For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized “fifth column” within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista — the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War. In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions are stealthily enlisting in a campaign of subversion orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border — and, when the time is right, this fifth column will erupt in an orgy of violence and mayhem.

Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington’s seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington’s proxy narco-war, which has killed tens of thousands of people since 2006 and displaced hundreds of thousands more, has done nothing to palliate those feelings. An actual U.S. invasion might be the only thing that would turn the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border into something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Since 2007, when the Fed’s most recent economic bubble collapsed, immigration from Mexico has tapered off dramatically. In Arizona, immigration (both legal and illegal) and violent crime have both been in decline for a decade. Yet the state’s Republican leadership, and much of its law enforcement apparatus — from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the corrupt septuagenarian headline whore, to Pinal County Sheriff  Paul Babeau, his younger and more telegenic understudy — insist that the state is under unremitting siege.  Governor Jan Brewer,  who claimed that the “majority” of illegal immigrants from Mexico are “mules” in the employ of drug cartels and that illegal immigrants had committed “beheadings” in Arizona, was headed for electoral oblivion following an unpopular tax increase — until she seized on the immigration issue, which propelled her to a dramatic political recovery.

Arizona’s Republican leadership has diligently cultivated anti-immigration hysteria, and in exploiting it has managed to embrace two apparently contradictory positions: It has denounced the Obama administration for butting into state affairs by filing a federal lawsuit against SB 1070 (the “Your Papers, Please” law), while angrily demanding greater federal intervention in the form of a military presence on the border. “It’s literally out of control,” Sheriff Babeau protested in an interview with Fox News. “We stood with Senator McCain and literally demanded support for 3,000 soldiers to be deployed to Arizona to get this under control and finally secure our border with Mexico.”

Arizona’s experience illustrates that the political potency of Mexico-bashing has no logical connection to the severity of problems associated with Mexican immigration. That lesson hasn’t been lost on Texas Governor Rick Perry, an establishment Republican who has sought to cultivate a constituency among Tea Party activists. In a recent MSNBC interview, Perry upped the ante by calling for a U.S. invasion of Mexico. Of course, Perry insisted, Mexico’s government would have to “approve” of the invasion.

As if to answer the question, “What kind of Latin American political figure would `approve’ of a U.S. invasion and occupation of his country?” Colombian-born Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos has offered a very public endorsement of the proposal. Between positions with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and his present gig at the post, Schumacher-Matos taught a course at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies, which is one of several academic nurseries in which the Establishment cultivates tomorrow’s Quislings.

In a tone reminiscent of a Brezhnev-era media apparatchik condemning “reactionaries” who resisted the advance of Soviet-administered enlightenment, Schumacher-Matos piously chastises Mexico’s political class for being “too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines.” Only if Mexicans somehow emerge from “their nationalistic stupor” will they see the light of reason and welcome the presence of “American military specialists stationed within [their country's]  borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones.”

Although Mexico “is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never — never — participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military,” Schumacher-Matos points out, inviting us to sorrowful contemplation of the shame of it all. To substantiate the point, he cites a recent study by Roderic Ai Camp of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oblivious to the irony of mentioning Wilson’s name in connection with proposed U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

“What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars for the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th,” Schumacher-Matos scolds. “They talk of imperialism and hegemony — which are irrelevant today.” This isn’t “imperialism” that we’re discussing: It’s applied humanitarianism of the kind that has turned places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia into havens of peace and prosperity.

Elements of Schumacher-Matos’s prescription are a bit outdated.  The “electronic intelligence systems” he describes are already operating in Mexico, huge amounts of money are being poured into training and equipping Mexican military and police, and U.S.-trained paramilitaries are actively involved in the Drug War – albeit, for the most part, on the side of the cartels. None of this is sufficient, he insists; there is no substitute for U.S. boots on the ground, even though the troops wearing them would be sent in a purely “advisory” capacity, at first, as they always are.

No hyperbole is involved in describing Mexico as another front in the Regime’s war with — well, practically everybody. This is illustrated by “The Third Front,” this evening’s installment of Oliver North’s “War Stories” agitprop series on the Fox News Channel. That title says a great deal about the assumptions of the militarist Right, which the FNC’s core demographic: Because our state of war never ends, we don’t begin a new war, we simply focus on a different “front.” Accordingly, Mexico will soon endure some more unwanted attention from the War Party, irrespective of what happens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or North Korea.

The government’s abduction of Cheyenne Irish just hours after her birth is hardly the first time law enforcement officials and social workers have cited “political extremism” to justify severe and extra-constitutional sanctions against people who have not been convicted of an actual crime.

Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg

Afterwards, discuss it below.

It isn’t radical Muslims’ hatred for “our freedoms” that drives terrorist acts on U. S. soil, William Grigg argues.  It is the regime’s continued policy of aggression on foreign soil, and its leveraging of Muslim outrage to justify its perpetual wars.

Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg

Afterwards, discuss it below.

Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer and disciple of New Age futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, makes a singularly unlikely Crusader. Yet apparently at some point in the past year or so Gingrich looked in a mirror and saw Don John of Austria looking back at him.

An epiphany of that kind would explain Gingrich’s perverse determination to depict the contrived controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a contemporary Battle of Lepanto. A more reasonable explanation would be that Gingrich, one of the most penetrably insincere figures in American politics, is trying to distill irrational populist resentment into a propellant for a presidential campaign.

The contrived furor over the Cordoba House shows few signs of abating, and Gingrich used a recent interview with Christian Right activist David Barton to keep the GOP’s base riled up over an issue that most likely will disappear from view after the coming mid-term election — even though the rancorous residue will remain.

Gingrich is a statist down to his chromosomes, so it’s not surprising to see him breezily dismiss the concept of property rights. Even though those behind the proposed Park51 Muslim Community Center are peacefully and legally pursuing their designs, “There are a number of different steps that could be taken” to nullify their property rights, Gingrich told an approving Barton. “There’s no reason this has to occur and whether it’s city, state, or federal there are plenty of ways for America to stop it.”

For instance, “Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war.” Absent federal intervention, Gingrich continued, the New York State government could wage a war of attrition against the project: “The Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene because frankly he has the ability to slow it down for decades if he wants to.”

(Incidentally, when asked in the Barton interview about his presidential plans, Gingrich coyly replied that he would have to discuss the matter with Calista, the most recent future ex-Mrs. Gingrich, before making a decision early next year.)

Why is dramatic intervention against the Park51 project necessary? Gingrich’s July 21st statement on the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is still being dutifully forwarded via e-mail by consumers of Republican-aligned talk radio, insists (on the basis of a studiously dishonest reading of Spanish history) that the supposed “mega-mosque” would be seen by Islamists as a “symbol of Islamic conquest.”

“America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization,” pontificated Gingrich.  “Sadly, too many of our elites are the willing apologists for those who would destroy them if they could. No mosque. No self deception. No surrender. The time to take a stand is now – at this site on this issue.”

The supposed urgency of this refrain is dictated by Gingrich’s assumptions about how the “Ground Zero Mosque” would be perceived by radical Islamists rather than how the matter should be defined under our laws, traditions, and values.

This is to say that Gingrich, the supposed champion of American culture, is demanding that we play by their rules, rather than our own.

Rather than recognizing that we are strong enough to be indifferent to the delusions of Islamist radicals, Gingrich (like the deranged Pamela Geller and the deluded people organizing to oppose construction of Muslim houses of worship across the country)  revels in our supposed weakness. They insist that we are so pitiable and helpless that permitting a Muslim YMCA to be built in Lower Manhattan would lead directly to dhimmitude.

All of this is an exercise in onanistic demagoguery — a lot of heavy breathing inspired by an imaginary threat.

If Gingrich actually gave as much as a gust of flatulence in a wind tunnel about the struggle against Sharia Law, he would have condemned the Sharia-compliant invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The new constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan — which were written by Bush-era U.S. officials, not the minions of the Double-Secret Muslim Crypto-Marxist Kenyan Usurper currently in the White House — explicitly define Sharia as the fundamental laws of those countries.

Brutal and corrupt as he was, Saddam left Iraq’s Christians alone. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled the “Sharia-compliant” regime inflicted on that country by American arms. Where was Newt “Charles the Hammer Martel” Gingrich when this tragedy was in its early stages? Oh, that’s right: Then, as now, he was enjoying a lucrative sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the neo-con “think-tanks” that agitated for the Iraq war.

Gingrich did nothing to oppose the 1999 U.S.-led NATO terror bombing of Serbia, which turned Kosovo over to the Islamist/Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army. He also supported earlier NATO interventions in Bosnia on behalf of Saudi-financed Jihadists, as well.

Since 1990, the Regime in Washington has done more to defend, promote, and expand Islamic rule than any world power since the era of  Saladin. It sent a vast army of what a Saudi prince called “our white slaves” to defend the House of Saud and the Emir of Kuwait in 1990; it entrenched Islamic states in the Balkans; more recently it has overthrown Saddam’s relatively secular government,  replacing him with a Sharia-based junta, and inflicted a centralized, Sharia-defined government on the clan-based Afghan society.

This is entirely in character for the Regime, which — chiefly through the CIA — has spent more than six decades weaponizing Islam for geostrategic purposes. Rather than urging a radical departure from the Establishment’s foreign policy, Gingrich now wants to promote an open-ended conflict with the entire Muslim world. After all, he told Barton to justify nullifying private property rights at Ground Zero, “this is a war” — a statement that, in context, makes sense only if “this” encompasses all Muslims everywhere.

Anyone unfortunate enough to be found guilty of “contempt of cop” can expect swift and brutal “justice” at the hands of the criminal, militarized Denver Police Department.

Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg

Afterwards, discuss it below.

“This guy …  just tried to run my husband over!” exclaimed Arkansas  resident Cindy Nelson in a frantic  911 call on July 21. “Oh, my God — he’s shooting at us! Oh, my God!”

A few minutes later, Fred Ensminger — the deranged assailant — placed a 911 call of his own.

“This is Diamondhead 1106…. I have been shot and I need medical at my front gate ASAP.”

Ensminger, as we will see anon, is a recidivist criminal, but he  is no run-of-the-mill psychotic. He is employed by the Police Department of Diamondhead Arkansas, a gated community located south of Hot Springs.

A few minutes before Cindy Nelson told a 911 dispatcher that a “guy with a badge” was trying to murder her husband, she had passed Ensminger’s pickup truck, which  was parked by the side of the road.

As Nelson started to go around the truck, Ensminger pulled out in front of her. According to an eyewitness, Ensminger “stopped suddenly,” causing Nelson to slam on her brakes to avoid a collision.

According to the witness, Ensminger climbed out of his pickup truck and began to harangue Nelson. She reacted by pulling around him and proceeding down the road. An infuriated Ensminger followed in close pursuit.

With Ensinger’s pickup truck looming in her rear-view, Nelson called her husband, Jerry Chambliss, and told him that she was being followed. She had no idea at this point that her stalker was an off-duty police officer.

After Nelson entered the gated community, Chambliss went into the driveway “with my arms up, palms out, hollering stop, stop, stop, what are you doing?” he later told investigators.

Ensminger gunned the pickup forward, striking Chambliss and knocking him down. He then compounded this act of attempted vehicular homicide by grabbing a shotgun his 40 caliber Glock and firing several rounds into the garage. At some point Ensminger punctuated his acts of attempted criminal homicide by flashing his state-issued costume jewelry.

Chambliss raced into the house and retrieved a loaded 9mm handgun and returned fire, striking Ensminger in the shoulder and forcing the assailant to withdraw.

After Ensminger called for backup, Nelson made a second 911 call requesting a police officer. When the dispatcher replied that an officer was already on the premises, Nelson suggested that it might be worthwhile to send someone other than the person who had just perforated her home with gunfire.

Following surgery to remove the bullet he had received as a consolation prize for finishing second in a shoot-out, Ensminger filed the predictably perjurious official report. He claimed to have observed Nelson driving erratically, and that she had attempted to run him over when he displayed the trinket denoting his supposed authority.

That claim was demolished by contradictory eyewitness testimony, which established that while Ensminger screamed at Nelson and wagged a finger in her direction, he never flashed his badge.

Ensminger offered a similarly mendacious version of his encounter with Chambliss. In the officer’s account, he was confronted by an “angry unknown man” who slammed on the hood of his car telling him to get out of the driveway.

In this depiction, Chambliss shot Ensminger without provocation, and the off-duty cop returned fire in self-defense. Once again, that account couldn’t be reconciled with the evidence assembled during an investigation by the Arkansas State Police.

In his official report, state Prosecuting Attorney Steve Oliver concluded that Chambliss “was justified in using deadly physical force in the defense of himself and his wife on July 21, 2010…. Under Arkansas law, Mr. Chambliss was not required to retreat if he was not the original aggressor.”

This of necessity means that Fred Ensminger, the “original aggressor,” committed multiple acts of criminal assault, and thus be subject to prosecution — correct?

Well, no.

Oliver ruled that Ensminger displayed “poor judgment in his aggressive pursuit of Ms. Nelson to her residence but he acted with the belief that he was justified under color of law.”

This unsupportable, invalid  “belief” appears sufficient to exculpate Ensminger’s repeated attempts to murder Jerry Chambliss. Oliver doesn’t provide any other explanation for his decision not to file criminal charges of any kind against Ensminger, who not only remains free but is still on active duty with the Diamondhead Police Department.

“Just because he has a badge he does not have the right to come down and kill citizens,” Chambliss complained to Little Rock’s Fox affiliate. According to Oliver, that state-issued bauble does indeed confer the authority to commit acts of discretionary murder. Oliver’s report clearly suggests that if Ensminger had displayed his chintzy totem of official privilege during the highway confrontation with Cindy Nelson, Chambliss would be facing criminal charges.

Significantly, the shootout between Ensinger and Chambliss was originally described by the Diamondhead Police and the local media as growing out of a “domestic dispute.”

Chief Pat Mahoney and Garland County Deputy Judy Daniel told Little Rock’s Fox 16 News that they were concerned about their injured comrade, who had been stricken in the line of duty as he was “investigating” a purported episode of domestic violence.

That official lie is indigestibly rich in irony, given the fact that Ensminger — a “gypsy cop” who has been repeatedly fired and punished for disciplinary infractions and criminal acts — was himself arrested on a domestic violence charge in 2006. The victim in that assault, which took place in front of the police station in Alexander, Arkansas, was a female police officer.

“We are very happy that the officer is OK and extremely glad that the suspect is in custody,” stated Deputy Daniel shortly after that heroic defender of public order tried to murder Jerry Chambliss. “It just makes it easier on everybody, the other officers, his family.”

Note how this description of  “everybody” refers exclusively to those employed as agents of government coercion. The “civilian” who used righteous force to repel Ensminger’s criminal assault apparently doesn’t count. Mere Mundanes never do.

If opinion polls are reliable at all, most Americans are too enthralled by the manufactured outrage over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque to notice that the government claiming to represent them just massacred, via remote-controlled drone, at least twenty innocent people in Pakistan.

Several of those killed in the attack were children whose lives were violently ended by a missile fired at the hideout of “suspected militants.” It was their fatal misfortune to be living next to an address chosen for a “targeted execution” — that is, an assassination conducted pursuant to presidential order.

This is just one of literally hundreds of “ground zeros” the U.S. government has inflicted on Pakistan since Barack the Blessed escalated the drone war early in his presidency. That fact is lost on the  spittle-flecked militarists who profess to be inconsolably offended by the presence of Muslims within a few blocks Ground Zero’s incomparably sacred soil in Lower Manhattan.

People intoxicated with a sense of vicarious victimhood aren’t likely to understand, or care about, the anger and frustration of Muslims whose homes and families have been destroyed, on a whim, by the rulers of a distant and unassailably powerful regime.

The more deranged among the neo-Know Nothings (the “No Mosques in America!” crowd) insist it is a species of sedition even to suggest that there is a connection between the criminal violence committed by Washington abroad, and the retaliatory terrorism we occasionally experience here at home.

This dogmatic indifference to the value of non-American lives was displayed by Hillary Clinton during an October 2009 foreign excursion in which she inflicted herself on the inhabitants of Pakistan.  During a meeting with Clinton, several well-spoken but forceful Pakistanis condemned the strikes as “executions without trial” and acts of state terrorism. Clinton breezily dismissed the complaints: “There is a war going on.”

That statement is a distant echo of Madeleine Albright’s notorious comments in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, in which she blithely said that it was “worth it” for the U.S. to suffocate Iraq with sanctions that were killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.

Albright’s words, which were re-played incessantly in the Muslim world, resulted in a huge windfall for terrorist recruiters (who really should have given her a commission for each suicide bomber who enlisted in their ranks).

Clinton’s arrogant, dismissive comments weren’t as widely reported, but the policy she defended is cultivating the seeds from which future terrorist attacks will spring. And the bovine residue being spread about the “Ground Zero Mosque” by the War Party’s cynical hate peddlers is helping fertilize that threat.

Newt Gingrich, self-appointed “teacher of civilization” and de facto leader of the neo-con lynch mob, in an op-ed piece he co-wrote for National Review:  “Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states.”

The views of Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, alleged covert jihadist and anti-American radical, as summarized in a June 23, 2004 interview with Chris Hedges of the New York Times:

“On June 23, 2004, [Imam Feisal Abdul-] Rauf told Chris Hedges, then a writer for the New York Times: `Islamic terrorists do not come from another  moral universe … they arise from oppressive societies that … Washington had a hand in creating.’”

If  the view Rauf expressed makes him a fellow traveler with jihadis, wouldn’t this mean that “Mr. Newt” is an apologist for Islamic terrorism?

Of course, what’s really going on is that Newt is promoting a taxpayer-subsidized form of micro-colonialism called Free Cities. Through that “private” initiative (which would actually be a form of international corporatism), the blessings of free enterprise, “limited” government, and protection for individual rights would supposedly be extended to hapless foreigners by the same entity — the Regime in Washington — that is the most powerful enemy of the same.

Gingrich may be history’s purest specimen of cynical political opportunism. As a recent Esquire profile makes clear, he doesn’t really believe in anything, other than his qualifications to tutor the rest of us.

Like Lenin, Gingrich is adept at identifying and exploiting grievances — or creating them ex nihilo. He is many loathsome things, but “stupid” isn’t in that inventory. Gingrich knows that he’s spewing unfiltered nonsense about the “mosque at Ground Zero,” and that he’s engendering hatred toward a moderate, establishment-centered Muslim cleric whose “radical” views aren’t that different from his own.

It’s doubtful that those at the terminus of the human centipede-style GOP propaganda cloaca will recognize that fact.