A few weeks ago the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) was slammed on The Rachel Maddow Show for its racist origins and associations. Then FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, came on the show for an interview and lied to Rachel Maddow about stuff that was pretty easy for her show to expose. It took all of one hour for the show to fact-check Dan Stein’s lies. In fact, Rachel Maddow seemed so disgusted that a guest had come on her show and lied to her viewers that she devoted another segment the following night to setting the record straight on FAIR and Dan Stein.

If the people at FAIR had just let the initial segment go, it probably wouldn’t have had much of an impact on their reputations. But the fact that Dan Stein followed up by going on the program and lying, backfired in a big way. Still, despite making fools of themselves, the folks at FAIR can’t seem to stop talking about it.

Now FAIR’s executive director, Julie Kirchner, has sent a letter to the president of MSNBC (the network that airs The Rachel Maddow Show) demanding an apology.

In the letter FAIR tries to explain the funding it gave to the group Protect Arizona Now (more about that here) in 2004 to pass Arizona’s anti-immigrant Proposition 200, an initiative which made it a misdemeanor for public officials to fail to report persons unable to produce documentation of citizenship who apply for public benefits.

Julie Kirchner writes, “Arizona law requires individuals who organize in support of or in opposition to a ballot initiative to register as a political committee. In the case of Proposition 200, the official committee in support of the measure was Protect Arizona Now (PAN).”

And then, “Instead of giving money directly to PAN, FAIR and the FAIR Task Force independently contracted with a company to gather signatures to help get Proposition 200 on the ballot. FAIR paid the signature gatherers directly.”

That makes perfect sense! So instead of giving money to PAN, FAIR paid the individuals who were working to gather signatures for PAN. Silly us, that’s not at all like giving money to PAN.

But that still doesn’t explain the follow-up report published by the Center for New Community in 2004 that describes FAIR’s attempts to take over Protect Arizona Now. If FAIR didn’t financially support the committee, why did it fight in court for control over its board and resources?

The fourth time FAIR was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show, it was to expose yet another Dan Stein lie. In 1997, Stein did an interview with Tucker Carlson in which he was quoted saying, “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?” in response to questions about FAIR’s connection to racial eugenicist Garret Hardin.

Dan Stein told Maddow that the comments he made to Tucker Carlson in 1997 were “misquotes” and “twisted” and that Carlson admitted as much. One problem, Maddow followed up and not only is there no record of a correction made by Carlson, but he told Rachel he stands by the quotes he reported in that interview with Stein.

So why exactly is FAIR lying so much? Maybe its leaders are too proud to admit that their real views are repugnant to most Americans. If the proverb is true and pride is the mask of one’s own faults, then we should be very fearful of what else FAIR is hiding.