By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX – As President Trump fought obdurate Democrats and reluctant establishment Republicans in December over spending a few billion dollars for necessary border security in a federal budget of trillions, something had happened in a little Arizona outpost that seemed unrelated to the political fight, but actually was complementary to it.
National Democrats and their allies, including the dominant media, had falsely cast border security as a manifestation of racism and bigotry. They waved away troubling facts that vetting and protection were needed against deadly gangs, sex traffickers, foreign terrorists, and an invasion of human and drug smugglers.
Not so long ago even prominent national Democrats including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton expressed strong opposition to massive, unauthorized immigration. But the prospect of importing waves of potential new voters who’d give Dems unchallengeable power proved more alluring to them than requiring moral responsibility.
Whenever Republican officials tried to address supplying financing for such U.S. security, they were confronted by demands that they confess and grovel over their inherent hatred and disdain for others. Instead of settling pertinent budgetary questions, border defenders were expected to stagger under a load of irredeemable guilt.
Democrat-friendly dominant media were a major factor in setting up this scenario, phony though it was. Seeing this spectacle, a person might think that the U.S. allowed no legal immigration whatever instead of having a very generous system for admittance, although it still needed reforms.
As the too-familiar scenario of alleged bigotry played out on the national screen, a man named Juan Moreno came to Arivaca, Ariz., a little outpost about 11 miles north of the Mexican border and about an hour-and-a-half’s drive southwest of Tucson. I was in Arivaca once, touring along the border to write a three-part Wanderer series in 2008.
Moreno wasn’t from Mexico but from Germany. He works for the major German magazine Der Spiegel, headquartered in Hamburg. Like many other media organs in Europe as well as in the U.S., Der Spiegel is heavy with left-wing opinion. Moreno had worked on a recent U.S. border story with Claas Relotius, a young, prize-winning writer famous among European journalists.
They wrote about Arizona vigilantes on the watch for illegal immigrants, with Moreno on the Mexican side of the international line and Relotius on the U.S. side, according to a subsequent account in Der Spiegel.
Relotius was celebrated for doing great stories. However, he also seemed to have a talent for mocking conservatives — hardly unusual among liberal reporters who select their material to present a desired picture.
But Moreno grew suspicious that Relotius was outright fabricating information. After raising questions and agonizing over his doubts back in Hamburg, Moreno headed to southern Arizona and managed to get in touch with two men, the first of them in Arivaca, who had appeared in the vigilante story. Shown a photo of Relotius, they both said they’d never seen him before.
Relotius’ deceptions began to crumble, and he was fired. In an Internet age, he had managed to put together “all these pieces and splinters and shreds and crumbs to create his characters,” his magazine subsequently admitted.
Deeply embarrassed over what turned out to be Relotius’ “large-scale journalistic fraud over several years,” Der Spiegel examined for its readers what happened. A December 20 post at Spiegel Online said, “Moreno would go through three or four weeks of hell because his colleagues and senior editors in Hamburg didn’t initially believe that Relotius could be nothing more than a liar.”
But, thanks to Moreno, Der Spiegel said, the fraudster’s “horrific episode is coming to an end, a charade that Claas Relotius was able to perform unhindered for far too long.”
While many might wonder how Relotius had been able to get away with it, an editorial-council member at a major weekly German newspaper, Die Zeit, suggested that editors brought it on themselves. Relotius knew what they liked to see.
Posting from Hamburg on December 21 at the U.S. site of Politico, Die Zeit’s Josef Joffe said: “The scandal is a wake-up call to Relotius’ editors back home — and everyone else. It’s unfortunately all too easy to fall into the same trap they did. Why check carefully if this is what we have always known and what confirms our beliefs?”
Meanwhile, as the December 21 deadline had approached for a federal budget agreement including border-security funding, some of President Trump’s core backers worried that he could go wobbly, but he held firm and a shutdown of around 25 percent of government funding occurred.
Negotiations were put on hold even though Trump skipped a planned Florida vacation and remained at the White House for action. But lawmakers left Washington for the Christmas holiday, with the Senate expected to be back in session on December 27, the day this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press.
Speculation suggested that the partial shutdown could continue even through the time when Democrats took control of the House in January with the majority they won in the November general elections.
The power dynamic would shift significantly then, with House Democrat leaders determined that U.S. border protection must be starved into submission so the nation can be overrun by the illegal-immigrant invasion to which they have tied their electoral future.
The two top priorities of national Democrats, along with their media allies, are massive tax-funded abortion and massive tax-funded invasion, both aimed at crippling this nation however possible until a new sort of country more to their liking can be put together in the rubble.
And it’s not only on these issues that dominant media try to put conservative Republicans on the defensive. The GOP also allegedly won’t be agreeably bipartisan with liberal Democrats.
Now, if “crossing the aisle” to achieve goals through cooperation with liberalism is a desirable standard, Arizona’s GOP governor, Doug Ducey, seems to be positioning himself to carry on the heritage of the Grand Canyon State’s bipartisan establishment that scorns conservatism.
Many people around the U.S. took note when Ducey named GOP Cong. Martha McSally to fill the late Sen. John McCain’s old Senate seat on December 18, even though McSally had just managed to lose the race for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat, the one vacated by Jeff Flake, a few weeks earlier in the November 6 general election to left-wing radical Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
After McCain died on August 25, Ducey had named Republican Jon Kyl, himself a former Arizona U.S. senator, to fill the vacancy until it comes before the voters in the fall of 2020 — even though Kyl openly said he might not be willing to serve more than a few months.
However, if Kyl agreed to serve just those few months, that would get Ducey safely past the November 2018 general election, when he was a candidate for a second four-year term as governor, before he might raise eyebrows.
After Ducey trounced leftist Democrat David Garcia for the governorship, voila, Kyl announced he was departing on December 31, and Ducey appointed the open-borders, pro-establishment McSally, who swamp-dwelling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) strongly wanted to take possession of that seat.
Thus Arizona, long burdened by massive illegal immigration, was to begin 2019 with two open-borders U.S. senators, just as the Grand Canyon State began the year of 2018, although this time their names are Sinema and McSally instead of McCain and Flake.
Indeed, a year ago Washington wizard McConnell meddled with Arizona voters’ preference by wooing reluctant Republican McSally into running for the seat that Sinema subsequently put into the Democrat column, just as McConnell had meddled in Alabama in 2017, with the result that pro-abortion Democrat Doug Jones won the Yellowhammer State’s Senate seat previously in GOP hands.
For someone who claims to favor advancing “electable” moderate Republicans, McConnell is developing a record of handing those seats to pro-abortion, leftist Dems.
As Ducey announced McSally’s appointment, both the governor and new senator tried to blur distinctions with leftist Democrats. Amazingly, McSally claimed to have “a lot of common ground” with Sinema, who had a record of attacking Arizonans in front of left-wing groups outside the state, calling Arizona “the meth lab of democracy” and “crazy.”
But McSally said, “There’s a lot of common ground between us, and I’m ready to hit it running. Arizona’s two senators have always worked together — for decades. That’s our tradition and how we are most effective — and that’s how I plan to serve.”
On December 18, Ducey said that in the November 2018 election, “The voters had two excellent choices” between Sinema and McSally. This led Phoenix conservative radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) to boggle that Ducey views far-left Sinema as equally excellent with McSally.
An observer might add that because the lefties got their Senate choice with Sinema, Ducey might have tried pleasing the right side of politics with the appointment of someone like dedicated conservative GOP campaigner Kelli Ward, who had chased Flake out of the Senate race before McSally dared enter it. But, oh no, “bipartisanship” only means rewarding the left.
However, veteran Phoenix attorney and former president of Arizona Right to Life John Jakubczyk told The Wanderer that he was pleased with McSally’s selection: “Considering how close the election was, the appointment of McSally is a good decision on the part of the governor. McSally will do a very good job representing the state. Her strong pro-life position and her conservative ideals will help the administration during the next two years.”
Even as Ducey thanked voters on November 6 for giving him a second gubernatorial term during an election-night rally at a Scottsdale hotel, he started backing away from the conservatism he campaigned on. Like many other Republicans even now, Ducey can use conservatism to win before he minimizes those activists.
Ducey told the Scottsdale rally, “The campaign was about ideas and policy. The contrast could not have been more clear. And the debate could not have been more spirited.”
He had just defeated strongly leftist Dem politician David Garcia, a dedicated pro-abortionist who said teen-agers shouldn’t need parental consent for abortion.
However, Ducey quickly shifted into praising bipartisanship instead of suggesting that leftists should realize the superiority of conservative ideas and cross over to the right. Ducey told those who didn’t vote for him that “I work for you,” and that his goal is to be a governor “of all the people, without regard for party affiliation, who you are, or where life finds you.”
Shortly thereafter, on November 19, Ducey announced he was filling a vacancy on the Arizona Board of Regents with liberal Fred DuVal, who had been his Democratic foe for governor in the 2014 election. Like David Garcia in 2018, DuVal was pro-abortion, although he lacked Garcia’s real enthusiasm for the topic of teen abortions without parental consent.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon site reported on August 16, 2018, that after Garcia received the gubernatorial endorsement of the Arizona chapter of NARAL Pro-Choice America, he “pledged that if elected, he would ‘veto any bill that infringes’ upon abortion.”
As for appointing DuVal to the regents, Ducey’s November 19 news release said: “In Arizona, we know how to work together, across party lines, put aside our differences and get positive things done for the people we serve. Few individuals have a better record and history of doing that than Fred DuVal.”
Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that local conservatives weren’t surprised when Ducey appointed a “squish” to fill McCain’s seat. Haney doubted there will be an attempt to unseat McSally in the 2020 GOP primary.
“Ducey’s about-face surrender last spring to the far-left teachers’ union demand for a 20 percent pay raise confirmed conservative suspicions that Ducey was a will-o’-the-wisp McCain Republican,” Haney said. “Therefore, they were not so much disappointed but rather resigned to their fate that another squish Republican would be appointed to complete McCain’s term.
“I do not believe that there will be a contentious Republican primary in 2020. The corruption and betrayals by the party hierarchy in the last five years have convinced conservatives that they are powerless to ‘right’ the listing-to-port, bad ship RINO,” he said.
“The big-money power brokers of the Chambers of Commerce who are thriving from cheap illegal-alien labor and the pseudo-intellectual educrats now control the GOP. Their dominance will prevent any conservative from gaining traction in the 2020 primary,” Haney said.
“I recall how Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain worked together to sabotage Trunk & Tusk Club fund-raisers when conservatives were in charge of the state and county parties. And I remember how they worked to have conservative precinct committeemen defeated. I wonder if this is the camaraderie that . . . McSally is referring to when she talks about the tradition of Arizona senators working together,” he said.
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard agreed that Republicans are unlikely to want a contentious 2020 GOP Senate primary that could cost the party the general election. However, he said, Republicans who expect McSally to vote in the Senate as she campaigned for it – a strong supporter of Trump and border security – are likely to be frustrated.
“I think McSally will vote more in line with how she voted in the House than how she campaigned in the GOP primary” for the Senate, Querard told The Wanderer.
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