Allah catches Jerry Rivers in a whopper, in which Jerry falsely promised that Zina Linnik’s family would speak out on why Terapon Adhahn’s “immigrant” label should be replaced by “monster,” followed by a segment with her uncle in which Adhahn’s immigrant status didn’t come up at all (and in which the uncle would have taken the opposite view if it had). At the end of the segment, Rivers doubles down, demanding that Michelle Maglalang apologize for being an anti-immigrant (not anti-illegal immigrant, just plain anti-immigrant) extremist who thinks Adhahn’s detention by ICE has anything to do with whether he is in the country legally or should have been deported after his earlier crimes. It’s way past time for FoxNews to give Jerry the boot.
As an aside, I’m sure some will object to my use of the name “Jerry Rivers” to describe the guy who calls himself Geraldo Rivera, noting that “Jerry Rivers” never really was his real name. On the one hand, it might be worthwhile to point out that Bill Clinton’s legal name also was never really “Bubba” or “Slick,” Hillary’s was never really “Hildebeest,” John Edwards’s was never really “The Breck Girl”, and Vladimir Putin’s was certainly never “Pooty-Poot.” On the other, a careful, thorough and appropriately defensive reading of Snopes’s purported debunking shows that the Jerry Rivers story, much like Al Gore’s Internet, is mostly correct, and wrong only on a relatively minor detail. In the case of Al Gore, that minor detail is the fact that he technically didn’t claim to have “invented” the Internet, but did make an equally preposterous claim to have “created” it. In the case of Jerry Rivers, it is true that his last name was never “Rivers,” but it is also true that it wasn’t Rivera, either, and that he did indeed change both it and his first name to play up his Puerto Rican heritage when it suited him. It’s also worth noting, however, that Jerry Riviera’s father really did have the surname “Rivera,” which would have become Jerry’s original surname if not for his mother’s equally lame effort to downplay his Puerto Rican heritage earlier in his life. So when it comes to playing cheap identity politics, I guess you can see this particular apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.
Others will object to the fact that I referred to Michelle Malkin as Michelle Maglalang, on the grounds that Maglalang really was once her last name, and arguably still is (see, e.g., the copyright notice in In Defense of Internment). I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.
Last and least, it’s worth noting that unlike both the perp and the victim in this horrible case, neither Jerry Riviera/Rivera nor Michelle Maglalang/Malkin technically qualifies as an immigrant. Based on their original surnames, however, I’ll give you three guesses as to which of them is closer to being an immigrant, and the first two guesses don’t count.
UPDATE: Michelle responds.
UPDATE x2: Apparently, Jerry Riviera has minions in the blogosphere. This one, who cares so much about poor Zina that he can’t even spell her last name, finds it “darned inconvenient” for some straw version of Malkin that Adhahn “is NOT an illegal Mexican, but rather a legal resident from Thailand, and 8-year member of the elite Army Rangers.” These factoids should come in really handy if the guy ever encounters anyone who seriously believes that (1) only Mexican immigrants should be deported, (2) no legal immigrants should ever be deported, even upon conviction of serious crimes, and (3) none of these rules apply to Army Rangers anyway.
