-immigration crisis our government's neglect has allowed to grow to such destructive proportions? Congress needs to create a new class of US residency for those illegals with no further criminal records and who can document a history of employment. That residency would provide basic social and economic rights. It would not give illegal immigrants the vote.

There is no reason, constitutional or moral, why Congress can't do this.

How about because it's a stupid idea?

Peters then lets slip what this is all really about: He writes that his plan would mean that his new underclass of undocumented immigrants “just couldn't force their political prejudices on us.” What “political prejudices” is he talking about? He doesn't say -- perhaps he's assuming, as other right-wingers have, that those immigrants would tend to vote Democratic.

That seems to be confirmed by what he writes next:

Born in 1952, I've lived through many national crises -- more than a few of them exaggerated in their proclaimed importance at the time. But I view the question of voting rights for illegal immigrants as the most critical issue of my lifetime, as regards the protection of our republic. We had the American Revolution, not the French Revolution. We never have been, and never should be, ruled by mobs. But mob rule is the goal of today's corrupt Democratic Party leadership. They view power as an end in itself. And they will do virtually anything to sustain, deepen and guarantee that power.

So it's not really about undocumented immigrants; it's about Democrats.

If we hated Obama as much as Peters does, we might be moved to fits of barely coherent ranting about nonexistent threats too.