By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Sometimes it helps to be up close to understand a situation.
As Thanksgiving approached, the international news agency AFP ran a weather story about the U.S. Southwest being expected to “sizzle” for the holiday, with Phoenix to “swelter” at 88 degrees.
Maybe 88 sounds bad at the U.S. news-editing desk back in humidity-heavy Washington, D.C., but that temperature is a November delight with sunny skies in usually low-humidity Phoenix.
Most of November 2017 here had highs in the 80s, and residents were smiling. Getting this kind of reward is the reason we’re willing to suffer through the summers. Summer weather has highs 20 or more degrees above 88, and often higher humidity.
But if you aren’t familiar with certain weather patterns, you could have been surprised at how Phoenicians welcomed these milder days.
If facts are unknown or misinterpreted, this can lead to unnecessary worry. On the other hand, if they’re malevolently covered up, this could cause dangerous complacency inviting disaster.
Arizona mostly isn’t tornado territory. But if it were, no one’s being protected if a cheery TV weather forecaster says all’s well when he knows the killer clouds are rushing in.
With new national scandals swirling afresh almost every day as November came to a close, Americans were reminded of how much churning scandal had been hushed off the map by dominant-media elitists. Was it so surprising after all that the sex maniac, baby-slaughter organization Planned Parenthood was among the most sacred of the elite’s causes?
Being afraid to offend powerful friends, and avidly back-scratching others in hopes they’ll return the favors, can explain where many problems arise.
Phoenix’s politically ambitious liberal Democrat mayor, Greg Stanton, probably had more on his mind than just being a nice guy when he recently proposed naming Terminal Three at the city’s major airport, Sky Harbor International, for cancer-stricken U.S. Sen. John McCain.
The conservative political blog Seeing Red AZ suggested on November 17 that Stanton was calculating “to bring RINOs into the Democrat fold” to help advance his career. The City Council carried out his wishes on November 29 by agreeing to the naming.
Despite understandable sympathy for McCain’s recently diagnosed condition, he hasn’t been a widely beloved figure here. Seeing Red AZ said the majority of people’s tweets were against the honor of the terminal naming, “until word went out to give him some accolades.”
Stanton is part of the bipartisan elite establishment here that advances its agenda and priorities, even at the expense of the populace. McCain definitely is part of that establishment.
As was former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a left-wing Democrat currently engulfed in scandal as president of the powerful, prestigious University of California system, leading some major California newspapers to call for her resignation.
A “furious” Napolitano is said to have meddled aggressively with a vital audit after her UC office was found to have concealed a $175 million slush fund. That’s not like her cozy days in Arizona, where the state’s dominant daily, The Arizona Republic, covered up for and excused her time and again while promoting her career.
Her double-crossing, defiance, anger, threats, and scores of vetoes at the state capitol were more than adequate warning of what she was capable of.
One tale at the time was that when Napolitano threw the president of Arizona State University out of her office, she slammed the door so hard behind him that her security came running, thinking the sound was a gunshot.
If Napolitano had been called to account in Phoenix instead of being kissy-faced by the local elite, she wouldn’t have advanced to being the disastrous secretary of U.S. Homeland Security, nor of following that up with another favor served up on a golden platter to her, the UC presidency.
Nor was Napolitano the only Arizona golden girl.
It’s more than a strange accident that Arizona’s pro-abortion Sandra O’Connor, who came out of national obscurity to become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, has not just one but two important places named in her honor here, the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law as well as the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix. And there’s also Sandra Day O’Connor High School.
On the other hand, the pro-life William Rehnquist, who had been a Phoenix attorney, became not only an associate justice of the Supreme Court but also a long-serving chief justice of the U.S. — the only chief justice Arizona ever has been honored with.
Rehnquist’s and O’Connor’s service on the High Court partly overlapped, from the early 1980s through the early years of this century.
But the pro-life Rehnquist has exactly zero recognition of his name on important places here — no courthouses, no law schools, no airport terminals. It’s almost as if he hadn’t existed, even though he served 33 years on the High Court, and 19 of those as chief justice, while O’Connor served 25 years as an associate justice.
At least, there’s a Rehnquist Center about 120 miles down the freeway at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. It’s not the U of A’s law school, but a part of its James E. Rogers College of Law.
As one of the Phoenix elite’s golden girls, O’Connor was put on a preferred path to power. Why, it was so important to advance her career that she was slipped in as recently elected President Ronald Reagan’s first Supreme Court nominee, in 1981, thereby violating Reagan’s pledge to select a pro-lifer.
Then came pro-abortion golden girl Napolitano, groomed and coddled by the elite into becoming Arizona’s attorney general then governor, until President Barack Obama incongruously but appropriately named this hot-tempered open-borders leftist to be his cabinet-level secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Oh, you hadn’t heard of her hot temper? The elite and their media allies protect their own.
Napolitano, like McCain and others, come from the local back-scratching elite who make it onto the national stage to do damage. Joining with other backscratchers from coast to coast.
First elected governor with a slim plurality victory in 2002, Napolitano successfully ran for re-election in 2006, before newly elected Obama picked her for Homeland Security in late 2008.
Shortly after she came into command of that federal department, Homeland Security issued a report to warm the heart of any radical leftist, claiming that pro-lifers and military veterans are potential terrorist threats to this nation.
It was titled, “Right-Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”
Early in 2008, Napolitano as governor had endorsed candidate Obama as her presidential choice over Hillary Clinton — although when Hillary’s husband was president, Bill Clinton had given Napolitano an early career boost by naming her U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona in 1993.
In a March 6, 2008, Wanderer article, Arizona GOP activist Rob Haney, a longtime foe of McCain, was quoted that when “nine of McCain’s staff of consultants and operatives were running for elected Republican precinct committeemen positions” in 2006, their names also appeared as “Republicans for Janet” on Napolitano’s campaign website.
That Wanderer story continued: “ ‘McCain later rewarded one of these staffers, Wes Gullett, by making him campaign chairman for his Arizona presidential effort,’ Haney said, adding that ‘a great number of McCain’s closest and most ambitious friends are pro-abortion and homosexual-agenda advocates who feel more at ease working for Democrats than Republicans’.”
In other words, cut from the same cloth as Democrat Napolitano.
These GOP operatives’ names appearing as Napolitano’s campaign supporters seemed shocking enough that their names were discreetly removed.
Napolitano’s Republican opponent in the 2006 gubernatorial race was pro-life conservative Len Munsil.
During her tenure as governor, I reported on Napolitano’s scandals and embarrassments for The Wanderer, as well as writing a long piece for the Intellectual Conservative website as she prepared for re-election in 2006.
Not having become something more interesting like president of the United States or a Supreme Court justice by 2013, Napolitano announced she was leaving Homeland Security to become UC president. This meant living in a mansion. Some students protested her lack of experience in education administration.
As the California audit scandal recently broke, the Seeing Red AZ blog posted on November 27: “As conservatives who chafed under the heavy hand of Janet Napolitano, we were gratified to see that she is finally being outed for her ruthlessness and corruption.”
The blog added that “Napolitano has faced blistering criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for her handling of the audit, which showed her office failed to disclose $175 million in funds in a secret account even as it paid executives hefty salaries and prepared to raise tuition.”
An editorial published in both The Mercury News and East Bay Times in the San Francisco Bay area noted that “Napolitano heads the 10-campus university system, and her office serves as the administrative center. Last year, the state auditor sent surveys to each campus trying to ascertain how well the office was performing. The answers were to be kept confidential.
“But Napolitano directed campus chancellors to first submit the responses to her office for review,” the editorial said. “A (sic) independent investigation, commissioned by the regents and headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, reveals the extent of the meddling….
“When UC Santa Cruz sent its answers directly to the auditor, Napolitano called the chancellor of that campus. She was ‘furious,’ the chancellor recalled, and proposed that he withdraw the survey answers, which he did,” the editorial said, adding that Napolitano’s staff insisted “the survey responses should reflect well on her.”
Daniel Borenstein, editorial-page editor of the East Bay Times, wrote: “Her interference with the audit shows that Napolitano, former Arizona governor and U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, has no respect for California government oversight that comes with running one of the world’s leading public university systems….
“That sort of interference cannot be tolerated by any public official. Napolitano needs to go,” Borenstein concluded.
A Big Price
Bay-area conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer on November 29:
“My opinion? She’s got to go, and while she’s on her way out the door, she needs to pay a big price — i.e., read that fines and jail time for her systematic rip-off of California taxpayers on the backs of the students at the 10 campuses of the University of California.
“UC gets $3 billion in state and federal money, in addition to tuition paid by students. It’s a nice pile to play with, and apparently Napolitano has done just that,” Simpson said. “But when questions started surfacing, especially after it was made public there was a $175 million slush fund in the president’s office, Napolitano hauled out the big guns, effectively silencing the investigation survey.
“Despite that, the regents, who hired her, let her off with just an apology and a reprimand! But hey — it’s just taxpayer money, and this is California. Cry ‘poor,’ get taxes raised, and cover it up. It’s all a political game,” she said.
Napolitano And The Jesuits
Rob Haney, the Phoenix conservative GOP activist and Catholic, told The Wanderer on November 29:
“Napolitano is a political-science graduate of Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution. Jesuit-taught religious are recognized as the leaders in the schism now affecting the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is a Jesuit. I suspect that Napolitano’s arrogant persona, far-left political bent, subterfuge, dishonesty, and lack of ethics were inculcated in her as an underclassman in the Jesuit university.
“Recall, Napolitano played a large role in the political lynching (Supreme Court Justice) Clarence Thomas endured in his U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Napolitano was accuser Anita Hill’s attorney,” Haney continued. “Pro-abortion Republicans helped elect Napolitano governor of Arizona with the slogan, ‘Republicans for Janet.’
“And with the support of Republican Senators McCain and (Jon) Kyl as well as Republican Representatives (Jeff) Flake and (John) Shadegg, Napolitano kept Arizona an open-borders state for the illegal-alien invasion,” Haney said.
“Arizona offers California our sympathy. We know full well the damage Napolitano is capable of inflicting,” he said.
(When Kyl stepped down as a senator, Flake ran for and won his open seat in 2012.)
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