WAR ON THE MEXICAN BORDER!

Grim-faced military officers and ashen-faced politicians describe a
horrific "war zone," with "hundreds of people murdered" and "citizens
under attack around the clock." Some of the politicos say that the
situation is so dire that it "may require our military."

Like the frenetic Bush-Cheney litany of lies that rushed America into
the senseless Iraq war, what we're now getting is a similar burst of
mendacity about Mexican drug violence spilling across the border into
our country. Rick Perry, the Texas gubernatorial goober, is even
trying to make it a presidential campaign issue. "It is not safe on
that border," he recently wailed to New Hampshire Republicans,
suggesting that he might send U.S. troops into Mexico "to kill these
drug cartels."

Adding to this macho melodrama, two retired Army generals produced a
"study" asserting that spillover violence makes the U.S. side
"tantamount to living in a war zone." One of the ex-generals is Barry
McCaffery, the infamous, hyperventilating fear-monger who once was
America's drug czar. At a press conference, McCaffery pointed
excitedly to "hundreds of people murdered on our side of the frontier."

Really? Hundreds murdered? No. His source turned out to be a South
Texas rancher full of anecdotes about dead bodies found in the brush -
but the Border Patrol says these were unlucky immigrants who perished
during the past several years trying to enter our country, not recent
victims of Mexican cartels. In fact, far from being a chaotic war
scene, a study of the 14 Texas counties bordering Mexico shows that
the number of murders has actually gone down in the past five years.

Rumors of a Mexican cartel war in the U.S. are nothing but lies by
self-serving political opportunists and self-aggrandizing military
contractors out to line their pockets.