THE DAILY BLADE: An Unholy Alliance
The Washington Post’s often droll but not always original (last item) Dana Milbank doesn’t believe that Mexican criminals – the drug and human smugglers who daily cross into AZ – behead people, and ridiculed Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) (“Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they're also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.”) for telling him something he didn’t know.
In an interview with Greta Van Susteren on June 16, 2010 Brewer (R-AZ) said this:
We are certainly under attack by the drug cartels and by the drug smugglers, the human smugglers. It's out of control. It's totally out of control. …
We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can't feel safe in their community. It's wrong! It's wrong!
A description of an interview Brewer did with Phoenix news program "Sunday Square-Off" on June 27th (The Stiletto could not find a transcript of the show – and neither could Milbank, apparently) says she “stood by her comment that beheadings are occurring in AZ as a result of the illegal drug trade.” But Brewer never told Van Susteren that the beheadings were occurring in AZ, only that they are being carried out by the same people who cross into and out of Mexico and her state with impunity. And she certainly did not say that “fair-haired Americans” were being beheaded, scalped or having their heads shrunk. This, folks, is how the MSM ridicules and marginalizes conservatives. Moreover, it’s a tried-and-true tactic to deflect attention from the real story.
The real story isn’t which side of the border the beheadings are occurring, it’s that they are occurring.
In April, McClatchy Newspapers reported that “[d]ozens of people have been decapitated in recent months, most of them apparently members of rival drug gangs locked in turf battles over narcotics routes, betrayals of loyalty and territorial influence”:
Decapitations by drug cartels in Mexico first began in 2006, and that year armed thugs swaggered onto the white tile dance floor of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, a town in Michoacan state, and dumped five heads from plastic garbage bags.
The blood-curdling act shocked Mexico, and evoked images of Islamic terrorism half a world away.
"These guys are copying the methods of al Qaida (terrorists)," said Jorge Chabat, a criminal justice expert at the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics in Mexico City. He said the Mexican drug lords saw Internet video of beheadings of hostages captured by Muslim extremists in Iraq and Pakistan, and adopted the tactic themselves, down to the posting of video on the internet.
Decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic - dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid. Cartel goons have moved away from that method, however.
"Dissolving the bodies in acid didn't bring them the same spectacular results," said Arturo Arango Duran, a security consultant in Monterrey, the industrial and business hub in the nation's north, referring to media coverage. "This is all part of a plan to use publicity to control territory through terror."
What do terrorists have to do with anything? There is evidence that al Qaeda has hooked up with Latin American drug cartels, and Hezbollah with Mexican drug cartels. Where do you think drug gangs learned about the effectiveness of a beheading or two to subdue and control entire villages?
Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking her to establish a special task force to determine the national security implications, citing a "high-ranking Mexican Army officer" whom she said believes Hezbollah could be training Mexican drug cartels to make bombs. She warned: "This might lead to Israel-like car bombings of Mexican/USA border personnel or National Guard units."
And so it came to pass: Last week, the Mexican drug gang La Linea used a car bomb for the first time in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, TX. The bomb, which is believed to have been detonated remotely with a cell phone, killed two policemen, a doctor and a paramedic. The murderous thugs had lured the victims to the scene by dressing a wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot.
The Case For Puerto Rican Statehood
In his column, George Will profiles Luis Fortuno, the “very” Republican and Reaganite governor of Puerto Rico, who favors statehood for the island. Fortuno argues that if Republicans secure the U.S.- Mexico border while also pushing Puerto Rican statehood, they won’t take as large a political hit in the Hispanic community as they otherwise would have. Will sees merit in his reasoning:
How many know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens? That every president since Truman has affirmed Puerto Rico's right to opt for independence or statehood? That every Republican platform since 1968 has endorsed Puerto Rico's right to choose statehood? That Ronald Reagan, announcing his candidacy in 1979, said, "I favor statehood for Puerto Rico"? …
Puerto Rico, which is only half as far from Florida as Hawaii is from California, is about the size of Connecticut. Its population is larger than the populations of 24 states. …
Many Republicans suspect that congressional Democrats support statehood for the same reason they want to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state - to get two more senators (and in Puerto Rico's case, perhaps six members of the House). Such Republicans mistakenly assume that the island's population of 4 million has the same Democratic disposition as the 4.2 million Puerto Ricans in the Bronx and elsewhere on the mainland.
Fortuno disagrees, noting that while Republicans on the mainland were losing in 2008, he was elected in the island's biggest landslide in 44 years. … A majority supports his agenda, which includes tax and spending cuts, trimming 16,000 from public payrolls to begin eliminating the deficit that was 45 percent of the size of the budget.
The Stiletto gives George Will props for knowing that Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth (not all politicians and pundits do), but if he would trouble himself to visit The Bronx and talk to the Puerto Ricans who live in the borough, he will find that they are proud of their American birthright, dislike being lumped in with illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America by dint of all Spanish-speakers being designated "Hispanic" (a made-up label, some insist) and resent illegals for sucking up jobs and community resources that would otherwise go to American citizens - specifically, to Puerto Ricans – as well as for identity theft specifically targeting Puerto Ricans (second item) that necessitated the voiding and reissuing of all birth certificates and other ID issued on the island.
If Obama's "comprehensive immigration plan" involves yet another round of amnesty, whatever Mexican-American votes Dems pick up will be offset, at least in part, by the Puerto Rican votes they lose.
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