Month: September 2018

The arrogance of the man who lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their sons’ caskets as they were returned to the country they fought for is mind-boggling.  As he attempted to rewrite many chapters of his failed presidency in a speech at the University of Illinois, he called the accurate and documented reports of the criminal negligence of secretary of state Hillary Clinton and himself during the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on our Benghazi compound a mere “conspiracy theory.”

Conspiracy theories don’t produce body bags, sir, but perhaps you don’t remember that night all too well because you spent the time four brave Americans were being killed under your command in Libya readying up for a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Kris Paronto, former Army Ranger and CIA contractor who fought with his colleagues on the roof of the CIA annex in Benghazi, remembers that night and tweeted his response to the then-president’s arrogant and dismissive ridicule of their sacrifice and your incompetence:

Benghazi is a conspiracy @BarackObama ?! How bout we do this,let’s put your cowardly ass on the top of a roof with 6 of your buddies&shoot rpg’s&Ak47’s at you while terrorists lob 81mm mortars killing 2 of your buddies all while waiting for US support that you never sent

Obama and Hillary had plenty of warnings that the security at Benghazi was woefully inadequate, that the compound was swimming in an ocean of terrorist training camps.  They ignored these warnings, and when the attack happened, they did nothing when a rescue mission could have been mounted.  Instead, stand-down orders were given to would-be rescuers, and following the attack, the infamous video lie was concocted and spread over the airwaves, with President Obama repeating it no fewer than six times in a speech before the United Nations.

Hicks, the last man to speak to Ambassador Chris Stevens, has exposed the video lie, documenting how he told Hillary’s State Department what was happening in real time that fateful night and how her State Department ignored warnings from Chris Stevens and others about the gathering terrorist storm and the woeful  lack of security.

Now retired, private citizen Hicks goes farther, telling Fox News Hillary Clinton broke laws while condemning four Americans to death at the hands of terrorists:

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs “to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.  And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure.  It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi.  Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”

Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who fought and died for his country at Benghazi, spoke of Hillary’s callousness at the 2012 GOP convention.  Smith focused in her riveting convention speech on Hillary’s disregard for the families of the Benghazi dead:

I know a few things could’ve been done to prevent it.  But nobody’s admitting to anything. Right now, my understanding is Hillary didn’t do a damn thing.  And I wonder what she did as Secretary of State, because she disavows everything.  She disavows the fact that she even got any call for security[.] … If this is her Department, she certainly doesn’t know how to run the Department.  And she lied the whole time. She lied to me and called me a liar on TV[.]

The movie 13 Hours is based on the book, in which the three CIA contractors, Kris Paronto, John Tiegen, and Mark Geist, who fought at Benghazi, tell the tale of the battle they fought with Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Tyrone Woods in the terrorist attack that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens, whose name Hillary could not remember.

It confirms that Benghazi was not a spontaneous demonstration gone bad due a video, despite Susan Rice repeating that lie on five Sunday talk shows, and President Obama repeated six times before the United Nations.  Hillary Clinton knew that it was a lie, telling the truth to daughter Chelsea and an Egyptian diplomat before she lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead.  It confirms that rescuers were told to stand down.

Hillary and her State Department had warnings, including from Ambassador Stevens himself, that Benghazi was an unsecure trap in the face of a growing terrorist threat.  As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized on documents unearthed by Judicial Watch:

The documents describe Libya as hardly the poster child for the Arab Spring, and echo warnings sent to State by Stevens himself.  He was aware of an attack on a convoy carrying the British ambassador to Libya and a June 2012 attack where an improvised explosive device blew a hole in the Benghazi consulate wall.  Nowhere in the 486 pages is mention of or concern for the effects of a video.

On Aug. 8, 2012, Stevens sent a two-page cable to the State Department entitled “The Guns of August: Security in Eastern Libya” and noted a dangerous “security vacuum” in and around Benghazi, as well as the presence of terrorist training camps.  He was ignored.

The documents reveal that, early on the day after the attack, the Pentagon received intelligence briefing slides detailing that the June 6, 2012, attack was tied to al-Qaida-linked terrorists seeking an Islamic state in Libya and who threatened to attack U.S. interests there.  It also said the June 6 attack “came in response to the 5 June (2012) drone strike on senior al-Qaida leader Abu Yahya al-libi.”

That Sept. 11 was a terrorist attack was known before, during and after it took place.

“I personally … think the (U.S. Africa Command) very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack,” Gen. Carter Ham, head of the Command, testified behind closed doors in June 2013 before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

And that, Ham said, was the “nature of the conversation” he had with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey moments before a 30-minute meeting with Obama prior to the president resting up for his fundraising Las Vegas trip.

Hillary Clinton ignore the pleas for added security at Benghazi, the terrorist threat that was building, and then let pleas for a rescue fall on deaf ears.  Could a rescue attempt have been mounted?  According to Hicks, yes, it could have:

Hicks says he believes “if we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced” – around 9:30 p.m. that night – “I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split.  They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them.”

Hicks, who was in Tripoli that night, relates how the Libyan prime minister called and told him that the U.S. ambassador had been killed, after which “the Libyan military agreed to fly their C-130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements.”

A Special Forces team was ready to go along but was forbidden from doing so by the U.S. Special Operations Command in Africa.

When Patricia Smith testified before Congress, most Democrats walked out of the room, turning their backs on the mother of one of those patriots abandoned by Obama and Hillary at Benghazi, refusing to hear her grief as she condemned what Obama now calls a mere “conspiracy theory”:

With the exception of ranking member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., 12 other Democrats on the Committee shamefully left the room and refused to listen to the testimony of Smith[.] …

Mrs. Smith testified how President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Clinton, among other top administration officials, approached her at the casket ceremony when her son’s body was returned to the U.S.

“Every one of them came up to me, gave me a big hug, and I asked them, ‘What happened, please tell me?’  And every one of them said it was the video.  And we all know that it wasn’t the video. Even at that time they knew it wasn’t the video. So they all lied to me.”

Judging from Obama’s speech, they’re still lying.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

The arrogance of the man who lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their sons’ caskets as they were returned to the country they fought for is mind-boggling.  As he attempted to rewrite many chapters of his failed presidency in a speech at the University of Illinois, he called the accurate and documented reports of the criminal negligence of secretary of state Hillary Clinton and himself during the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on our Benghazi compound a mere “conspiracy theory.”

Conspiracy theories don’t produce body bags, sir, but perhaps you don’t remember that night all too well because you spent the time four brave Americans were being killed under your command in Libya readying up for a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Kris Paronto, former Army Ranger and CIA contractor who fought with his colleagues on the roof of the CIA annex in Benghazi, remembers that night and tweeted his response to the then-president’s arrogant and dismissive ridicule of their sacrifice and your incompetence:

Benghazi is a conspiracy @BarackObama ?! How bout we do this,let’s put your cowardly ass on the top of a roof with 6 of your buddies&shoot rpg’s&Ak47’s at you while terrorists lob 81mm mortars killing 2 of your buddies all while waiting for US support that you never sent

Obama and Hillary had plenty of warnings that the security at Benghazi was woefully inadequate, that the compound was swimming in an ocean of terrorist training camps.  They ignored these warnings, and when the attack happened, they did nothing when a rescue mission could have been mounted.  Instead, stand-down orders were given to would-be rescuers, and following the attack, the infamous video lie was concocted and spread over the airwaves, with President Obama repeating it no fewer than six times in a speech before the United Nations.

Hicks, the last man to speak to Ambassador Chris Stevens, has exposed the video lie, documenting how he told Hillary’s State Department what was happening in real time that fateful night and how her State Department ignored warnings from Chris Stevens and others about the gathering terrorist storm and the woeful  lack of security.

Now retired, private citizen Hicks goes farther, telling Fox News Hillary Clinton broke laws while condemning four Americans to death at the hands of terrorists:

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs “to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.  And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure.  It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi.  Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”

Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who fought and died for his country at Benghazi, spoke of Hillary’s callousness at the 2012 GOP convention.  Smith focused in her riveting convention speech on Hillary’s disregard for the families of the Benghazi dead:

I know a few things could’ve been done to prevent it.  But nobody’s admitting to anything. Right now, my understanding is Hillary didn’t do a damn thing.  And I wonder what she did as Secretary of State, because she disavows everything.  She disavows the fact that she even got any call for security[.] … If this is her Department, she certainly doesn’t know how to run the Department.  And she lied the whole time. She lied to me and called me a liar on TV[.]

The movie 13 Hours is based on the book, in which the three CIA contractors, Kris Paronto, John Tiegen, and Mark Geist, who fought at Benghazi, tell the tale of the battle they fought with Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Tyrone Woods in the terrorist attack that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens, whose name Hillary could not remember.

It confirms that Benghazi was not a spontaneous demonstration gone bad due a video, despite Susan Rice repeating that lie on five Sunday talk shows, and President Obama repeated six times before the United Nations.  Hillary Clinton knew that it was a lie, telling the truth to daughter Chelsea and an Egyptian diplomat before she lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead.  It confirms that rescuers were told to stand down.

Hillary and her State Department had warnings, including from Ambassador Stevens himself, that Benghazi was an unsecure trap in the face of a growing terrorist threat.  As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized on documents unearthed by Judicial Watch:

The documents describe Libya as hardly the poster child for the Arab Spring, and echo warnings sent to State by Stevens himself.  He was aware of an attack on a convoy carrying the British ambassador to Libya and a June 2012 attack where an improvised explosive device blew a hole in the Benghazi consulate wall.  Nowhere in the 486 pages is mention of or concern for the effects of a video.

On Aug. 8, 2012, Stevens sent a two-page cable to the State Department entitled “The Guns of August: Security in Eastern Libya” and noted a dangerous “security vacuum” in and around Benghazi, as well as the presence of terrorist training camps.  He was ignored.

The documents reveal that, early on the day after the attack, the Pentagon received intelligence briefing slides detailing that the June 6, 2012, attack was tied to al-Qaida-linked terrorists seeking an Islamic state in Libya and who threatened to attack U.S. interests there.  It also said the June 6 attack “came in response to the 5 June (2012) drone strike on senior al-Qaida leader Abu Yahya al-libi.”

That Sept. 11 was a terrorist attack was known before, during and after it took place.

“I personally … think the (U.S. Africa Command) very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack,” Gen. Carter Ham, head of the Command, testified behind closed doors in June 2013 before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

And that, Ham said, was the “nature of the conversation” he had with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey moments before a 30-minute meeting with Obama prior to the president resting up for his fundraising Las Vegas trip.

Hillary Clinton ignore the pleas for added security at Benghazi, the terrorist threat that was building, and then let pleas for a rescue fall on deaf ears.  Could a rescue attempt have been mounted?  According to Hicks, yes, it could have:

Hicks says he believes “if we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced” – around 9:30 p.m. that night – “I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split.  They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them.”

Hicks, who was in Tripoli that night, relates how the Libyan prime minister called and told him that the U.S. ambassador had been killed, after which “the Libyan military agreed to fly their C-130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements.”

A Special Forces team was ready to go along but was forbidden from doing so by the U.S. Special Operations Command in Africa.

When Patricia Smith testified before Congress, most Democrats walked out of the room, turning their backs on the mother of one of those patriots abandoned by Obama and Hillary at Benghazi, refusing to hear her grief as she condemned what Obama now calls a mere “conspiracy theory”:

With the exception of ranking member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., 12 other Democrats on the Committee shamefully left the room and refused to listen to the testimony of Smith[.] …

Mrs. Smith testified how President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Clinton, among other top administration officials, approached her at the casket ceremony when her son’s body was returned to the U.S.

“Every one of them came up to me, gave me a big hug, and I asked them, ‘What happened, please tell me?’  And every one of them said it was the video.  And we all know that it wasn’t the video. Even at that time they knew it wasn’t the video. So they all lied to me.”

Judging from Obama’s speech, they’re still lying.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

Gone are the heady days when Barack Obama could fill a stadium with his followers.  Like a former sitcom star now doing dinner theater performances, he is self-relegated to lesser venues and smaller crowds.  On Saturday, at what Think Progress (house organ of the left-wing Center for American Progress) called “his first campaign stop of the midterm elections,” only 750 people (T.P.’s estimate) turned out at the Anaheim Convention Center to partake of the Barack experience.

About 750 people attended the event at Anaheim Convention Center, where Obama delivered a short speech centered on unity and the “politics of hope.”  And, after a story about getting kicked out of Disneyland when he was caught smoking in the Magic Kingdom after a concert as a teenager, Obama issued an impassioned critique of Trump and the state of American democracy and encouraged the crowd to back the candidates he came to support.

No styrofoam columns anymore.

The Anaheim Convention Center can host events seating 7,500 people, so it was not lack of tickets keeping Obama fans away.  Maybe it was the halting, uncertain style of Obama’s speeches these days that kept the crowds away.  Sample this excerpt for as long as you can stand it:

Incredible honor to have @BarackObama here today! #TakeItBack  https://t.co/MlgoxRaSIw

— Mike Levin (@MikeLevinCA) September 8, 2018

The contrast in crowd size, not to mention enthusiasm, with Trump’s rally last week in Billings, Montana could not be greater.  Trump drew a capacity crowd of 12,000 to Rimrock Auto Arena, with another 10,000 gathered outside.  This in a city with a metropolitan population of 169,728, according to a 2016 Census Bureau estimate.

By contrast, Anaheim sits in the midst of the Los Angeles-Long Beach Combined Statistical Area, with a population of 18.7 million, more than a hundred times as large as Billings.

Gone are the heady days when Barack Obama could fill a stadium with his followers.  Like a former sitcom star now doing dinner theater performances, he is self-relegated to lesser venues and smaller crowds.  On Saturday, at what Think Progress (house organ of the left-wing Center for American Progress) called “his first campaign stop of the midterm elections,” only 750 people (T.P.’s estimate) turned out at the Anaheim Convention Center to partake of the Barack experience.

About 750 people attended the event at Anaheim Convention Center, where Obama delivered a short speech centered on unity and the “politics of hope.”  And, after a story about getting kicked out of Disneyland when he was caught smoking in the Magic Kingdom after a concert as a teenager, Obama issued an impassioned critique of Trump and the state of American democracy and encouraged the crowd to back the candidates he came to support.

No styrofoam columns anymore.

The Anaheim Convention Center can host events seating 7,500 people, so it was not lack of tickets keeping Obama fans away.  Maybe it was the halting, uncertain style of Obama’s speeches these days that kept the crowds away.  Sample this excerpt for as long as you can stand it:

Incredible honor to have @BarackObama here today! #TakeItBack  https://t.co/MlgoxRaSIw

— Mike Levin (@MikeLevinCA) September 8, 2018

The contrast in crowd size, not to mention enthusiasm, with Trump’s rally last week in Billings, Montana could not be greater.  Trump drew a capacity crowd of 12,000 to Rimrock Auto Arena, with another 10,000 gathered outside.  This in a city with a metropolitan population of 169,728, according to a 2016 Census Bureau estimate.

By contrast, Anaheim sits in the midst of the Los Angeles-Long Beach Combined Statistical Area, with a population of 18.7 million, more than a hundred times as large as Billings.

Great move, they’ve had no pressure put on them for years.

Via Daily Caller:

The Trump administration will order the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to shutter its Washington, D.C., office in a bid to increase pressure on Palestinian leadership amid stalled peace talks.

“We have been notified by a US official of their decision to close the Palestinian mission to the US,” PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat said in a statement Monday, according to Al-Jazeera.

National Security Advisor John Bolton is expected to announce the closure in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society on Monday.

“The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” Bolton is expected to say, according to a draft copy of his prepared remarks reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Keep reading…

The border situation is getting extremely violent and ugly, according to a new report from the Washington Times:

Assaults on ICE agents reached a decade high in 2017, and assaults on Border Patrol agents have also surged in recent years, according to new government numbers that seem to back up agents’ claims that illegal immigrants are increasingly looking to fight rather than flee.

The new numbers, reported by Homeland Security’s inspector general, could even be underselling the problem, investigators said, because the government doesn’t do a good job of tracking incidents, and agents and officers don’t always report them properly.

But the report does signal renewed danger particularly on the southwest border, where agents say a surge in illegal immigration in recent years generally correlates with growing violence.

Violence?  From illegals?  The report is a contradiction of the “narrative” put out by the left, its press allies, and even some libertarians, that illegals commit far fewer crimes than the average American and therefore rule of law is unimportant.  Illegals, after all, are just moms and toddlers, coming here to celebrate Mother’s Day, aren’t they?  As NPR reported, “Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies Show.”

So OK, then: let the illegals in.  Violence from illegals is nothing but a right-wing myth.  Never mind about that rule of law stuff.

Now we have a new surge of border mayhem targeting law enforcement.

Obviously, something is going on.

To take an incentive-based look at what that might be, there are several possibilities.

One: President Trump’s crackdown on illegal border-crossers is ending the free-for-all illegal crossers have up until now benefited from.  This Border Patrol chart, from Washington Post lefty columnist Catherine Rampell, shows a clear upward trend in 2018.  So instead of turning themselves in to the Border Patrol for diaper service, a warm bed, Meals on Wheels, and a bus ticket or free flight to their destination of choice, plenty of the people who pay cartels to get them across are finding themselves busted.  Obviously, the Border Patrol is being restored to its original mission, and that’s cutting into one perverse incentive to immigrate illegally, because word gets around.

But it doesn’t quite explain the violence.  It would only explain an increased willingness of illegal border crossers to run away from, not toward, ICE and Border Patrol agents.

The violence is likely coming from money matters, among both cartels and their clients.

First, stepped up enforcement of illegal border crossings is costly – to cartels, who make billions off these illegal crossings.  The knowledge that a bust may happen is enough to incentivize at least some would-be border-crossers from not wanting to cross illegally at all, and that means less “business” coming in for the cartels.  It’s obviously enough to make them mean.

Two, busts are costly for cartels in another way: losing a man to jail for one of Trump’s stepped up busts of illegal border-crossing operations means having to find a replacement and train that person, which costs cartels more cash.  Like any business operation, cartels raise their prices to illegals to cover the costs – which is why the price of a coyote-guided illegal crossing has gone up – neighborhood of $6,000 or so, from Central America, and probably higher now.

Higher prices mean fewer customers – which, again, costs cartels money as it shrivels their markets further.  They are cartels, after all.  They get really nasty when they lose money.

 But most businesses diversify when business goes south.

Certain other factors seem to be working toward cartels’ advantage.  One of those is the presence of left-wing judges who throw consistent roadblocks at President Trump every time he tries to enforce rule of law on the border.  Trump has not been able to get rid of DACA, a non-law that was nothing but an executive order drawn out of the air by a leftist president using his pen and phone for one.  Nor has he been able to enact family separations from group border-crossers apprehended crossing illegally as a disincentive to abusing the asylum system.  The crying toddler pictures served the cartel aims handsomely, creating incentives for more business.  Nor has he been successful (at least until recently) at keeping unvetted nationals from terrorist states out.  What’s more, the Border Patrol and ICE have been sanctioned in court for defending themselves from border rock-throwers and shooters, ending up in big payouts to lawbreakers at lawmen’s expense.  The cartels watch these things and can logically conclude, from their business perspective, that once a matter reaches a court level, leftist judges will ensure that illegals always win.  That, too, is good for the cartel business.

Nobody gets involved in violence, not even cartels, unless the risk-to-reward ratio is acceptable.  Obviously, left-wing judges have lowered the risks and stepped up the rewards as Trump has shrunk the market.  If you know you’re going to get off because the justice system and the left-wing press will always be on your side, you take the risk.  That seems to be what’s fueling this ugly trend.

A controlled border would not have this violence.  An uncontrolled one, with just enough comfort for lawbreakers, might just.  That underlines just how important it is to allow President Trump the leeway he needs to enact his border control agenda.  Voters need to figure this out, because the violence at the border shows that the cartels already have.

Image credit: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, via Flickr, public domain.

The border situation is getting extremely violent and ugly, according to a new report from the Washington Times:

Assaults on ICE agents reached a decade high in 2017, and assaults on Border Patrol agents have also surged in recent years, according to new government numbers that seem to back up agents’ claims that illegal immigrants are increasingly looking to fight rather than flee.

The new numbers, reported by Homeland Security’s inspector general, could even be underselling the problem, investigators said, because the government doesn’t do a good job of tracking incidents, and agents and officers don’t always report them properly.

But the report does signal renewed danger particularly on the southwest border, where agents say a surge in illegal immigration in recent years generally correlates with growing violence.

Violence?  From illegals?  The report is a contradiction of the “narrative” put out by the left, its press allies, and even some libertarians, that illegals commit far fewer crimes than the average American and therefore rule of law is unimportant.  Illegals, after all, are just moms and toddlers, coming here to celebrate Mother’s Day, aren’t they?  As NPR reported, “Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies Show.”

So OK, then: let the illegals in.  Violence from illegals is nothing but a right-wing myth.  Never mind about that rule of law stuff.

Now we have a new surge of border mayhem targeting law enforcement.

Obviously, something is going on.

To take an incentive-based look at what that might be, there are several possibilities.

One: President Trump’s crackdown on illegal border-crossers is ending the free-for-all illegal crossers have up until now benefited from.  This Border Patrol chart, from Washington Post lefty columnist Catherine Rampell, shows a clear upward trend in 2018.  So instead of turning themselves in to the Border Patrol for diaper service, a warm bed, Meals on Wheels, and a bus ticket or free flight to their destination of choice, plenty of the people who pay cartels to get them across are finding themselves busted.  Obviously, the Border Patrol is being restored to its original mission, and that’s cutting into one perverse incentive to immigrate illegally, because word gets around.

But it doesn’t quite explain the violence.  It would only explain an increased willingness of illegal border crossers to run away from, not toward, ICE and Border Patrol agents.

The violence is likely coming from money matters, among both cartels and their clients.

First, stepped up enforcement of illegal border crossings is costly – to cartels, who make billions off these illegal crossings.  The knowledge that a bust may happen is enough to incentivize at least some would-be border-crossers from not wanting to cross illegally at all, and that means less “business” coming in for the cartels.  It’s obviously enough to make them mean.

Two, busts are costly for cartels in another way: losing a man to jail for one of Trump’s stepped up busts of illegal border-crossing operations means having to find a replacement and train that person, which costs cartels more cash.  Like any business operation, cartels raise their prices to illegals to cover the costs – which is why the price of a coyote-guided illegal crossing has gone up – neighborhood of $6,000 or so, from Central America, and probably higher now.

Higher prices mean fewer customers – which, again, costs cartels money as it shrivels their markets further.  They are cartels, after all.  They get really nasty when they lose money.

 But most businesses diversify when business goes south.

Certain other factors seem to be working toward cartels’ advantage.  One of those is the presence of left-wing judges who throw consistent roadblocks at President Trump every time he tries to enforce rule of law on the border.  Trump has not been able to get rid of DACA, a non-law that was nothing but an executive order drawn out of the air by a leftist president using his pen and phone for one.  Nor has he been able to enact family separations from group border-crossers apprehended crossing illegally as a disincentive to abusing the asylum system.  The crying toddler pictures served the cartel aims handsomely, creating incentives for more business.  Nor has he been successful (at least until recently) at keeping unvetted nationals from terrorist states out.  What’s more, the Border Patrol and ICE have been sanctioned in court for defending themselves from border rock-throwers and shooters, ending up in big payouts to lawbreakers at lawmen’s expense.  The cartels watch these things and can logically conclude, from their business perspective, that once a matter reaches a court level, leftist judges will ensure that illegals always win.  That, too, is good for the cartel business.

Nobody gets involved in violence, not even cartels, unless the risk-to-reward ratio is acceptable.  Obviously, left-wing judges have lowered the risks and stepped up the rewards as Trump has shrunk the market.  If you know you’re going to get off because the justice system and the left-wing press will always be on your side, you take the risk.  That seems to be what’s fueling this ugly trend.

A controlled border would not have this violence.  An uncontrolled one, with just enough comfort for lawbreakers, might just.  That underlines just how important it is to allow President Trump the leeway he needs to enact his border control agenda.  Voters need to figure this out, because the violence at the border shows that the cartels already have.

Image credit: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, via Flickr, public domain.