From Fox News, this item:

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed and another wounded while driving through northern Mexico Tuesday, in a rare attack on American officials in this country which is fighting powerful drug cartels.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said one agent was critically wounded in the attack and died from his injuries. The second agent was shot in the arm and leg and remains in stable condition.

Those are the facts. The official reaction to them is…interesting.

Here’s the pull quote o’ the day from Homeland (In)Security Sect. Napalitano:

Let me be clear: any act of violence against our ICE personnel – or any DHS personnel – is an attack against all those who serve our nation and put their lives at risk for our safety. We remain committed in our broader support for Mexico’s efforts to combat violence within its borders.

Um…yeah. Let me see if I can run this through my top-secret dBS-er 2000 gadget that automagically converts politicianspeak to plain ol’ Anglais:

Allow me to confuse you: Anybody who murders or injures one of my employees is attacking all my employees. And I’m issuing  a strongly worded statement praising the great job Mexico is doing, keeping their murder rate from getting any higher than it already is.

Wow. So the Napolitanonator finds it unacceptable that one of her ICE agents is shot dead and another one is wounded while on the job in Mexico. Her response is to offer a statement of public support to Mexico? Huh? Am I missing something?

You may not like George Bush, but at least when he first visited the smoldering wreckage at Ground Zero, he didn’t grab a megaphone and say, “I’m upset about this, and they’ll be a strongly worded letter about it in the Times tomorrow morning!”

Where’s the outrage? Where’s the demand for justice? Hell, where’s the storm troopers, flooding across the border to get the bastards that killed one of ours? Apparently, Napolitano thinks Homeland Security should be a homey kind of place, offering mugs of hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows and a dash of cinnamon sprinkles for anyone who gets crossways with her agency.

We’ve gone from “no child left behind” to “officers will be left behind…we’ve got more where they came from.”

I dunno. Can Cabinet Secretaries be impeached? I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV). But if I were any member of her not-so-merry band of brothers in blue, patrolling our borders, I’d look carefully to see if those new jackets she ordered as a show of teamwork don’t come with great big targets on their backs.

13 COMMENTS

  1. Why were the ICE agents driving through Northern Mexico? Vacation? Immigration investigation? Gun shopping? Drug enforcement?

  2. The Department of Homeland Security is setup to protect the territory of the U.S. from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters… So, yeah, it should be pretty ‘homey’ in terms of its area of concern. If you want something done outside of our borders, you would need to look at the Department of Defense. It does of course raise the question already raised by others as to what the officers were doing in Mexico…

  3. AP now claims that this was a carjacking at a gang “checkpoint” and that the agents were targeted only because of the vehicle. I’m doubtful that we’re getting the true story.

    • I also saw the Suburban write-up… that they’re car was what got them shot at when the “checkpoint” they stopped at turned out not to be military, but cartel. It’s possible. I doubt they were running around in ICE uniforms. They were most likely plain-clothes but “looked” like cops, plus they had a nice car.

  4. I think you’re missing the point, guys. Let’s take this out of the world of ICE and Border Patrol. Let’s say an off-duty cop has a few of his fellow boys in blue over for a friendly game of Texas Hold-’em. Two of the off-duty cops carpool. On their way home, they are shot at, one’s killed and the other wounded. Do you think that the rest of the police force would rest until bringing the assailants to justice? Where I come from, shooting a cop means that if they DO find you, you’ll be lucky to make it to the station alive. The whys and wherefores as to what you were doing in which part of town, doing what don’t really enter into it. Shoot a cop and you’re a marked man.

    It’s the reaction from Napolitano that I find so interesting – and disturbing. She starts well with the “attack one of us and you attack all of us” meme. But then she loses major points on the dismount. “We support Mexico?” Who gives a flying rats ass about Mexico and their war on the drug cartels? We lost a man. Her message to Mexico should be “Find who did this and bring them to justice, or we will. You have 48 hours to comply, or we’re comin’ in after them.

    Of course, the problem there is, even if Napolitano did go all Ronald Reagan on the Mexico, nobody would believe her. The world agrees on one thing – Obama & Co. are a bunch of empty suits. Paper Tigers. Or as we say in Texas, “All hat…no cattle.”

    But I hear DHS is doing a bang-up job shutting down URLs that offer pirated MP3 files. I have but one question for you: How’s that “hope-y,” “change-y” thing workin’ out for ya’?

  5. Two ICE officers were attacked on a highway 400 miles south of the Texas border. Reportedly, they were traveling from a training meeting with Mexican police personnel when they were attacked at a roadblock set up by a local drug/crime cartel.

    Your response plan includes impeaching the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, then invading Mexico with “storm troopers, flooding in across the border” in a military strike.

    “Storm troopers”? Really?

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