Cheeky Felipe

By J. Robert Smith

Seems that Barack Obama doesn't have a monopoly on audacity. Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, is full of it too.

Calderon mounted a podium on the White House lawn to take a swipe or two at Arizona's new illegals law. And that's plain cheeky, given that Mexico is the prime source of the illegals problem in the United States. But as Mr. Obama and liberals might say, why quibble?

In all the reporting about the illegals problem, with all the ink, electronic and otherwise, being spent on Arizona's law, little if any is spent on the colossal failure Mexico is, and how our southern neighbor's colossal failure has driven its poor into the United States looking for the American Dream (or a welfare state version thereof).

Mexico's failures are too many to catalogue in this space. But those failures can be summed up with these words: "Corruption, Crime, Incompetence and Statism." CCIS doesn't make for much of an acronym, but it makes for what ails Mexico.

Perhaps all those sharp, aggressive editors and news directors can find the money in their crimped budgets to send reporters south of the border to do a little old fashion shoe-leather reporting. It's time the spotlight is turned on Mexico, where CCIS has made lives so wretched that millions of Mexicans often risk life and limb to head north into the United States.

Shame on Calderon's moral bankruptcy. Shame on Mexico.