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Townhall...
Ms.
Napolitano, Show Us the Border
By Katie Kieffer
9/12/2011
Out
of sight is out of mind. Secretary
of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano can give the impression she’s
doing her
job and keeping Americans safe when Americans are unaware of the
dangers
lurking next door.
Napolitano
can’t stop natural
oppressors like tropical storms, hurricanes or earthquakes but she can
impede
the drug cartel violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Nevertheless,
Napolitano
refuses to publicly acknowledge the extent of border violence from drug
cartels. She also refrains from pressuring the media to cover the
preventable
destruction and bloodshed on the border as much as it covers natural
disasters.
Between
35,000 and 40,000 people were
killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón launched his war
against drugs
in 2006, reports the Associated Press.
I
think Americans deserve to know
about the drug cartel violence spilling onto our border. It should be
printed
on the front page of every major newspaper and discussed nightly on
prime time
television. We’re not talking about violence occurring across the ocean
in
Libya. We’re talking about brutal gangs operating out of our next-door
neighbor, Mexico.
Let’s
say you look outside and catch your
next-door neighbor decapitating, scalping and removing the skin from
the faces
of a family that lives across town. Then, you watch him stuff the skin
from the
faces and scalps into a woman’s purse and showcase the purse as a
bloody
“trophy” (this happened last month outside a Sam’s Club store in
Acapulco).
Assuming
you can’t move, what would
you do? Close your blinds, grab a beer and turn on the football game?
Or, would
you build a 21-foot-high wall around your house?
On
March 24, Commissioner of the Texas
Department of Agriculture Todd Staples wrote a letter to Napolitano
asking her
to “recognize the threat of Mexican drug cartels as being a clear and
present
danger to our citizens and to the safe production of the United States
food
supply.”
Staples
asked Napolitano to visit the
site ProtectYourTexasBorder.com where Texas farmers and ranchers
explain how
drug cartels drive them to “abandon their land, leaving it vulnerable
to
criminal occupation, while retreating from farming and ranching and
jeopardizing
the food supply upon which we’ve all come to rely.”
Perhaps
Napolitano was too busy
fine-tuning her “If You See Something, Say Something” Walmart
infomercials to
bother replying. She delegated the Assistant Secretary for the Office
of
Intergovernmental Affairs, Betsy Markey, to respond to Staples on her
behalf.
Markey
wrote: “Unfortunately, there is
a widespread misperception that the Southwest border is overrun by
violence
spilling from Mexico’s ongoing drug war. The reality is that some of
America’s
safest communities are in the Southwest border region…” Markey’s note
reveals
Napolitano’s brazen refusal to acknowledge the drug-induced violence on
the
border...
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
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