Navy A-Port

IBD Editorials ^ | May 18, 2011 | Staff

[Kaslin]

Military: What's the U.S. Navy doing naming a ship after a leftist activist? If it wants to honor American Hispanics, there are scores of military heroes more worthy than Cesar Chavez.

Apparently, even the military isn't immune to being reimaged into the Obama world view. It was announced Tuesday that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Democratic governor of Mississippi, had chosen to name a Navy cargo ship under construction in San Diego after the migrant labor leader.

Chavez will join aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, astronauts Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, and assassinated civil rights hero Medgar Evers, whose names adorn other such military transports.

Does a labor agitator belong in that company?

When 80% of Colorado voters in 2002 opposed a referendum to establish "Cesar Chavez day," even majority-Hispanic counties joined in voting no.

Maybe that was because, as the Arizona Republic's Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported years ago, for Chavez, the union came before even his fellow Hispanics.

Chavez "was as effective a surrogate for the INS (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, since merged into the Department of Homeland Security) as ever existed," according to Navarrette.

"Indeed, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union he headed routinely reported, to the INS, for deportation, suspected illegal immigrants who served as strikebreakers or refused to unionize," Navarrette noted. Chavez even offered to post his own union goons as border guards to keep non-unionized Mexicanos from crossing the border into California.

[magslinger]

What's the U.S. Navy doing naming a ship after a leftist activist?

It is nothing new. They have been doing that since they named CV-42.FDR