'Nightmare' that wasn't

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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.