On the evening of
November 18, Steve Bannon spoke at the Marriott resort on the west side of Tucson . He was invited to
that venue by the Brian Terry foundation, which used the occasion to present
him with their “courage in journalism” award. According to the local paper,
roughly 400 people paid anywhere from $50 to 1000 to hear Mr. Bannon speak. Not
surprisingly, his presence also attracted
about 200 demonstrators, who lined both sides of Starr Pass Avenue in the vicinity of the resort. The protest
was peaceful, and no one was injured or arrested.
The award given to
Mr. Bannon was given to him due to his coverage of the “Fast and Furious”
program in Breitbart, the publication that he has been in charge of for several
years. His article specifically mentions that death of Brian Terry.
As you may recall,
Brian Terry was a Border Patrol agent who was killed at the end of 2010. The
guns that killed him were purchased from the “Fast and Furious” gun program
that our government instituted during the Presidency of George W. Bush. The
program was called “Operation Wide Receiver” when it was started in 2006, but
the name was changed to “Fast and Furious” in 2010.
Due to their
suspect credibility, I don’t watch FOX “news” (where right wing radio host
Michael Levin will soon have a weekly show), or read Breitbart or the National
Enquirer, all of which are the chief sources of information for Donald Trump.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the article that Bannon had written in Breitbart
about Brian Terry. You can read the entire article by clicking on the link
below.
Frankly, I didn’t
expect to read an unbiased article in Bannon’s publication, and I was right. He
mentions the Obama “scandals “ of Benghazi, the IRS, Department of Justice
phone tapping, Pigford, GSA, Solyndra, Lightsquared, and the EPA administrator
email aliases. If you take a few minutes to research them, you’ll quickly
discover that NONE of them were actually a scandal. Naturally, the article says
absolutely NOTHING about the involvement of the Bush administration in the “gun
running program”, which was originated by ATF offices in Phoenix
and Tucson .
Although he no
longer works for the Trump administration (he has since returned to Breitbart),
Bannon is still very much a Trump supporter. In his speech, he said, “President
Trump needs your backing now more than ever. this nullification process that is
underway, this nullification that is trying to take away the 2016 victory from
the American people and Trump supporters – it has to be stopped “.
According to
Bannon, Trump would not be President if the Brian Terry incident has not
occurred. He blamed the “elite global apparatus” and multinational corporations
for resistance to a massive wall along the Mexican border.
The immigration
issue happens to be one of my “hot buttons”, so I’d like to add a few comments
at this point. The first of those comments is that spending $20 billion for a
massive wall along the Mexican border is a REALLY STUPID idea. Mexico is not going to pay for it, and neither
are the U.S. taxpayers.
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump
said that he was going to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. Since it
would cost an estimated $285 billion to deport all those people, it simply is
not going to happen. The link below provides more details.
Even if we came to
our senses and did not build the wall, we STILL spend $12 billion a year on
border security, and the NET migration from Mexico has been ZERO since 2004.
Click on the links below for an expanded discussion.
In 2006, the Bush
administration passed the “Secure Fence Act”. As a result, we erected close to
700 miles of fence along the border, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. To quote
the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, “a billion here and a billion there
– pretty soon you are talking about some real money”.
To their credit,
the founding fathers built “freedom of speech” into the 1st
amendment to the Constitution. Although it allows people like Steve Bannon the
right to publish nonsense in publications like Breitbart, it also allows
peaceful protestors the freedom to assemble and protest right wing extremists
like Steve Bannon,
For that, we can
all be grateful.
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