The House Divided (How long can a people remain a People when its leaders side with its foes?)

Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn don’t mince words on NRO: “Allowing the running down of a part of the United States by the head of a foreign government, at the White House, standing next to the president — who not only didn’t challenge him, but encouraged him — is a foreign- and domestic-policy catastrophe.” I couldn’t agree more with them, or with Mona Charen and Michelle Malkin, who’ve written forcefully about the absurdity of entertaining commentary on our immigration enforcement (or lack of same) from Mexico. That would be the same Mexico that enforces its immigration laws with the very “intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse” of which its president, Felipe Calderón, falsely accuses Arizona.

It is sadly noteworthy, though, that Bill and Seth wrote their essay before Calderón’s appearance Thursday before a joint session of Congress. It was at that latter event, with Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi presiding, and with President Obama’s cabinet front and center, that the most breathtaking display took place. I refer not to the tongue-lashing from Calderón, but to the standing ovation from nearly two-thirds of the People’s representatives and from the assembled administration officials. The ovation was for a brazen attack on the People.

Make no mistake: In the Congress of the United States on Thursday, it was a hostile Mexico against a besieged Arizona. Mexico won in a rout.

I was talking to a friend the other day, trying to explain my melancholy over the country. Conversations like that tend to get a bit self-absorbed, but indulge me for a second. I said I couldn’t think of a better example than myself for relating the problem no one wants to face up to. A number of years ago, at some risk to myself and my family, I prosecuted savage jihadists who had made themselves enemies of the United States. I was lauded for doing so by the Clinton administration. Though I disagreed with that administration philosophically, and particularly with its conception of international terrorism as a crime problem, I praised the much-needed overhaul by which it put teeth in our counterterrorism laws. Our disagreement was over the best way to protect the country, not over the imperative that the country be protected. Our debate was the traditional Right-Left debate.

Moreover, as a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona — for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens’ lives and property — is slandered as a human-rights violator.

And here is the excruciating part: As the Calderón spectacle demonstrates, these sentiments are not fringe sentiments.

To be sure, they are not held by the majority. To be elected, candidate Obama had to run as a post-partisan moderate, a pragmatic centrist who would not be constrained by ideology. Two camps well knew that this was nonsense: those few of us on the right who bothered to study Obama’s record, and those on the Alinskyite left who understood the campaign to be merely a charade necessary to grab the reins of power.

It was the second camp we saw standing and cheering for Calderón in Congress on Thursday. They used him as a vehicle to condemn Arizona.

This second camp, Obama’s transformative Left, had the numbers to give a thunderous ovation in the People’s House because a lot of people agree with them. If I had to guess — after its two generations of marching through our institutions, controlling the academy, and scripting the legacy media — I’d put it at one in five, or maybe even four, Americans. That’s enough to form a country the size of France or Germany.

Whatever that country may be, it is not America as we know it. Quite the opposite: Its purpose is to remake America, to render it unrecognizable to those who love America as she is, or has been. To that frightening new country, the rest of us are Arizona. We are here to be jeered and loathed. We are necessary only to pay for the unsustainable Change.

That, however, is not supposed to be the social contract, not for most of us. We don’t aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine. Arizona suits us just fine. And while the Alinskyites know they need us to underwrite their utopia, we will eventually figure out that we don’t need them to govern — and bankrupt — us.

A nation is a big, bumptious thing. It needn’t agree on everything. It can even bitterly disagree on major things. But to be a nation, a People, it has to agree that it has a shared destiny: that its unique culture, core principles, and independence are worth preserving, protecting, and defending.

I didn’t see a shared destiny during those moments in the People’s House Thursday. I saw Democrats cheering for Mexico’s attack on Arizona. It was a catastrophe.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, published by Encounter Books

May 20, 2008
Aid to Mexico an urgent priority
Miami Herald, FR Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 by ajodl

The outpouring of drug-related violence in Mexico over the last few months has made it indisputably clear that President Felipe Calderón's government is engaged in a fight to the death against the powerful criminal gangs that run the cross-border drug trade.

For Mexico, the stakes are all too clear: Either it prevails or the country becomes one big sanctuary for druglords. With Mexico reaching out to the United States for help and the Bush administration eager to comply, Congress must make assistance to Mexico an urgent priority.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee took the first significant step toward approving the aid package known as the Merida Initiative by approving a $1.6 billion plan to fight drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.

This is a welcome move, but the bill still has a number of hurdles to overcome, and, meanwhile, the fire in Mexico is gathering intensity. Officials murdered In the last two months, 12 Mexican federal police officials have been assassinated, including the acting federal police chief and other high-ranking law enforcement officers. Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo -- three major border cities -- have become increasingly dangerous.

On May 10, the No. 2 officer on the Ciudad Juarez police force was shot more than 50 times and killed, and this weekend the police chief himself resigned.

The Merida Initiative, named for the city where Presidents Bush and Calderón announced the plan, represents the U.S. part of a partnership aimed at stopping this growing security threat. Most of the funding goes toward providing helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to the Mexican government to combat the narcotics trade, along with training for operations.

Unreasonable proposals. It prohibits cash payments of any kind and it includes significant protections, such as barring the involvement of units accused of human-rights abuses. Even with these kinds of safeguards, supporters of the measure in the Foreign Relations panel had to fight back efforts by Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and others to add conditions that would have made the bill unworkable.

One defeated proposal would block the aid to Mexico unless the U.S. president certifies that the U.S.-Mexico border is secure. Such proposals are not only unreasonable, but counter-productive. They are designed to stymie all aid to Mexico at a time when the government is waging a fight in which the United States has a major stake. If the violence in Mexico is not checked, it is only a matter of time before it spills over across the border. Mr. Calderón has courageously decided to make a stand against drug criminals. By helping him, the United States will be helping itself.

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February 12, 2008
Mexico's President Calderon Headed to U.S.
newsmax, Philip V. Brennan
FR Posted on 02/13/2008 by VU4G10

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has has publicly stated his concern for the "growing harassment" and "frank persecution" of Mexicans in the United States, will make his first official visit to California Wednesday and will meet with immigrant leaders among others.

Speaking to the Mexican government's migrant assistance agency in November, his comments about "persecution" appear to have been aimed at U.S. presidential candidates who voiced their desire to curb illegal immigration. He also expressed disappointment at Congress' inability to agree on an immigration reform measure.

While in the Golden State, he will address the state Legislature and attend a private lunch meeting with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, and other officials. According to George Grayson, a government professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia who specializes in Mexico, Calderon also is coming to the United States to apply political pressure on U.S. lawmakers.--SNIP--Calderon wants his $1.4 billion in US taxpayer loot--no questions asked.

SOURCE http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969534/posts

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QUOTING FORMER CONG TOM TANCREDO (R-Colo) Juan Hernandez headed up the Mexican govt agency, "Ministry of Mexicans Living in the United States. Hernandez is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, and a good friend of then-presidents Bush and Mexico's Vicente Fox." Hernandez was presidential candidate John McCain's Hispanic outreach man.

Hernandez explained to Cong Tancredo the purpose of the Mexican government agency: Ministry of Mexicans Living in the United States:

(1) to increase the flow of Mexican nationals to the United States.....

(2) to direct Mexican nationals in the US to serve Mexico’s needs (like reconquista);

(3) to increase US remittances to Mexico of $50 billion a year (30% of the Mexican GDP);

(4) to get US jobs for an exploding Mexican population, alleviating Mexico's social instability due to rising unemployment;

(5) to get free US training for Mexicans, who are expected to return and repatriate those skills back to Mexico.

Hernandez, a duaol citizen whp resides in Fort Worth, supports amnesty: "By populating the United States with millions of Hispanics tied economically, politically and linguistically to Mexico, we are able to exert enormous influence and pressure on US policy and its dealings with Mexico."

SOURCE http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33894

NOTE: " Exerting enormous influence and pressure on US policy and its dealings with Mexico" means extorting billions of US tax dollars to subsidize corrupt Third World federales.

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