Okay, CNN has now picked up and aired the video we posted the other day of Rudy's speech in 1996. In it, Rudy declared that we will "never, ever" be able to totally control immigration -- a comment strikingly at odds with his current campaign vow to "end" illegal border-crossing for good.

The network also got a response to our video from the Giuliani campaign.

Unfortunately, however, CNN botched its report, letting the Rudy camp skate by with an explanation that was almost comically bogus. The network only played a tiny snippet of the Rudy speech, omitting the part of it that would have proven that the campaign's pushback is complete nonsense. As such, CNN's report is worth a look, because it signals a potential pitfall for the media in covering Rudy's latest ongoing exercise in immigration dissembling. Check it out:

Look, I greatly appreciate the pickup and the plug for the site, and it's good to see that CNN is paying attention to Rudy's immigration shenanigans. Nonetheless, this just won't do.

As you can see from the above video, the Rudy campaign's response here is that Rudy meant to say in his 1996 speech that we couldn't end immigration merely because we didn't have the technology to do it. And if you focus on the one sentence of the speech that CNN quoted, this is at least a somewhat plausible explanation. The Rudy quote CNN selected was this one:

"We're never, ever going to be able to totally control immigration to a country that is as large as ours."

Here, however, are the Rudy quotes from our video that CNN left out:

"We're never, ever going to be able to totally control immigration to a country that is as large as ours, that has borders that are as diverse as the borders of the United States, and as a society that wants to be a country that values freedom -- that values freedom of movement, freedom to do business.

"If you were to totally control immigration into the United States, if you were to totally control the flow of people in the United States, you might very well destroy the economy of the United States because you'd have to inspect everything and everyone in every way possible. I don't know that there's any technological way to totally control it. There's no doubt much better ways to get more of a reasonable degree of assurance about who's coming in, to get more control over it, you're never totally going to control it. So we just have to accept that if we want to be the kind of country that we are."

As you can see, in 1996 Rudy wasn't merely saying that totally controlling immigration was impossible; he was also explicitly saying that he thought that doing so was a bad idea, too. While he did allude to the technological aspect of the problem, he also very clearly said that devoting the resources necessary to totally halting immigration could "destroy the economy of the United States" and could even threaten our sense of ourselves as a society that "values freedom of movement, freedom to do business."

So, again, the crux of Rudy's view back then was that trying to totally control immigration was a bad idea -- something that again is strikingly at odds with his current stance, and something that is getting lost here.

The reason this matters is that this mumbo-jumbo about technology is emerging as Rudy's primary pushback on immigration right now. He even repeated it himself as a campaign stop on Thursday, and he'll certainly be repeating it again and again during his quest for the GOP nomination. So let's hope that reporters avoid getting snookered by Rudy's latest exercise in dissembling as we go forward.