‘Nightmare’ that wasn’t

It’s over now, the carnage on the Arizona-Mexico border caused by violent right-wing vigilantes. No longer are members of the so-called Minuteman Project shedding the blood and violating the human rights of innocent Mexicans whose only “crime” was illegally trying to enter the United States to earn money for their impoverished families.

Weeks of slaughter and atrocities are now at an end, and the Minuteman vigilantes are going home. Oh, wait a minute. It never happened.

There was no bloodshed during the three weeks when civilian volunteers patrolled the border. No carnage, no human-rights violations, nothing. The closest thing to an “atrocity” was when a volunteer had an illegal immigrant to pose for a photo holding a funny T-shirt. (The horror.)

“Border vigilantes stir fears of violence,” was the headline on a March 31 Associated Press article, warning “law-enforcement officials and human-rights advocates are worried about the potential for bloodshed.” A California college professor/”human-rights” activist called the border volunteers “domestic terrorists [who] represent a danger to the country.”

Rep. Raul Grijalva, Arizona Democrat, sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, warning that the Minuteman Project “creates a situation for something violent to occur.”

Yet nothing violent occurred. What did occur, both U.S. and Mexican officials agree, is that a few hundred law-abiding Americans did what their government (with an annual budget of more than $2 trillion) said it couldn’t do: discourage illegal border crossings.

The lack of vigilante violence in Arizona was the latest (though certainly not the last) in a long history of liberal predictions that failed to materialize. Like name-calling and scandal-hunting, scaremongering is an easy way for liberals to divert attention from the fact they haven’t had a workable policy agenda in years.

A partial list of predicted nightmares that never came true:

c In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich and others predicted tens of millions of people around the world would soon starve to death as a result of overpopulation. It didn’t happen, and global fertility rates are now so low (and still falling steadily), that some demographers forecast a decline in world population beginning as soon as 2050.

• In the 1970s, Americans were warned an “energy crisis” meant the world would soon run out of oil. Three decades later, no one predicts exhaustion of the petroleum supply — ever.

• In the 1980s, liberals said evil warmonger Ronald Reagan was on the verge of provoking World War III, with “nuclear winter” wreaking havoc on the planet as a result of the impending thermonuclear holocaust. Didn’t happen. The Soviet Union folded like a cheap suit.

• In the 1990s, liberals screamed that poor children would starve to death because of welfare reform and Republicans’ “draconian” cuts in social programs. Fast forward to 2005: experts now warn of an obesity epidemic among poor children.

• After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, experts rushed to warn Americans of the dangers of right-wing militias — soon, hordes of gun-toting wackos would goose-step down Main Street. Never happened. The supposedly large and growing “militia movement” turned out to be a handful of kooks in camouflage.

Amazing, isn’t it? Liberals haven’t accurately predicted anything in 40 years. Yet every time a liberal “expert” gins up a new prophecy of disaster (global warming, anyone?) his phone number is added to the speed-dial of “Nightline” producers, and the New York Times wins another Pulitzer for its five-part series examining the crisis du jour.

With the failure of the predicted “border vigilante” crisis, liberals have maintained their record of being 100 percent wrong — and now press on to new adventures in wrongness.

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