Columnist.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, America, but Andrew Cotto is done defending you to his European friends at dinner parties. There's no use begging. You brought this on yourself -- as Cotto explains in his Salon.com article, "My American exceptionalism fantasy is over: How these midterms sealed the deal." You may not be aware, but Cotto is a novelist no one has heard of and also teaches creative writing at CUNY, so he's very big. More bad news from Salon.com: "O'Reilly is losing, and he knows it." That's why Republicans swept everything from U.S. senator to substitute-part-time-dog catcher. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, Bill.
After Tuesday night, Republicans' main objective is clear: Convince Oregon Measure 88 to run for president. Measure 88 won more votes than anything else on the Oregon ballot. More votes than pot legalization. More than the incumbent governor, the incumbent senator or any of the six other ballot measures. The widely popular, landslide vote on Measure 88 prohibits illegal immigrants from getting drivers licenses. In the nightmare scenario for MSNBC, by midnight Tuesday night, Republicans won 52 senate seats -- 53 with their probable win in the Louisiana runoff in December, 54 if they win Alaska and 55 if they win Virginia. And I'm not even counting Democratic flips.
In the past week, The New York Times has ridiculed Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie for having "fed panic" by ordering quarantines for health workers arriving from Ebola-plagued countries. NBC News' Brian Williams opened his broadcast last Friday announcing that the Obama administration was trying "to restrain the Ebola panic." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow complained that the "hysteria" over Ebola was getting "stupider."
In this year's midterm elections, New Hampshire's Scott Brown is taking on the slickest Democratic politician since John Edwards. Incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen presents herself as a regular mom who "rearranges the dishes in the dishwasher if it is packed by someone else" -- as she told The Boston Globe when she ran for governor. But then she backs policies that only Fidel Castro's mom would like. (And based on her immigration stance, I think we all know it's her Guatemalan maid who's packing the dishwasher.)
There had never been a case of Ebola in the U.S. until a few months ago. Since then, thousands of people have died of the disease in Africa, and millions upon millions of dollars have been spent treating Ebola patients in the U.S. who acquired it there, one of whom has died. But the Obama administration refuses to impose a travel ban. This summer, the U.S. government imposed a travel ban on Israel simply to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu into accepting a ceasefire agreement. But we can't put a travel restriction on countries where a contagious disease is raging.
On Monday, The Washington Times reported on the Homeland Security Inspector General's finding that detention facilities for illegal border-crossers are teeming with diseases because the guests don't know how to take medicine or use toilets. By Tuesday, there were more than 1,000 comments. That's a lot of comments. Articles on ISIS usually get between five and 100 comments. True, a month ago, a CNN poll reported that 90 percent of Americans said they believed ISIS was a direct threat to the United States. What else could they say? You'd feel awfully silly if you told a CNN pollster ISIS wasn't a threat and, the next day, the group set off a bomb in Times Square.
We're interrupting our Republican Senate 2014 Marathon this week for a brief note on the media. (But contribute to Scott Brown immediately, and please don't vote for the third-party, tea party candidate in Louisiana, right-wingers! Remember: Obamacare cannot be repealed without 66 votes in the Senate.) I've barely been paying attention to the news, except to check Senate polls every night, because, as some of you may have noticed, I've been in the bat-cave under Swiss Guard protection, writing my next book. But based on only about an hour of media consumption a week, I've recently noticed mainstream "news" outlets telling huge whoppers, long ago disproved and forgotten.
Everyone is on tenterhooks wondering what the Republicans' national strategy for the November elections will be. Shouldn't they be thinking of that soon? The GOP desperately needs a "wave" election to rack up Senate seats this year, because the next two election cycles are not favorable for Republicans. Let's see, what would make a good national issue? Democrats are far savvier than Republicans when it comes to winning elections, and I note that Obama has decided to put off his "executive amnesty" until after the elections. Does that ping any neurons in your tired "Diversity Is a Strength" synapses, Republicans?
The most important words printed in The New York Times since "REAGAN EASILY BEATS CARTER" were from a front-page article last Sunday about how, after six years of Obama, the federal judiciary is now dominated by Democratic appointees. Edward Whelan, head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, responded to this by saying: "The best way for conservative voters to prevent further damage to the courts is to swing the Senate to Republican control in the elections this November." He's absolutely right. Turn that into a mnemonic, sew it on needlepoint pillows, include it in your wedding vows, right-wingers. For the next six weeks, nothing matters more to the country than Republicans taking a majority in the Senate. When it comes to politics, conservatives need to learn one thing from liberals: All that matters is winning.
President Obama now says he will wait until after the November elections to implement an "executive amnesty" for 11 million illegal aliens, so as not to hurt Democrats' chances this year. Instead of waiting to be enraged in December, voters, could you please be enraged now? Once the holiday season kicks off, you'll be too busy going to parties and Christmas shopping to notice that you're suddenly living in Mexico. Getting Obama to postpone a rancid idea isn't something to celebrate. *Yay! We did it! We forced him to delay doing something the country doesn't want for SIX WEEKS!* Every Republican candidate better be jamming Obama's threat down the throats of their Democratic opponents.
In an article about police shootings in last Sunday's New York Times (8/31), Michael Wines disputes the conventional wisdom about a disproportionate number of African-Americans being shot by police, saying there are no data one way or another. But Wines revives the canard about blacks being disproportionately targeted in traffic stops. There actually is a study for that. Throughout the 1990s, the nation was fixated on tales of jack-booted New Jersey state troopers who were stopping speeders on the turnpike *just because they were black!* In a 2000 primary debate, Vice President Al Gore sneered at then-New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, saying, "Racial profiling practically began in New Jersey, Senator Bradley."
As the story of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown begins to look less clear-cut than we were led to believe by Brown's friend, Dorian Johnson, the "voices of oppression" on MSNBC now say the real issue is that there aren't enough blacks on the Ferguson police force. As Brown may or may not have said seconds before his death: I give up. If the Ferguson police are forced to hire more minorities and women for the sake of diversity, the one thing we can be sure of is that more black people will be murdered, raped and assaulted.
It's important to remember that, in police shooting cases like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, the initial facts are often wrong. You don't want to end up looking like Rich Lowry, National Review editor, whose March 23, 2012, column on the Trayvon Martin shooting was titled, "Al Sharpton Is Right." Early accounts are especially unreliable when reporters think they have a white racism story. Stirring up racial hatred is how journalists make up for sending their own kids to lily-white private schools. As detailed in my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, the old media's standard for any police shooting of a black person is: "Racist until proved innocent." We got three-alarm racism stories for the shootings of Jose (Kiko) Garcia, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart and Edmund Perry.
It's been reported everywhere -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News -- that the William Wilberforce Sex Trafficking Act requires that any non-Mexican children who show up on our border be admitted and given a hearing. (New York Times, July 7, 2014: "Immigrant Surge Rooted in Law to Curb Child Trafficking.") The problem, we've been told, is that a loophole in the sex trafficking law mandates these hearings -- or "removal proceedings." But there is no such loophole.
It's been fun to watch the media discuss the border crisis in real time, improvising their arguments on the fly. *Let's try A, and if that doesn't work, we'll try B.* First, they said there was no surge at the border -- it was a phony crisis manufactured by the Drudge Report. The facts on the ground quickly made that argument inoperable. Next, liberals told us these "undocumented migrants" (the PC phrase for "illegal aliens" -- because we'll never figure out what that means) were mere children fleeing violence and drug cartels.
Chris McDaniel, candidate for the U.S. Senate from Mississippi, lost the Republican runoff to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran last month, and now he is being led down a primrose path to political oblivion. McDaniel's passionate supporters think that a moment of crisis for the country is a good time to treat control of the Senate as if it's a prom queen election. Hoping for yet a *third* primary vote, McDaniel's crew is going to prevent him from having any political career, ever again. Observe that no one is asking Al Gore to run again, except maybe his cardiologist. Even in cases of actual vote fraud, history shows that the contesting politicians get branded as sore losers and destroy their political careers. Better to be magnanimous and live to fight another day.
Soccer fans have decided to prove me wrong about soccer being a fruity sport by spending the last week throwing hissy fits. This, in defense of a "sport" where the losing players cry on camera. The massive and hysterical response to my jovial sports piece proves how right I was. Nothing explains the uniform, Borg-like caterwauling, but that soccer is a game for beret-wearers. Most of the articles attacking me are verbless strings of obscenities, their subject matter identified only in the title. Consequently, I've decided to emulate The New York Times, which runs the exact same column, year after year, "Soccer Catches On, Take 27," by re-running mine on how excruciatingly boring soccer is.
I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade -- or about the length of the average soccer game -- so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay. (1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks. In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms."
While the Obama administration tortures the Benghazi raid suspect into a false confession that a YouTube video made him attack our embassy, let's review what his "capture" is meant to distract us from: (1) The IRS' Lois Lerner claims her computer crashed, destroying all her emails to the White House, congressional Democrats and the Department of Justice, at the very height of the IRS' targeting of tea party groups. Six other IRS officials now claim their emails are also missing. (Have they tried shutting down their computers and restarting?) Rosemary Woods erased part of a White House tape nearly half a century ago, and Chris Matthews is still talking about it.
