Right wing candidates behaving like drug cartel thugs

Some of the loudest squawking about illegal immigration is coming from the Right and specifically Tea Party types. Those same types are also using the drug cartel violence as a major reason for supporting moves such as mass deportation or imprisonments of illegal immigrants not to mention locking down the borders.

So perhaps it is ironic that some Tea Party candidates are using the same type of intimidation against reporters that has led to the deaths of more than 30 Mexican journalists in the past four years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist. Nothing so extreme has come from the Right as killing reporters on el Norte side of the border, at least yet. But the recent roughing-up of an Alaska journalist who dared to ask Republican and Tea Party Senate Candidate Joe Miller a valid question at an event shows that the Right is not  above using violence to intimidate U.S. reporters.

Then you have the Republican and another Tea Partyier running for New York governor who threatened to “take out” a reporter. GOP candidate Carl Paladino became engaged in what was described as a near scuffle with a columnist who had been writing about his out-of-wedlock daughter.

What is even more shameful is the American public is letting this kind of behavior become the norm. Perhaps some in the public dislike the press or at least those who don’t report subjects slanted in their favor like the GOP state-run TV channel Fox News. Will this country have to resort to protection details for reporters like in Mexico? I can’t see U.S. journalists allowing that to happen because they rightfully don’t want to be subsidized by the government.

Yet, until some Americans start complaining about the behavior of these thug politicians and their entourages, we will tread more and more down the path being traveled by those journalists down South of the border. And where those reporters are increasingly ending up is not at all a pleasant destination.