Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) announced on Tuesday that after 18 years in Congress she will retire.
With a safe Republican seat in Congress, it really does seem plausible that this was simply a retirement based on a desire to move on in life, after such a lengthy time of service.
But in the process, Myrick leaves behind a lengthy record — of some amazing comments about alleged Muslim infiltration of the United States. So before we lose the chance, let’s relive the memories.
Way back in 2003, Myrick said at a Heritage Foundation event on national security, during the Q&A session: “You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, ‘You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.’ Every little town you go into, you know?”
In October 2009, Myrick joined with thee other House members, Paul Broun (R-GA), Trent Franks (R-AZ), and John Shadegg (R-AZ), to call for an investigation of Muslim interns on Capitol Hill. The allegation was that they were part of a radical Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate the House of Representatives, by seeking positions on key national security-related committees.
The source was a book, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, based on a co-writer’s infiltration of the Council on American-Islamic Relations disguised as a recent Muslim convert. (The same author has also referred to President Obama as “our Muslim leader,” and claimed to have personally found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an Air Force agent — but the weapons were then stolen from under our noses by the Syrians.)
Myrick wrote the foreword for the book, which was published by World Net Daily — the right-wing news site best known for being the chief organ for “Birther” conspiracy theories opposing President Obama’s eligibility to hold office.
Myrick also alleged that CAIR’s advocacy work on Capitol Hill amounted to lobbying, and called for the IRS to probe the group’s non-profit status.
A week later, Myrick and her compatriots officially filed a request with the House Seargent-At-Arms, from which no action was taken.
In January 2010, she launched a video series on YouTube, to discuss these security threats. “There is a lot of radicalization on the Internet today; there is radicalization in the mosques; there are people who have been indoctrinated into the same line of thinking that are now in positions in our government,” Myrick says in the “Beyond Terrorism” episode. “All of this is tied together. And we want to bring this to you over a period of time, so you can be educated.”
Then in March 2010, she continued to defend her comments from 2003, about the people who run convenience stores. “I wasn’t off the wall,” she said. “It may have come across that way, but you have to put it in context.”
(The context, she said, was a case in which a group of North Carolina-based men smuggled cigarettes and funneled the profits to the Lebanese group Hezbollah.)
And in June and July of 2010, she capped it off by warning of the ultimate foreign threat: Middle Eastern agents of Hezbollah joining Latino gangs, and sneaking across our southern border disguised as immigrants
“It really bothers me because here we are with a porous border, not really paying attention to who is coming over, what’s happening with Iran and Hugo Chavez and Venezuela,” Myrick said on Fox News. “We know that there are people going to Venezuela learning Spanish and then coming up through Mexico with fake documents trying to cross the border. If they’re stopped they say, ‘Well, I’m Mexican’ or Spanish.”
Myrick also added that a “border agent who really knows the difference in their language can tell that they aren’t Mexican. And so it’s very difficult if the agents aren’t really trained in linguistics to know that and they get across.”
