05/03/2010
Mark Twain supposedly remarked, “A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on.”
He must have had the dinosaur media in mind as the sender of the lie, since the MSM is either painfully stupid or agenda-driven about topics that don’t appeal to elite liberals. For example, it has shown no sign of being able to learn anything about the immigration issue despite years of patient tutelage to dopey reporters by diligent patriots.
In fact, the press has been spewing hysterical falsehoods about the Arizona immigration law at record decibels. The last week has been an unprecedented Pravda-like shriek-fest at the very idea that a state government would step in where the feds have refused to do their duty.
First and foremost, the dinosaur media have been accepting as fact the disinformation disgorged by Raza, the $PLC et al, who paint any effort at border enforcement as racist profiling. One example is the despicable $PLC’s characterization of attorney Kris Kobach as a “hate group lawyer,” when he is in fact a courageous defender of public safety and American sovereignty.
Keep in mind that all the howling has been about fear based on an imaginary idea of the law. Arizona law officers will not be rounding up illegal aliens en masse, storm-trooper style; they will be checking IDs for status during traffic stops and crime investigations. No one has been “profiled” nor will they be — it’s all fear-mongering. But the open-borders gang is very frightened by the prospect of genuine immigration enforcement, because the idea might catch on (as it has in at least five other states).
On the other side is the real terror that border-area Arizonans experience. Ranchers have their property invaded daily by dangerous drug and alien smugglers. Rancher Robert Krenz was murdered in March by a smuggler, and on Friday a Pinal County deputy was shot by an alien armed with an AK-47.
But according to the corrupt media, the worries of illegal aliens about profiling are more important than actual violent crimes committed against law-abiding citizens. So it goes in the nation’s newsrooms.
Ann Coulter has been chatting up willing interviewers about the issue:
If Coulter’s explanation isn’t a sufficient kick in the pants, check out the list of corrosive, untrue remarks collected by Byron York, illustrating how deeply unscrupulous the press is.
Top 10 dumbest things said about the Arizona immigration law, Washington Examiner, April 30, 2010
The last few days have seen an extraordinary outburst of criticism of Arizona’s new immigration law. In the nation’s elite media outlets, its most respected commentators are portraying the law as an act of police-state repression. Many, if not all, of the specific criticisms can be refuted simply by reading the law itself, but others are more generalized criticisms of immigration enforcement. In any event, it’s hard to choose the most over-the-top and wrongheaded commentary on the law, but here are ten choices, in no particular order. (If you don’t know why a particular statement is wrong, you can check here, and here, and here, and here.)
1. “The statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.”
2. “As the Arizona abomination makes clear, there is a desperate need for federal immigration action to stop the country from turning into a nation of vigilantes suspicious of anybody with dark skin.”
– Dana Milbank, Washington Post
3. “I can’t imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.”
4. “This law creates a suspect class, based in part on ethnicity, considered guilty until they prove themselves innocent. It makes it harder for illegal immigrants to live without scrutiny — but it also makes it harder for some American citizens to live without suspicion and humiliation. Americans are not accustomed to the command ‘Your papers, please,’ however politely delivered. The distinctly American response to such a request would be ‘Go to hell,’ and then ‘See you in court.’”
– Michael Gerson, Washington Post
5. “In case the phrase ‘lawful contact’ makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. ‘A person is guilty of trespassing,’ the law provides, by being ‘present on any public or private land in this state’ while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented.”
– Linda Greenhouse, New York Times
(Greenhouse’s “trespassing” allegation was based on an early version of the Arizona bill that was not the bill that became law. Her mistake was later removed from the Times site, but you can see original version here.)
6. “Federal law treats illegal immigration as a civil violation; Arizona law criminalizes it by using the legally dubious mechanism of equating the mere presence of undocumented immigrants with trespassing.”
(This editorial makes the same mistake as Linda Greenhouse’s “trespassing” column above.)
7. “I am saddened today at the prospect of a young Hispanic immigrant in Arizona going to the grocery store and forgetting to bring her passport and immigration documents with her. I cannot be dispassionate about the fact that the very act of her being in the grocery store will soon be a crime in the state she lives in…An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being.”
– Bishop Desmond Tutu, Huffington Post
(Tutu is perhaps relying on the erroneous information in the New York Times and Washington Post above.)
8. “It harkens back to apartheid where all black people in South Africa were required to carry documents in order to move from one part of town to another.”
– Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on ABC’s “This Week”
9. “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona…suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”
10. “This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers?’ There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ’show me your papers.’ It’s their catchphrase. Every time someone says ’show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check. So heads up, Arizona; that’s fascism. I know, I know, it’s a dry fascism, but it’s still fascism.”
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.