- Excerpts from the following article...
-
- On February 9, 2001, during a Black History Month speech
before 400 members
- of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Bustamante
casually referred to
- an African-American labor organization as the "Nigger"
labor organization,
- using the evil "N" word and continuing obliviously
with his speech for
- another 10 minutes while up to 100 outraged listeners
rose and left the
- room....
-
- _____
-
- Bustamante then stopped and apologized for what he called
his "slip". Black
- activists like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who would
have demanded the head
- of any Republican politician who used the "N"
word, uttered no criticism of
- Bustamante. The nation's leftist press largely ignored
the issue, as it had
- when former Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Byrd, D-WV, used
the same vile
- epithet on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
- "You don't make a slip like that," said audience
member Gwendalyn Bello,
- "unless it is something you say normally."
- "What was troublesome to a lot of people,"
said San Francisco labor
- organizer and state president of the A. Phillip Randolph
Institute James
- Bryant, "was that the word came out very naturally."
-
- _____
-
- After telling reporters at a press conference, "We
could not conduct
- business without the immigrant," the then-Assemblyman
was asked if he
- supported illegal immigration, Bustamante replied: "My
district requires
- it." Thereafter for a time he restricted his press
conferences to Spanish
- language media.
-
-
- Bustamante: The Racist in the Race?
-
- By Lowell Ponte
- FrontPageMagazine.com
- 9-9-3
-
- HIS FAMILY NAME CAN MEAN "GRAVE DIGGER" IN
THE SPAIN his ancestors left to become colonizers and exploiters of Mexico.
- Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, having broken his promise
not to put his name on the October 7th recall ballot as a candidate to
replace fellow Democrat Gray Davis, has emerged as his party's last best
hope to retain control of California's governorship.
-
- This race's first Time/CNN poll shows Bustamante besting
all Republicans on the ballot except Arnold Schwarzenegger ("Black
Plowman" in Austrian German), to whom he would lose today by 10 points.
- With what he calls "two bruising months" to
smear the Hollywood star before the election, Bustamante could win. Or
this mistake-prone, erratic politician could lose badly and in the process
dig a hole so deep that he could bury California's Democratic Party for
decades to come.
-
- Who is this round-faced, balding 50-year-old pol from
the farmlands of California's Central Valley, where a large share of America's
nuts and fruits are grown?
-
- The oldest of six children, Cruz Bustamante grew up south
of Fresno, California, with his siblings, mother Dominga and father Cruz,
a barber and, briefly, local City Councilman. They shared the home with
his grandparents on both sides of the family from Chihuahua and Zacatecas
in north-central Mexico. (One of Mexico's notorious presidents, 1837-1839
& 1839-1841, had been Anastasio Bustamante.)
-
- In this agricultural region that some call the once-and-future
Mexifornia, little Cruz prior to kindergarten spoke nothing but Spanish.
As a politician he reportedly has voiced regrets about losing perfect
fluency in it and said he wants to make frequent trips to Mexico to regain
it.
-
- When he attended local Tranquillity High School, as Bustamante
told LatinoLink reporter Fernando Quintero in 1999, "You noticed the
differences between everyone there, and you had to take sides. You were
either a good Mexican kid or a coconut ['brown on the outside, white on
the inside']."
-
- This was the era when, amid cries of La Raza, "the
race," United Farm Workers fought growers and then the Teamsters Union
for control of farm fields in California's heartland. Those pickers who
dared to question UFW caudillo Cesar Chavez risked a visit by thugs at
midnight who would leave them with smashed faces and broken arms as the
leftist union tried to force racial polarization and political radicalization
down Latino throats.
-
- After high school, Bustamante began studies at Fresno
City College to become a butcher. He dropped out before earning his degree.
-
- His father persuaded local Congressman B.F. Sisk to make
Cruz an intern in Washington, D.C. The experience ignited in Bustamante
a passion for politics and power.
-
- "I was like a kid in a candy store" he told
Quintero. "I found that I could call an agency and make things happen.
That was very exciting for me."
- To another reporter he said of his internship: "I
discovered that I was much better at cutting red tape than at cutting meat."
-
- Returning home, Bustamante began attending Fresno State
University, where he also failed to graduate but immersed himself in local
and student politics, including the racial activism of MEChA, a group whose
name is an acronym for "Moviemiento Estudiantil Chicano de AZTLAN,"
the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.
-
- "I wasn't the most radical Mechista," says
Bustamante nowadays. Perhaps not, but he was a member of MEChA and has
refused all requests that he dissociate himself from its values and ideas.
-
- As its critics might argue, to say you were not "the
most radical Mechista" is a bit like saying you were not "the
most radical Nazi." Just to have been a Nazi, however "moderate,"
is radical, socialist and evil enough to warrant condemnation.
-
- Like Nazism, MEChA has acquired more than a tinge of
racism. In their tactics to advance Latinos and "La Raza," many
of its activists have directed racist attacks against not only white-skinned
Anglos but also against blacks,
- Asian-Americans and Jews - in fact, against every non-Latino
group.
-
- The "A" in MEChA stands for "Aztlan,"
their word for the entire southwestern United States from Texas to California
and from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, lost in war or sold
by Mexico to the U.S. Mechistas aim to reclaim all this land for Mexico
in a new reconquista, a "reconquest" like the re-taking of Spain
from Moorish Muslims by Roman Catholics that was completed in 1492.
-
- In 1996 and 2000, then Vice President Al Gore worked
closely with the Southwest Voter Registration Project to register Hispanic
voters as Democrats. Gore appeared with project leaders who as they shook
his hand were wearing the brown berets of Aztlan symbolic of the Mechista
crusade to restore Mexican control to all once-Mexican land.
-
- Again, Bustamante has refused to distance himself in
any way from MEChA and its desire to return Aztlan to Mexico. Does he see
himself running to become governor of one of the United States - or of
the regained Mexican state of Alta California, as the Spanish called the
upper counterpart to Baja California in Mexico? This is something he should
be asked about by voters and the press at every public appearance.
-
- After telling reporters at a press conference, "We
could not conduct business without the immigrant," the then-Assemblyman
was asked if he supported illegal immigration, Bustamante replied: "My
district requires it." Thereafter for a time he restricted his press
conferences to Spanish language media.
-
- Bustamante's political success is one symptom of America's
largest, fastest-growing Hispanic minority. In California Hispanic-Americans
today make up about one-third of the population, and Anglo whites are now
less than 50 percent of this state's residents.
-
- (Blacks comprise only eight percent of California's population
but hold 11 percent of all government jobs, nearly 50 percent more than
what advocates of racial apportionment would call their "fair share."
Blacks, even more than whites, are immediately threatened in their neighborhoods,
jobs and future by the growing rival Hispanic minority manifest in Bustamante.)
-
- The first Hispanic elected statewide in 120 years, Bustamante
throughout his political career has urged Latinos to vote for him in ethnic
solidarity. Last year he was the "poster child" running mate
Governor Gray Davis embraced in campaign ads aimed at this community. How
ironic it is that Bustamante has now dug Davis' grave by giving Democrats
an alternative on the October 7th ballot.
-
- Bustamante built his early career not only on brown skin,
however, but also on green cash. A skilled fundraiser for Democrat politicians,
he in 1993 was rewarded with a safe Democratic seat in the Assembly from
Fresno. In 1996 he was elevated to Speaker of this lower house of the
California legislature when veteran Speaker Willy Brown, now San Francisco
Mayor, was pushed out by a new term limits law.
-
- This law turned California politics into a game of musical
chairs, forcing career politicians to jump from one job to another. When
he was term-limited out of the Assembly, Bustamante won election in 1998
to the lucrative but usually unimportant job of Lieutenant Governor.
-
- In a "Freudian slip" during a 2001 speech,
Cruz Bustamante may have revealed just how much MEChA-like racism continues
to infect his own mind.
-
- On February 9, 2001, during a Black History Month speech
before 400 members of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Bustamante
casually referred to an African-American labor organization as the "Nigger"
labor organization, using the evil "N" word and continuing obliviously
with his speech for another 10 minutes while up to 100 outraged listeners
rose and left the room.
-
- Bustamante then stopped and apologized for what he called
his "slip." Black activists like the Reverend Jesse Jackson,
who would have demanded the head of any Republican politician who used
the "N" word, uttered no criticism of Bustamante. The nation's
leftist press largely ignored the issue, as it had when former Ku Klux
Klan leader Robert Byrd, D-WV, used the same vile epithet on the floor
of the U.S. Senate.
-
- "You don't make a slip like that," said audience
member Gwendalyn Bello, "unless it is something you say normally."
- "What was troublesome to a lot of people,"
said San Francisco labor organizer and state president of the A. Phillip
Randolph Institute James Bryant, "was that the word came out very
naturally."
- Perhaps Mr. Bryant did not know that Bustamante had formed
his ideas about race as a Mechista.
-
- Bustamante's first name Cruz is the Spanish word for
"Cross." This embustero's true name should be Doblecruz, "doublecross,"
to remind people of his tendency to betray and backstab onetime allies.
-
- With the recall movement against his ally Governor Gray
Davis on the verge of success, Bustamante shocked fellow Democrats by proposing
that he would allow a statewide vote to recall the Governor - but, by ignoring
what the state constitution clearly requires, would forbid any vote to
replace Davis.
-
- By this de facto coup d'etat, boasted Bustamante, the
Governor's office would become vacant and he as Lt. Governor then would
automatically become the new Governor. All that would be needed to guarantee
continued Democratic control of this office, said Bustamante, was approval
by an obscure, Democrat-dominated panel called the Commission on the Governorship.
-
- Fellow Democrats apparently sat Bustamante down and explained
that California was not yet Mexico, that the voters would not accept such
an obvious banana republic coup d'etat or his shredding and burning of
the constitution in front of their eyes. What he advocated was blatantly
illegal, much like Gray Davis' demand that his name be allowed on the ballot
of candidates who could succeed him.
-
- For days Bustamante sulked, "holding out the possibility,"
wrote veteran Sacramento Bee political columnist Daniel Weintraub, "that
this panel could weigh in and rule that only he could succeed Davis."
-
- Then Bustamante relented, magnanimously declaring that
he would allow the people to vote on replacements for Davis.
- "There is no circumstance in which I would be a
candidate," said the humiliated Bustamante in one interview.
- "I will not participate in any way other than to
urge voters to reject this expensive perversion of the recall process,"
he said earlier elsewhere. "I will not attempt to advance my career
at the expense of the people I was elected to serve. I do not intend to
put my name on that ballot."
-
- In saying this, he was maintaining the united front demanded
by Davis and organized labor that no prominent Democrat go on this ballot,
thereby sealing Davis' fate by giving Democratic voters an alternative
to voting against the recall.
-
- But last week Bustamante broke his vow, double-crossed
his party, and became the first major Democrat to leave a sinking ship
by putting his name on the ballot to replace Gray Davis. His official
posture is nearly paradoxical, telling Californians to vote against the
recall of Davis but also to vote for him.
-
- In a state with a million more registered Democrats than
Republicans, and with Republicans likely to scatter their votes among several
contenders, a sizeable turnout could mean victory for Bustamante. That
Davis will be recalled seems likely, with a third of Democrats and more
than half of Hispanics against him, so the only question to be decided
is who will replace him.
-
- But who is Cruz Bustamante? Is he the man who said he
would not run under any circumstances, or the man who lied about this and
days later was running?
-
- Is he the politician who claims vast experience but now
says he has only spoken via telephone with Governor Gray Davis "a
few times" in recent years? Or is this former Assembly Speaker and
current Lt. Governor a key part of the ruling Democratic elite that created
the economic and social mess that prompted the Davis recall?
- In other words, is Bustamante a knave or a naif? Was
he part of this ruling leftist elite that ran up government spending by
41 percent while population grew by only 20 percent during the Davis years,
thereby causing the current budget disaster in California as well as 40
percent of economic problems nationwide? Or was Bustamante only pretending
to be an important player in the government? Either way, he is unfit to
become Governor.
- Why replace Davis with Davis II?
-
- (It is true that he and Davis have disagreed on some
issues, and in every case - e.g., whether to expand lawsuits to overturn
Proposition 187 and its limits on government benefits to illegal aliens
- Bustamante has advocated policies even farther to the Left than has Davis.)
-
- Is Bustamante the politician who now says he wants to
give Californians a choice? Or is he the coup plotter who tried illegally
to seize the governorship for himself by denying the people any vote at
all?
- (This is close to what he and the Democratic Party are
still doing, having used threats and intimidation to keep all other Democrats
- except pornographer and Clinton operative Larry Flynt - off the ballot
so that Democrats have no choice but him. Is this "pro-choice"
liberalism?)
-
- Is Bustamante the witty "moderate" and smiling
grandfather that the leftist media will portray? Or is he still the ideologue
who refuses to renounce his youthful embrace of the pan-Hispanic racism
of MEChA and who in a Freudian slip called blacks "Niggers" in
front of an African-American organization? What did this reveal, and can
Californians risk electing a governor with this kind of mind and values?
-
- Is he the "good Mexican kid" or the "coconut"
he was prodded to choose between back in high school? Does he ultimately
see himself as an American or a citizen of Aztlan?
-
- Two things are indisputable about Cruz Bustamante: the
man is an opportunist and a liar. He has lied so often and betrayed so
many that nothing he claims to be now can be trusted or believed.
- For the sake of California and the nation, we can only
hope that the political grave DobleCruz Bustamante has dug is his own.
-
- http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=9325
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