In a brief essay that did little more than repackage a press release from the Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff's Department, The New American reported on July 8 that Sheriff Paul Babeu has bravely declined a personal security detail despite threats on his life "from the Mexican Drug Cartel and Drug Cartel members." Those alleged threats, which are deemed "credible," were provoked by Sheriff Babeu's bold efforts "to secure the United States border," readers were told.
Correction, Please!
Perhaps this should be described in terms of a correction made necessary by subsequent developments that impeach the credibility of Paul Babeu and his department, at least where gathering and assessing "intelligence" is concerned.
After former* JBS member, unabashed neo-Nazi, and accused federal provocateur J.T. Ready assembled a militia-like group to patrol Pinal County in search of illegal immigrants, Sheriff Babeu told the press that he neither encouraged nor invited Ready and his chums to act as a law enforcement auxiliary. He mentioned the possibility that Ready's little knot of knuckleheads "may have gotten the attention of the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico," reported Arizona's KPHO-TV, a CBS affiliate.
Babeu referred to an article supposedly written by "Michael Webster, [a]columnist with the LA Times," describing a sit-down meeting with a member of Los Zetas. "During the interview," reports KPHO, "the cartel member specially mentioned Babeu."
"`We're going to hold Sheriff Paul Babeu personally responsible,' Babeu said quoting the article," recounted KPHO. "I've never seen threats made publicly, using our media to make threats south of the border to us," the sheriff concluded, emphasizing that "the threat will not intimidate his department."
One problem here is that Michael Webster doesn't write for the Los Angeles Times, and never has. No article of the sort referred to above was ever published by that paper. Mr. Webster, who describes himself as a "syndicated investigative journalist" -- and who may, indeed, so some worthwhile reporting -- publishes most of his work through an on-line news aggregator called U.S. Border Fire Report.
Webster's essay refers to a conversation he claims to have had with "One of my informants that I have called Juan" in which the 35-year-old man, "who claimed to be an officer in the Los Zetas drug cartel organization," criticized Babeu for not properly investigating the killings of drug couriers, which were supposedly committed by vigilantes.
"The Los Zetas officer said `I believe there is a cover-up by sheriff Paul Babeu by protecting the Americans who did the killings. If the true facts of this case are not revealed publicly and the guilty ones are not brought to justice I will hold the sheriff personally responsible."
Taking this account at face value, it's difficult to discern an actual death threat, as Sheriff Babeu clearly intends. But there is nothing about this story to elevate it above the status of printed rumor: While we may be justified in accepting Webster's claim to have met and spoken with "Juan," we're given no reason to believe that this man was what he reportedly claimed to be.
The Zetas presumably know enough about operational security, and have sufficient organizational discipline, to deny their cadres the luxury of mouthing off in detail to bloggers regarding their malign designs against U.S. law enforcement officials.
Babeu or his office misrepresented Webster as a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, and repackaged his intriguing but dubious account as legitimate intelligence regarding a plausible threat against the sheriff.
Obviously, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office has pretty emancipated standards of "credibility" when it comes to assessing supposed threats to Sheriff Babeu's life.TNA would be wise to run a clarification or retraction of its earlier PR story about Babeu, but it won't.
Santayana famously said that "skepticism is the chastity of the intellect." When it comes to assessing sensational claims made by opportunistic Republicans seeking to exploit nativist impulses, The New American's editorial "leadership" is a pushover. This is the sort of thing we'd expect from people content to repackage "news" from undisguised tabloids like the Globe -- assuming that the "news" item resonates with the narrative being written by the GOP-aligned media apparat regarding the evil deeds of the foreign-born usurper Barack Obama. (Mr. Obama, I hasten to point out, is at least as despicable as his Republican predecessor, whose policies he has continued with almost perfect fidelity.)
Back in the 1960s, when the Feds through COINTELPRO and other initiatives were creating the conditions for violent racial conflict, the JBS used what influence it could to put out or contain the fire.Today, the weak-willed opportunists running things in Appleton are helping to spread accelerant.
As recently as 1996, when TNA was still in the business of investigative journalism and the management of the JBS was burdened with principles of some kind, the organization actually exposed cynical efforts to pit Americans against each other through engineered racial conflict (see, if you can find it, the July 22, 1996 cover story "Behind the Burnings: There is More than Racism at Work"). Of course, that was about a decade before the organization fell into the hands of people content to ride waves because they were too timid to make them.
*Ready claims that he wasn't expelled by the JBS, which has a black-letter policy forbidding members to be active in white supremacist organizations. By his account, Ready simply allowed his membership to expire.
In a June 29 essay burdened with the alarmist title "Eighty Mile Swath of Arizona Surrendered to Cartels," The New American addressed what it called "the menacing terror of drug traffickers and human smugglers that have all but taken adverse possession of the region."
"Eighty miles from the border with Mexico in Arizona, the federal government has posted signs warning Americans not to approach any closer to the border, as it is a region of `active drug and human smuggling' and that those that ignore the warning may “encounter armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed,'" wrote TNA contributor Joe Wolverton II.
Those warning signs, he insisted, are "white flags of surrender flying 80 miles within the border of the United States of America. Is [sic] such examples of federal contempt of the border crisis enough to convince those who scoff at cries of treason and invasion?"
The claim that the Obama administration turned over the territory to Mexico originated with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a publicity-fixated Republican neo-con and ally of John McCain. Babeu's jurisdiction does not abut the border with Mexico. Clarence Dupnink, sheriff of neighboring Pima County, which does share a border with Mexico, insists that border violence has actually decreased in recent years.
Drug smuggling and related violence -- which are unavoidable bi-products of the demented "war on drugs," an unconstitutional and counterproductive effort to regulate the bloodstream of Americans -- are a problem for Arizona (albeit a smaller one now that it was several years ago). The same is true for sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.
The Obama Administration Running Legal Interference for New Black Panthers?
Item:
"The New Black Panther Party has been a controversial subject for a number of reasons," wrote GOP stenographer Raven Clabough a July 10 posting on the TNA website. "On Election Day 2008, Black Panther member King Samir Shabazz and national chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz were caught on video bearing billyclubs outside of a Philadelphia polling center. An investigation was launched and charges of voter intimidation were made, but the Department of Justice, under the leadership of Eric Holder, elected to dismiss the case."
J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney-turned-GOP activist, claims that under Obama and Holder the voting rights section of the Justice Department repeatedly showed "hostility" toward prosecuting intimidation cases involving "black defendants and white victims," and said that its dismissal of the NBBP case illustrates this institutionalized bigotry.
Thomas J. Perrelli, identified by Adams as the one who ordered the dismissal of the case against the NBPP, wasn't confirmed until three months after the Bush administration dropped the criminal complaint.
Deputy Assitant AG Julie Fernandes, who per Adams' version ordered subordinates not to prosecute minority voter intimidation cases, didn't start at her post until six months after the criminal case was dismissed.
Why wasn't Adams outraged when the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department dropped the criminal probe of the NBPP? Why is he trying to give the Obama-Holder Justice Department all of the blame for this, when, at most, they were simply building on the decisions of their predecessors?
The Obama administration won the civil case against the NBBP by default. It didn't pursue an injunction against the entire organization -- which was the department's original approach -- focusing instead on the one individual whose actions, captured on tape, were clearly illegal.
What Adams describes as "reverse discrimination" has been referred to by others involved in the decision as a disagreement over strategy and priorities among "career people" in the department. This seems entirely plausible, pending corroboration from Adams of his alarming accusations of official misconduct that, if true, would be grounds not only for impeachment but criminal prosecution.
UPDATE --
While the people in charge of TNA are pandering to the Fox-aligned demographic by retailing breathless accounts of Afro-Militarism, an Arizona offshoot of the National Socialist Movement -- led by former JBS member, Hitler fanboy, and likely federal asset J.T. Ready -- are actually taking people hostage at gunpoint.
The New Black Panther Party's alleged "voter intimidation" involved one NBBP goofball -- roughly one-eighth of the group's entire membership -- making faces and saying offensive things. The NSM's "border patrols" are quite likely to get someone killed.
Obama's a foreign-born usurper -- we read it in the check-out line!
Item:
"Globe magazine has jumped into the citizenship controversy with a July 12 cover story that states, `Obama was not born in the U.S.,' writes Raven Clabough, who appears to be TNA's liaison to the Hannitized. "The supermarket tabloid may not have the best track record for accurate reporting among mainstream publications, but it does have a large circulation and its voice and what it has to say will undoubtedly bring the issue of Obama's citizenship to the attention of a lot more people and cause them to consider seriously if there is anything to it."
Correction:
Actually, there's nothing to correct here, because there's no story -- at least none that The New American would have bothered with back when those producing it aspired to provide credible news and thought-provoking commentary.
To the extent that there is "news" here, the substance of it would appear to be this: Whether or not Obama's an illegitimate president owing to foreign birth, a large-circulation tabloid has lent its support to that theory, and this will have an impact on the opinions of its readers (make that "browsers"). This isn't reporting. It's not even blogging. It is pure, undisguised pandering of the worst and most transparent variety. And it is an all-sufficient indictment of the abysmal standards that prevail at what was once an exceptional publication.
Oh, If Only We Had a Military Dictator....
Item:
In a paean to "Operation Wetback," the paramilitary Border Patrol operation that rounded up and deported millions of Mexican laborers, Dr. Roger McGrath extols the"bold, decisive, and forceful leader" who presided over it: General Dwight Eisenhower (who was president at the time), and Lt. General Joe Swing, Director of the INS.
"It took a military man, who thought that national borders should mean something" in order to defeat the "unholy alliance of agribusinessmen and other employers," in concert with perfidious Mexicans, to subvert the border and undermine the labor market in the southwest, writes McGrath.
The problem began during World War II, when, "with so many Americans in the service — and fighting and dying overseas — Mexicans illegally entered the United States to take advantage of employment opportunities, especially as agricultural laborers."
Fortunately, Eisenhower and Swing were willing to employ military means to beat back this invasion, offering an example we would be wise to follow, concludes Dr. McGrath.
Correction:
First of all, it's notable to see Eisenhower -- not Robert Welch's favorite public figure -- being extolled as not only a hero, but as something akin to the savior of the republic, in the pages of The New American. Perhaps the TNA editorial staff decided it was acceptable -- in this one instance -- to traffic in "nuances" that differ from Mr. Welch's views. (Of course, publicly differing in "nuance" from the incumbent JBS management is a firing offense, or at least it was in one specific instance.)
Of greater significance is the omission fromDr. McGrath's essay of any mention of the 1942 "Bracero" treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.
McGrath depicts Mexican laborers as "taking advantage" of dislocations in the labor market caused by the war socialist economy of WWII. In fact, it was the FDR regime that invited those laborers into the country through the 1942 Bracero Treaty, which didn't expire until 1963. Through that agreement, the U.S. government imported millions of Mexicans to labor as "guest workers" in fields, factories, and other productive roles left vacant because of mobilization for the war.
Mexico at the time was in the midst of its own depression, which was even deeper and more tragic than ours. So it's not surprising that millions of Mexicans -- in some cases, literally entire villages -- migrated northward in search of the promised wage of 30 cents an hour (which was specified in the treaty). Nor is it surprising that the northward migration didn't flow tidily in government-established channels.
None of this is mentioned or even alluded to in Dr. McGrath's homily regarding the supposed virtues iron-handed military rule.
By omitting "Bracero" from this discussion, McGrath produces a caricature: The villains are insidious Mexicans "stealing" jobs from American draftees, and conniving businessmen bereft of civic virtue.
The "heroes," by way of contrast, are "decisive, forceful" military leaders in positions of political authority -- guys like Lt. Gen. Swing, whom McGrath describes as "[h]andsome and square-jawed with sparkling blue eyes, white hair, and a bearing that suggested strength and decisiveness...." Yes, someone like that is just the hero to beat back the Brown Peril, isn't he?
Mini-clarification, July 18: In the photo caption on page 37 in the print edition of TNA's July 19 issue, there is a fleeting reference to the "Bracero Agreement" as providing to Mexican laborers "a legal way to enter the United States and work." This truncated, inadequate description is the only mention of Bracero in the entire article.
Observations:
The TNA stories examined above display the superficiality, selective credulity, and opportunism that have come to characterize the publication since -- oh, let's pick a date purely at random; how about October 2006? Dr. McGrath's story, produced by a capable writer and long-established academic figure, represents something worse: Deliberate omission in an effort to promote an ideological agenda.
There was a time, not long ago, when TNA would take the time and invest the effort to examine and report on issues responsibly, rather than simply retailing whatever resonates with the Republican-wedded, Fox "News" and Talk Radio-obsessed sub-population.
They're too busy riding the wave in Appleton to take the time and care to find out if part of Arizona really is under the rule of throat-slitting Mexican narcotics lords, or if the Holder-era Justice Department really is a festering pit of Afro-racist corruption.
But this would require actual reporting, and it might complicate the effort to pander to the lowest common denominator -- and in the cases discussed above, that denominator runs right along one of the fault-lines Robert Welch warned about.
"The Cressbeckler Stance": JBS-TV's New Star Attraction?
Why bother watching Art Thompson stumble through the latest installment of "cranky old reactionary reads the newspaper"? Joad Cressbeckler offers pretty much the same content in a much more entertaining way:
