The false leftist narrative that suggests President Trump is a uniquely evil president because American Border Patrol agents hurled a few tear gas canisters at invading migrants continues its amusing collapse.
Trump is hardly unique in using tear gas and pepper bombs to protect the border from an invading horde. Another American president, one hailed as a Messiah by the same people hurling scatalogical invective at Trump, did the same thing.
His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and given the data published by The Daily Caller, he might have been known as the Gasser in Chief. Or maybe we might call him “Pepper.” Obama’s agents used gas and pepper spray more than 500 times at the border.
Obama’s Numbers
The latest Trump-Is-Evil narrative began when border agents at the San Ysidro crossing in San Diego deployed tear gas to stop the vagabond army that rushed the border and pelted American personnel with rocks and other projectiles.
It turned out, as The New American reported on Monday and Tuesday, that the illegal-alien horde used women and children as the tip of its spear. Border patrol personnel confirmed the dirty tactic, which the migrants knew would be fodder for leftists to denounce Trump, generate sympathy, and ultimately, open the border.
On cue, the Left exploded in a childish, uninformed tantrum. Second-rate actress Alyssa Milano tweeted a scatalogical rant and called Trump an “evil-creature-person,” whatever that means. Rob Reiner, who played Meathead on All in The Family, and George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu, accused Trump of “gassing babies” and “firing tear gas at young children.”
One Democratic senator, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, the party’s chief deputy whip and self-proclaimed “climate hawk,” hysterically called the tear gas a “chemical weapon” in a now-deleted tweet. Let’s hope his knowledge of climate science is deeper than his knowledge of chemical warfare.
But after all the leftist caterwauling, we learned something else. Obama’s Border Patrol used gas frequently — as in all the time. The Washington Times divulged that Obama’s border agents deployed gas and pepper spray monthly, but the detailed numbers, reported at The Daily Caller, are even more compelling.
Obama’s border cops used gas and pepper spray on illegal aliens 513 times between 2012 and 2016. They used CS gas — 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile — 79 times through those years. But pepper spray, pava capsaicin, was the go-to weapon of choice for Obama’s agents. They used it 434 times between 2012 and 2016.
Six Weeks at the Border, Foreign Flags Flying
Tear gas and pepper spray aside, the angry attack at the border doesn’t appear to have helped the migrant cause.
A border official told CNN they would have to wait at least five or six weeks even to apply for asylum. “By virtue of the folks that are, again, here already lawfully presenting themselves, we estimate that the first arrivals of the caravan will get processed in about five or six weeks of presenting themselves here,” said Robert Perez of Customs and Border Protection.
And Mexico, the Associated Press reported, has indeed agreed to house the Mexicans while they await. Given that U.S. border agents are processing only about 100 asylum claims daily, the incoming foreign relations secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, told reporters at a news conference that Mexico will “assume that a good part of [the migrants] are going to be in this area of Mexico for the coming months.”
The residents of Tijuana, the Mexican border town from which the migrants launched their attack on the U.S. Border Patrol, are none too happy about the 6,000-strong occupation force.
And for good reason. As their march through Mexico and attack on Sunday well shows, many of the migrants will quickly turn to violence to get what they want. That has Tijuanans a little scared, as The New American has reported, and it ought to scare Americans as well.
Yet the lawlessness and violence of the tramping horde, which again, used women and children as human shields when they rushed the border, is ignored by the American Left.
When socialist Representaitve Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lazily compared the migrant army tramping through Mexico and rampaging at the border to Jews running from Nazi Germany — “asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime,” tweeted the young genius — a commenter on her Twitter page noted the obvious: “I don’t recall refugees from Nazi Germany carrying Nazi swastika flags to Ellis Island or throwing rocks at Ellis Island personnel while in line to be processed. Please provide those photos.”
Photo: AP Images
