Tahmooressi’s saga is one of the strangest and most infuriating incidents in recent U.S.-Mexico relations; the Mexican government’s insistence on holding him under hideous conditions for a minor infraction he claimed, quite plausibly, he made by mistake did not sit well with Americans mindful of how indulgent their country has been towards Mexico. It came at a time the Mexicans were ushering a tidal wave of illegal immigrants from South America across their northern border, with no secret made of the Mexicans’ burning desire to make those people America’s problem. The treatment of people who sail across the border on a northerly heading certainly seems to be different from what happens if you cross from the United States into Mexico, even if it’s fairly obviously done by accident. The Mexicans claim they went hard on Tahmooressi because they want to crack down on gun violence from drug cartels in their country – a laudable goal, but it’s not easy to see how railroading one American with three guns in the back of his pickup truck was going to throw the fear of God into the cartels. If the Mexican government is worried about guns from the United States crossing the border, they should have a long talk with retiring Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obama, and those who carried out Operation Fast and Furious. Many of those guns remain unaccounted for to this day; they tend to get recovered from scenes that feature a lot of yellow tape and chalk outlines. Somehow Tahmooressi’s plight became a partisan struggle, and something of a “Fox News and talk radio story” in the eyes of the mainstream media, because of the Obama Administration’s downright bizarre refusal to help. The President himself had nothing to say on the matter, despite repeated pleas for intervention from congressional Republicans. humanevents/2014/11/03/sgt-tahmooressi-comes-home-at-last/
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 12:21:55 +0000