RSS Feed MenuI believe we have to rethink our entire strategy for working with Mexico. The war that’s underway in Mexico is an enormous national security threat to the United States. More people were killed in Mexico in 2008 than were killed in Iraq. There is a genuine civil war underway between drug dealers as cartels who, sadly, are financed largely by American money, purchasing drugs in this country. That cartel is waging a vicious and brutal war, fully as horrifying in the atrocities and the things they’ve been doing to people as anything that was done in Iraq.
The United States has an enormous interest in a prosperous, safe, self-governing Mexico living under the rule of law. If we allow the Mexican government to decay and we allow the drug dealers to win, then we will have a nightmare on our southern border and no amount of fence and no amount of national security will compensate for the collapse of Mexico. We need a significant, serious strategy designed to help people in Mexico achieve safety, achieve prosperity, and achieve the ability to live a life in which everyone has a hope of a better future.
This is a very serious problem, much more serious than that in Afghanistan, and yet almost no publication, no news media is taking it very seriously. And I will urge you, as close as you are to Mexico, to make sure that your Congressional delegation and news media really focuses. I am trying to get both the New York Times and Washington Post to really begin transferring people and resources to Mexico because I really think this is a serious problem for us as a country. The answer is not just to say, “I don’t care what happens south of the border, as long as I have a good fence.” You will never contain the human problem if the Mexican government collapses. We have absolutely a vested interest in helping them find a way to be prosperous, safe, and live within their own law.
Anonymous // Jan 25, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Newt pressed his first wife to sign divorce papers while she was still in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. He also graciously said “She isn’t young enough or pretty enough to be the President’s wife.” But his second marriage hasn’t been that smooth either. Newt and Marianne have been separated – “frankly”, she told the Washington Post in June 1989, “it’s been on and off for some time.”
Anonymous // Jan 25, 2009 at 5:28 pm
House Banking Scandal: Newt Bounced 22 Checks
Remember the House Banking scandal, where so many congressmen wrote rubber checks on government money? Newt hopes you don’t, because he bounced 22 himself, which almost cost him reelection in 1992. His vote for the secret House pay raise, and the chauffeur who drove him around Washington in a Lincoln Town Car, didn’t help.
Anonymous // Jan 25, 2009 at 5:29 pm
House Banking Scandal: Newt Bounced 22 Checks
Remember the House Banking scandal, where so many congressmen wrote rubber checks on government money? Newt hopes you don’t, because he bounced 22 himself, which almost cost him reelection in 1992. His vote for the secret House pay raise, and the chauffeur who drove him around Washington in a Lincoln Town Car, didn’t help.
RLHotchkiss // Jan 25, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I tried to post about this but my post wouldn’t go through. Maybe it is too long. Anyway you can read it here: http://p2p-offense-newt-gingrich.blogspot.com/
The highlights are that it is nice that Gingrich is finally aware of a problem that has been brewing for decades and even has whole genre of folk music dedicated to it. I wishe he would tell the truth–Interdiction has been a total failure. Legalizing narcotics is the single most effective foreign policy decision we could make. The saved money could be antidrug efforts that work
Carney // Dec 16, 2009 at 12:29 pm
We also need to realize how narrowly we avoided unmitigated catastrophe in the last Mexican election, when a Hugo Chavez style nation-wrecking leftist came within a whisker of winning the presidency. We may not be so lucky next time.
Imagine a Mexico joining OPEC and restricting oil production to jack the price up again, threatening to cut us off, funding illegal alien and Southwest separatist groups, including violent ones, freely intersecting with organized crime gangs now running rampant throughout both our nations, its armed forces brandishing the latest Russian tanks and planes, bristling with Russian advisers and intelligence agents, welcoming the Iranian leadership and signing pacts with them, allowing Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad to operate bases on its soil.