Is Mexico’s Presidente Felipe Calderon the rudest White House guest ever? His condemnation of Arizona’s newly heightened immigration enforcement was over the top for a foreign dignitary on a state visit. But host Obama and the liberal media already set the stage in inaccurately characterizing the law as racial profiling, so it was easy for el Presidente to be speak ungenerously about his neighbor.
Of course, in bashing Arizona, Calderon is bashing America, because the state is standing up for our national sovereignty while Washington won’t. Plus, Americans side with Arizona and don’t buy all the propaganda about profiling. (Apparently Felipe has largely written off American tourism since insulting potential customers is poor business practice. Plus the noisy gun battles between rival cartels can be offputting to sensitive travelers.)
When Presidente Calderon was interviewed on CNN (transcript), he repeated the lies about racism. He did admit that Mexican immigration laws had recently been softened to use as a club against the United States, because Mexico’s tough enforcement was “very powerful argument” in painting his country as a hypocrite in earlier amnesty battles.
Calderon also made a big deal of portraying his nation as a trustworthy neighbor, declaring in his speech to a joint session of Congress, “Mexico is determined to assume its responsibility. For us, migration is not just your problem.” … “I have come here as your neighbor, as your partner, as your ally, and as your friend.”
(Obama likes the word “partner” in describing his pal Calderon, and used it more than a dozen times in his welcoming press conference.)
But Calderon and the Mexicans don’t want illegal immigration to stop, a fact that two-thirds of Americans recognize, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. The $20 billion in annual remittances is easy money, and it helps keep millions of Mexican families fed and quiet.
If Calderon were a real “partner” in law enforcement, he would have police at the border preventing crossers from entering the US illegally. Instead, Mexico has Grupo Beta, a sort of border-roaming welfare worker cadre, to help the illegals get across.
In addition to lecturing Americans about racism, Presidente Calderon unloaded another pack of lies about guns during his Congressional speech:
Mexican President Challenges Congress On Immigration, Guns, NPR blog, May 20, 2010
Just to give you an idea, we have seized 75,000 guns and assault weapons in Mexico in the last three years. And more than 80 percent of those we have been able to trace came from the United States — from the United States.
And if you’ll look carefully, you will notice that the violence in Mexico started to grow a couple of years before I took office, in 2006. This coincides with the lifting of the assault-weapons ban in 2004. One day, criminals in Mexico, having gained an access to these weapons, decided to challenge the authorities in my country. Today, these weapons are aimed by the criminals not only at rival gangs, but also at Mexican civilians and authorities.
With all due respect, if you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States with access to the same power of weapons will not decided (sic) to challenge American authorities and civilians. It is true the U.S. government is now carrying out operations against gun traffickers. But it’s — it is also true that there are more than 7,000 gun shops along the border with Mexico, where almost anyone can purchase these powerful weapons.
True assault weapons are full auto and are not legally available in any American gun store, so the guy is lying like a rug, er engaging in political theater for the folks back home and liberal gun confiscators here.
Other weasel words were chosen carefully. He referred to the guns “we have been able to trace…” Most of the recovered firearms have no identification numbers because they come from China and similarly squirrelly arms suppliers.
The facts are unfriendly to gun grabbers…
The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S., Fox News, April 2, 2009
There’s just one problem with the 90 percent “statistic” and it’s a big one:
It’s just not true.
In fact, it’s not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.
What’s true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency’s assistant director, “is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S.”
But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.
“Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market,” Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.
See also a video version of this story, Fox Report: Mexican guns not from US.
