By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — A talk-radio host here played Arizona-born singer Marty Robbins’ tragic 1959 ballad El Paso as bumper music to note Kamala Harris’ quick stop in the west Texas city of that name while the vice president tried a belated attempt to fend off criticism over Joe Biden’s doubly tragic and self-inflicted open-borders catastrophe.
Latino supporters of Donald Trump greeted the hapless Harris with posters humorously playing off her first name as “Que Mala” in Spanish, meaning “how bad.” Now that’s a poster that bad-news Kamala deserves to see wherever she goes.
Robbins’ huge hit told the sad story of a jealous cowboy who shoots down a handsome rival for the affections of a saloon girl, then, having destroyed his own future, flees into the New Mexico badlands. However, he misses Felina so much that he rides back to the cantina, knowing that showing his face again could cost his life to pursuers’ bullets.
That’s just what happens as the ballad concludes, “Cradled by two loving arms that I’ll die for, one little kiss and Felina, good-bye.”
At least Felina cared enough to come out to hold him in the dust instead of ignoring his last moments.
Which is more than can be said for the callous Biden administration watching aloof as the border states are crushed beneath massive illegal immigration that it cheers on while transporting the invaders around the U.S.
For the song’s cowboy, unbridled emotion led to tragedy. If only he hadn’t been so hot-tempered, the calamity could have been avoided. But what are sad ballads without tragedies?
Similarly, if only left-wing Democrats could avoid behaving like left-wing Democrats, disaster could be bypassed. But that would be asking too much of specialists in chaos who think their future grows brighter when they make this nation’s darker.
One thing that Kamala definitely avoided in El Paso was contact with those directly suffering from Biden’s border nightmare.
John Daniel Davidson, political editor of The Federalist website, posted at the New York Post on June 25 that Kamala “didn’t even go to the actual border. She visited a Border Patrol station about nine miles from the Rio Grande, talked to some immigration activists and legal-service providers, posed for press photos back at the airport, and departed for Los Angeles before 1 p.m. Even the choice of El Paso was pure theatrics.”
She was hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of the crisis, at the other end of the Rio Grande Valley, Davidson wrote.
Texas is the second-largest state in area, only behind Alaska, and Kamala was 800 miles distant from some major illegal-invasion points. In other words, about the same distance as between Chicago and New York City.
It was as if Kamala sought to address left-wing Chicago Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s corruption by paying a visit to New York City. Not that Kamala would criticize Dem corruption anywhere it’s found, and there’s plenty in any blue metropolis.
Kamala might have felt frustrated that after she finally answered her critics’ demands to go to the border, they only kept attacking her. But she hadn’t really done what they asked. It’s as if a teen-ager finally passed the test at school that his mother kept demanding he study for. But he passed it only by completely cheating, not by doing the homework.
Texas Democratic border Cong. Henry Cuellar long has been at odds with his own party’s dangerous policies. In a June 24 interview with Fox News, Cuellar noted that despite his persistent invitations for Harris to visit the border, he and other congressmen learned of the pending visit only through news reports.
Cuellar said Harris didn’t even pay other Lone Star State Democratic politicians the courtesy of informing them of her plan.
“In fact, I talked to some other Texas Democrats, they had no idea until they saw it in the news,” Cuellar said. “So again, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or Republican, you got to pay courtesy to the members of Congress that are down there at the border.”
In an opinion column posted at Fox News, Cong. Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) named some other, more pertinent places Harris could have stopped at, like Arizona’s Yuma or Tucson border sectors, or “anywhere along the border she could talk to residents, business owners, political leaders, law enforcement and ranchers.”
Mentioning the death-dealing illegal drugs that the Biden-Harris policies have allowed to flood in, Biggs added, “The VP did not even go to the children’s facility at Fort Bliss, just minutes from where she landed on her private plane, Air Force 2. This is because the photo op would turn sour if the press and public could see the ‘kids in cages’ resulting from her policies.”
Critics noted that Kamala revealed she’d be making her long-avoided trip on June 25 only after being prodded by border-protecting Donald Trump announcing he’d be going to see unfinished border wall in Texas on June 30.
Changing Demographics
Breitbart News posted on June 25 that a Texas Democrat congresswoman, while welcoming Harris to El Paso, described it as “the new Ellis Island.” However, the actual Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, was where newcomers were screened for legal entry to the U.S. It wasn’t a mere processing center where millions of illegal invaders were rushed in for residence.
On June 28 Breitbart posted comments by Cong. Ted Budd (R., N.C.) that struck a familiar note about what open-borders Democrats are up to: “I think it’s a long play to change the demographics of the country. You flood all 50 states. Of course, these people don’t just stay in Texas or Arizona or close to the border. They travel all over the U.S. and people vote with their feet, right?”
They vote with the ballots that power-mad Democrats give them, too. Democrat leaders simply are replacing American citizens with advantage-seekers more suited to their purposes.
On June 15 Fox News reported that Trump said he accepted Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s invitation to visit an “unmitigated disaster zone.”
Fox said that Trump said in a statement: “Biden and Harris have handed control of our border over to cartels, criminals, and coyotes. Drug dealers, MS-13 gang members, human smugglers, sex traffickers, and the criminal elements of the world now have free reign (sic). What Biden and Harris have done, and are continuing to do on our border, is a grave and willful dereliction of duty.”
Abbott also announced that Texas would resume building a border wall.
Governors in some other Republican states said they’d be sending members of their own enforcement teams to help with the crisis in Texas and Arizona because malign Biden’s government was preventing federal border agencies from doing their proper jobs.
The Pensacola News Journal posted on June 17 that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said: “We’re here today because we have problems in Florida that are not organic to Florida that we’ve been forced to deal (with) over many years, but particularly over the last six months, because of the failure of the Biden administration to secure our southern border. And, indeed, to really do anything constructive about what is going on in the southern border.”
DeSantis stood behind a sign at the lectern that said, “Secure our border, secure our states.”
Referring to drugs flooding in, DeSantis said, according to the newspaper, “I can tell you, if you talk to some of these north Florida sheriffs, in Northwest Florida who are dealing with the meth problem that we’re seeing, it’s really ravaging communities particularly in the northern part of our state.”
Other states sending help reportedly included Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, and Arkansas.
The Des Moines Register posted on June 24 that Hawkeye State Gov. Kim Reynolds — like DeSantis in the Sunshine State — cited her own state being impacted by border violators, with drugs and weapons showing up there that were brought in by cartels.
The Register quoted Reynolds: “My first responsibility is to the health and safety of Iowans, and the humanitarian crisis at our nation’s southern border is affecting all 50 states. The rise in drugs, human trafficking, and violent crime has become unsustainable.”
A Fragmentary Spirit
Meanwhile, USA Today posted on June 23 that the Biden administration was forcing out of his job veteran Border Patrol head Rodney Scott.
Experienced Border Patrol officials had clashed with Biden’s sick ideas on border enforcement.
“The Biden administration already has nominated its own head of CBP, Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, who is widely regarded as a supporter of the kinds of immigration reform championed by Biden,” USA Today said.
In an opinion article posted June 27 at the New York Post, pundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds noted a fragmentary spirit growing in the U.S., as confidence in the federal government declines, as well as more-conservative parts of states wanting to escape dominance by megalopolitan areas.
Among various examples, Reynolds cited border protection: “Faced with the Biden administration’s reluctance to secure the border, threatened states are cooperating with one another to do a job once left to federal authorities.”
Even if the federal government were to collapse or go broke, he said there’s an alternative — “the states have their own credit ratings, their own bureaucracy, their own police and quasi-military forces, their own reservoirs of legitimacy. We’re already seeing that.
“Even if the federal government fails, the states will remain,” Reynolds said. “Think of it as a backup system that we hope we won’t need — but increasingly might.”
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