BREAKING NEWS: News outlets are reporting that Russian jets today crossed into Ukrainian airspace. Also Washington is buzzing with reports that Vladimir Putin has broken off all talks with the White House and that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel cannot get his phone calls to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu returned. Let's see what the weekend brings.
An Inarticulate Rancher vs. Big Bad Government
Did you hear what Cliven Bundy said about Barack Obama? He said Obama was "articulate" and "clean." Oh, wait -- that was Joe Biden.
Bundy said that Obama was "light-skinned" and spoke with no "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." I'm sorry -- that was Harry Reid.
He used the "n" word, right? Well, not that "n" word, but the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd used to.
Yesterday, the New York Times broke a story that implied Bundy was a racist. "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," Bundy said. After lamenting the condition of many poor blacks today, he asks rhetorically, "And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life … or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."
Armed with these insensitive and racist statements, liberal reporters rushed to put politicians on the record. Predictably, the politicians ran for the tall grass.
Bundy's statement is inartful and ignorant . . . but that has nothing to do with the dispute he has with the federal government. He also said a lot more (here and here) than what the Times printed.
By the way, this is the same New York Times that for months could not find one hateful word worth reporting from racist and anti-Semite Jeremiah Wright's sermons. This is the same New York Times that only reluctantly covered the violent extremists in the Occupy Wall Street movement once they could no longer ignore it.
The thousands of Americans who rallied to Cliven Bundy did not do so because of his views on race relations or slavery. They rallied against an out-of-control government that was pointing military-grade weapons at American citizens and setting up so-called "free speech zones" over a dispute involving cattle grazing.
The left lost that PR war. Now, sadly, Cliven Bundy's rhetoric has given the left the opportunity to do to conservatives what it always does -- not defeat our ideas, but instead smear us all as bigots, extremists and Neanderthals. It is worth remembering that they did the very same thing to Rep. Paul Ryan just a few weeks ago when his words were free of any racial insensitivity.
Senators Demand Obama Enforce The Law
Yesterday 22 senators sent a letter to President Obama blasting the latest attempt to weaken our immigration laws. Consider these excerpts:
"We write to express our grave concerns over the immigration 'enforcement review' that you ordered… the changes under consideration would represent a near complete abandonment of basic immigration enforcement and discard the rule of law and the notion that the United States has enforceable borders. …
"Since 2009, your administration has issued policy directives and memoranda incrementally nullifying immigration enforcement… These policies have operated as an effective repeal of duly enacted federal immigration law…
"Our entire constitutional system is threatened when the Executive Branch suspends the law at its whim and our nation's sovereignty is imperiled when the commander-in-chief refuses to defend the integrity of its borders."
How would the left react if a future conservative president decided to undo Obamacare by executive order? Or ignore parts of the tax code he did not like? What if he told state attorney generals that laws permitting abortion were unconstitutional and should not be defended in court?
The Face of Radical Islam
Yesterday, an Afghan security guard opened fire at a hospital in western Kabul, killing three American doctors. They were working at the CURE International Hospital, a Christian charity dedicated to "healing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom of God."
To one radical Islamist, no amount of good deeds could make up for the fact that these American doctors were "infidels" who deserved death.
Speaking of Islamists, Sheik Mostafa Elazabawy, the imam of Masjid Manhattan, is protesting a film scheduled to be shown at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. He objects to the fact that the film refers to the 9/11 terrorists as "Islamists" and says they were waging "jihad."
All you need to know about this film is that it was narrated by NBC's Brian Williams. There is no way one of America's most prominent politically correct media elites would do anything to offend Islam. A spokesman for Williams confirmed as much, saying, "Brian did not take the request to narrate this film lightly and, after receiving a script from the museum, asked two leading experts to carefully review the wording."
As retired Fire Deputy Chief Jim Riches, whose son, Jimmy (also a firefighter) died at World Trade Center, put it: "The fact is, 19 people who were Muslims did come and crash planes that killed 3,000 Americans. There's no getting around that."