The old media love a great race – so much that they’d rather double their pleasure by injecting race into the 2010 congressional races. They weren’t content with claiming conservatives were anti-black racists who wanted to restart the Civil War. Now the left and the media are saying conservatives are anti-Hispanic racists who have re-launched the Mexican War as well.
That latest bogus claim follows
The media and the left have become so entangled on the issue that it’s almost impossible to sort out which ones are leading the charge to halt the law, beat up on Arizona and embrace 12-20 million illegal immigrants into our national bosom and pocketbook.
Those even-handed, professionally neutral journalists acted like they had joined La Raza. CBS Early Show co-host Harry Smith claimed to know the hearts of every Hispanic in Arizona, asking Sen. John McCain: “And for the millions of Hispanic Americans who live in Arizona, what do you say to them who feel like this bill is purely discriminatory?” ABC “Good Morning America” co-host Bill Weir harassed Arizona Sherriff Joe Arpaio, “Will you grab people on street corners?”
One-time New York Times Supreme Court reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse called Arizona a “police state” [1] and said she would avoid it till the law changed. She compared the law to “the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa.”
Official left-wing voices were just as shrill. Professional race baiter and the man who once called New York City “Hymietown,” Jesse Jackson called the law equal to “terrorism for the innocent … you look suspicious because you are Mexican.”
CNN Headline News host and perennial nutball Joy Behar invoked images of World War II Germany [2]. “Do you think it's kind of – doesn't it feel like sort of Nazism a little bit?” she asked.
Both the media and the left know how they want to play this – don’t go for the jugular, go for the wallet. They plan to promote a boycott of Arizona to break it for daring to say that people here illegally shouldn’t be.
The left’s Nation magazine embraced a boycott with echoes of the Martin Luther King Day boycott of the early 1990s. Sports correspondent Dave Zirin [3] led off his call with innocent-sounding lines from a Public Enemy song from that era called “By the Time I Get to Arizona.”
Zirin called the new law “echoes of apartheid” and added: “This will be the last column I write about the Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist.” He forgot to mention the Public Enemy song had a video with a whole story line of political assassination of whites [4] who opposed the King holiday. In the video one politician is poisoned and another is blown up while members of the band appear repeatedly carrying rifles and wearing paramilitary garb.
Imagine if the band had been white and the targets had been Hispanic. Now that would have been noteworthy.
CBS’s John Blackstone, estimated that previous boycott cost the state “170 conventions and $300 million.” That is what liberals plan for Arizona this time, too.
On ABC, Barbara Pinto said “the call for an economic boycott here has caught fire on the Internet.” Both ABC and NBC announced the scary news that all 400 planned guests for the American Immigration Lawyers Association had canceled.
Of course, Democrats are pushing the idea to get supporters to the polls. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., called for people to cancel summer vacations in
Even
As the boycott builds, and journalists will make sure it does, we’ll hear repeated reminders of how Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to illegals. Yes, using all information available at the time, Reagan did so. It was a horrific mistake. Instead of solving a problem, it guaranteed an endless cycle of amnesty and illegal border crossing.
What the media and left don’t want to discuss is the fact that a failure of government – that same government that now controls our health care – is what led