MilPub

And those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes. 

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update 6/29: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

As part of the massive GOP performance art project to convince their idiot rubes base that the patrie is en danger of being overrun by hordes of illegal flesh-eating zombie immigrants (or something) the Trump Administration has announced that it will cut off all aid to three Central American (or, "Mexican", as we MAGAts like to call them) nations; Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
We can save a lot of time and nonsense by beginning this discussion with the acceptance that there is no actual "border crisis", that immigration is not an existential threat to the United States, and that anyone who attempts to convince you that #1 and #2 are actual things is trying to sell you something rather like a bridge, or some Nigerian oil minister connections.

The thing about this, though, is that given the conditions on the ground in central America this is either the stupidest Stupid Trump Thing Ever or perhaps the most cunning of Steven Milleresque Cunning Plans.

Life in much of Central America is pretty Hobbsean; nasty, brutish, and short. We, the People, own a shitload of the responsibility for that, given our repeated and malicious meddling in Central American affairs ranging from the support of loathsome caudillos from Arias through Somoza to Rios Montt all the way back to the diddling of American corporations such as United Fruit and the filibustering of William Walker.

One of the main reasons there ARE troubles south of the US-Mexican border is because the U.S. has helped ensure that conditions in those places - never conducive to good government and social stability to begin with, given their Spanish-colonial and post-colonial history - have made it difficult for the locals to simply survive.

When I talked about this almost ten years ago I pointed out the obvious:

"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything wil be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."

If, indeed, your neighbor's house is on fire it would seem the heights of ignorance to turn off the little garden hose you've been using to help wet down the flames.

But that would be assuming that you WANT to put out the fire.

As I've also said here before; the GOP in its current incarnation has nothing substantive to offer the non-plutocrat/non-theocrat constituency. Its entire policy agenda consists of returning the U.S. to the social, political, and environmental conditions of 1899. A New Gilded Age, in other words, with everything that implies for those of us not Rockefellers, Goulds, or Carnegies.

So, if the GOP is to gain power in a representative polity it MUST present the temporarily-embarassed-millionaires with another reason to vote Republican. Hence the booga-booga scares about tricksy transgender ladyboys lurking in the girls' bathroom. Hence the frantic insistence in the God-given right to Own Every Semiautomatic Weapon Ever Made. Hence the - as here - insistence that the Browns are Coming To Kill Us All.

And I think this is what this is.

If you treat it as actual foreign policy it's blindingly moronic. You have internal problems in neighboring nations, so you ensure that the relative pittance you've been devoting to helping those neighbors ameliorate the problems doesn't get used as a lever to try and force their dysfunctional governments into being more functional, but simply goes away. You're not trying to solve anything with it. You're just pulling it out from under them.

But...if you treat it was a sort of stupid-person's-idea-of-a-smart-idea that's really intended to ensure that those problems continue and provide you with your immigration Reichstag fire?

That's actually a stupid kind of cunning. You're making trouble for your nation, but making political gains for your party.

And that, my friends, is the State of the Nation.

WASF.

Following the example of my nation's chief executive, I am declaring a state of emergency!
Despite my fine physique and suave and debonair personality I still can't afford a Jaguar E-type, and Mila Kunis won't return my phone calls.

This cannot stand! I am calling on a threatened nation to shower me with cash (and the number to Mila's private line..!) in order to preserve peace, tranquility, and the Natural Order of Things.

Ridiculous, you say?

How much more ridiculous than Orange Foolius' announcement to abrogate Congress' mandated power-of-the-purse to get funding for his Big Beautiful Wall?

I mean...first, let's all remember that this entire southern border farrago is a ginned-up piece of nonsense. Period. There's nothing going on along the U.S.-Mexico border that qualifies as a concern, much less a crisis, WAY much less an "emergency". There IS no "emergency", or, at least, nothing more compelling than my bank account and sex life.

There's no there there.

And yet..."conservatives" will sit on their hands while this great tangerine-hued fool kicks down one more wall between a republic and an autocracy. Because the GOP "base" has been primed by President Coulter and President Limbaugh that they will all be killed and then raped by hordes of brown gangsters if the Wall is not Built. To hell with oligarchy, shrinking wage bases, foolish foreign wars, climate change...MS-13 may be climbing in the bathroom window as we speak!

Emergency!

Here's the thing. A lot of people - and especially a lot of the media people - are going to make this all about Trump. He's a huge orange whiny titty-baby who's having a tantrum that the mean old Dhimmicrats won't GIVE ME MY WALL!!!, so this is going to be portrayed as his toddler-snatches-the-toy solution.

But it's not.

The notion that the situation along the frontera requires spending billions appropriated for other reasons is nonsensical. Border security spending has been thrashed out to a fare-the-well in Congress. Using some gimmick to subvert that process removes a critical "check and balance" between the legislative and executive. It's not explicitly ruled out in the founding documents simply because it's a moronic argument on it's face; people as intelligent as the Founders and Framers would have laughed the notion out of the room.

No. This is an extraordinarily dangerous move, and, because a huge proportion of supposed "conservatives" will do nothing or, worse, applaud it because it is aimed at a target they have been told to hate and fear, represents a not-insignificant chance that it will be folded into the norms of government. The notion that this president or any president can do this is a very un-republican idea.

The notion that a fairly large number of the citizens of a supposedly self-governing republic will accept this?

Even more dangerous, and less republican.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

(Oh, and Mila? Wear something nice, K?)

Update 2/15 11am: Welp, he did it.

Our friend Pluto is confident that "conservative" Republicans won't follow Hair Furor down the rabbit hole. Let's check in with their Congressional leadership, then, shall we?

"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Trump’s hand was forced on declaring a national emergency by congressional Democrats.

“President Trump’s decision to announce emergency action is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of the national interest,” McConnell said in a statement. “I urge my Democratic colleagues to quickly get serious, put partisanship aside, and work with the president and our homeland security experts to provide the funding needed to secure our borders as we begin the next round of appropriations.”

In a tweet, another prominent Senate Republican, Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, said he backed Trump’s action.

“I stand firmly behind President Trump’s decision to use executive powers to build the wall-barriers we desperately need,” wrote Graham, chairman of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee."

The Conscience of Conservatives! Standing athwart the path of history and burbeling "Ummm...durrrr..." Meanwhile, here's our President* singing his explanation why this was necessary:



Hmmm. I wonder if the furnace is lit today..?

Update 2/15 12pm: Of course, if you don't want your republic to become an autocracy, it helps to ensure that the wanna-be-autocratic moron you elected president* is...well, a moron:

From the WP - emphasis mine - :

"After the announcement, President Trump tweeted, “Space Force all the way!” For months, Trump has been calling a Space Force, a new, free-standing military department, with its own chain of command and uniforms. The White House intends to work with lawmakers in submitting legislation by early next year, a senior Administration official said, with the hopes of standing up the department as early as 2020."

Be still, my heart...
Before you laugh too hard, remember that the last time we had a Republican in the White House nearly as unhinged and probably less criminal that the current occupant we got these:
So I can't wait to see how my tax dollars will be well-spent!

And speaking of tax dollars, Charlie Pierce has a nice little piece that draws a pretty bright line between what the American Right and American Left have on offer.

Speaking for the Right, Laura Ingraham reminds us how scary foreign dark people are;

"In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like."

This is, let us remember, about an "immigrant crisis" that is not a crisis because it does not exist.

And, as Pierce notes, it probably sounded better in the original Algonquin.

From the Left...well, I'll let Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez speak for herself as a final comment on the relative value of "Spaaaaace Foooooorce!!!!!";

“We write unlimited blank checks for war. We just wrote a $2 trillion check for that GOP tax cut and nobody asked those folks how they are going to pay for it...Why is it that our pockets are only empty when it comes to education and health care for our kids? Why are our pockets only empty when we talk about 100 percent renewable energy that is going to save this planet and allow our children to thrive?...We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do. When it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and when it comes to unlimited war, we seem to be able to invent that money very easily."

As we should always recall when the number of people who subscribe to InfoWars is mentioned, We the People includes some very great fools.

No, we're not "better than this".

This is who we are now. This is the nation I served for 22 years. This is the country I swore to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

This is the country that sends small children to "court".

If We the People do not hold the people who are doing this, and the people who want this, as the "domestic enemies" of this nation, then that IS who we all are.

I had an interesting vest-pocket insight into the problems of U.S. politics this morning when a Facebook pal of mine posted a link to an article critical of the Trump Administration's migrant-kiddie-internment policy.

Because the VERY first "comment" was from some dude (an in-law of hers, as it turned out) snarling that "if you don't want your kids taken away, don't break the law!"

This was met (unsurprisingly, since my friend is pretty lefty) with a barrage of "Seriously, dude?" replies. Said dude's defense was that he was all in with lurrrrving him some immigrants, provided they "did it legally".

Said dude was then forcibly reminded that U.S. immigration law, as currently constituted, 1) makes it practically impossible for a simple campesino from the Mexican hinterlands or anywhere else in Latin America to obtain legal residence in the United States, and 2) makes it a misdemeanor to try and enter any other way, so that, in effect, the choice for a poor person from the hemispheric midsection is to be immiserated or imprisoned. That's kind of the language of an abuser; "If you just stop making me mad, honey, you would stop forcing me to hit you..."

Things went downhill from there, with said dude whipping out every chuckleheaded "conservative" Internet meme (Clinton did it too/first, it's The Law, Liberals are Immigrant Cucks, etc, etc...), concluding with the suggestion that imprisoning latino kiddies without their families was not as big a hardship for said kiddies as the hardship suffered by military dependent kiddies whose absent mommies and daddies were fighting for your freedoms, dammit!!!

Finally, after getting hammered for his combination of dopey memes, untruths, strawman arguments, poor analogies, and the sort of "repeating-the-same-idiot-thing-is-the-same-as-rational-argument" style of "debate" you run into in places like Breitbart, or the comment sections of your newspaper all the time, he pulled the original comment and ended the debate.

Which, frankly, is a problem. Because we SHOULD be discussing the issue of the United States and its southern neighbors.

Starting with the premise that the wingnuts aren't entirely wrong.

Oh, don't get me wrong; they ARE wrong, because they aren't actually arguing rationally. They're not really debating the ISSUE, but, rather, shrieking their fears of racial pollution, cultural submergence, the potential loss of white supremacy that are wrapped up in the idea "Press One For English".

But.

The notion that it is not healthy for a republic to have in its midst a significant, indigestible mass of people who are outside the civil contract, who are outside the protection of civil and criminal law, and are locked out of the public square is not ridiculous. It is not good for the people, who are prey to the worse elements of that polity. It is not healthy for the republic, which is forced to make choices and enforce them on a populace that has no voice in making those choices.

It's not even good for the polities those people are fleeing, because it allows those nations to avoid making changes that might help those people want to stay where they are.

But.

Treating this as the problem solely of those people fleeing those places (or seeking a better life here in the U.S.) IS ridiculous. That's my issue with the Trumpkins here. They're trying to take a complex problem with a multivariate and difficult history - including some VERY bad behavior on the part of the United States and its people - and simplify it into making it about the MS-13 rapists with calves like cantaloupes.

If we lived in a United States governed by rational people - left or right - we'd be talking about a sort of "Grand Concert of North America", which would address things as disparate as the impact of American gun and drug laws, the dysfunctional legacies of Spanish colonialism and native Latin American caudilloism, trade and infrastructure relations...even things as arcane as "could a hemispheric solar power initiative create jobs and raise incomes along with addressing the cost of fossil fuel production and importation..?"

IMO the problems with trying to do that here are overwhelmingly in dealing with the Right.

The Left needs to accept that there ARE problems with migration from Latin America. No, just taking a shit-ton of people in from troubled Latin countries doesn't help them, or us. There needs to be SOME rules, and some limits. And there needs to be a reasonable "process" that, if you try and go around it and get caught, puts you out on the mat like the Flintstones' sabertooth cat.

But the Right...shit, where to start?

You're gonna have to press one for English. Any solution WILL involve migration, and so just like Mrs. Van Schuyler shopping at the Lower East Side in 1899, you're gonna hear Spanish like she heard Italian and Russian and German and Polish and Yiddish. Relax. Just like those Fagolinis and Kropotkins and Drumpfs and Solokowskis and Cohens, the second generation will be bilingual, and the third will be wearing Jordans, talking GenZZ slang, and playing Hong Kong hip-hop way too loud on Friday night

You're gonna have to accept that your Wonder Bread brand of "conservatism" probably won't resonate with those folks. You're gonna have to find another not so fully invested in Being White. Oh, and maybe a trifle less sucking-up-to-the-rich might be nice.

Just sayin'.

A sane conservative America would be willing to go there.

The current "conservative" America will not, because it cannot. It's Trump, in all his insanely vituperative, libtard-hating, social-justice-warrior-cucking, anti-everything-not-seen-at-the-last-NASCAR-race-meeting glory. To change would be to deny its very essence.

So, it's pretty simple, and, no, it doesn't really involve "both sides".

The existing Left needs to think about "immigration" a little deeper.

The existing Right must be Destroyed.

Todd Miller over at Tomdispatch has a decent little discussion about the backstory to the "OMFG! The beaners are revolting! Send in the Army!" tales we've been reading about ARNG troopers being dispatched to help fortify La Frontera, seeing as how the traitorous Dhimmicrats won't vote for Trump's Big Beautiful Wall.

I've been thinking about this, and ended up posting a long piece over at GFT discussing how I think that the problem goes much deeper, into the way we frame this as an "immigration" or "border control" problem.

It's not. It's a "capitalism" problem, and to even have any remote hope of solving it - and as Miller points out that when the Chinese climate change hoax really kicks in it's likely to mean massive population shifts from the tropics on a scale that will make the current situation look like a country club weenie roast - would mean a seriously unsparing look at how We the People have set up our economic system to lure the very people We then have the sort of hissyfit about that leads to us doing dumbass things like the election of an orange-colored real estate grifter to national office.

"The bottom line is that to keep meat cheap the business had to cut costs, and worker's pay is typically the single biggest cost of any business.

The same is true of nearly any business you look at that employs significant numbers of undocumented people. Construction, landscaping, agriculture, "hospitality" (meaning hotels and restaurants). This isn't anyone's "fault", or, if it is, it's Our fault, We the People. We've forgotten that it's the nature of capitalism; you can hope to charge everyone a premium and go broke, or you can skin your costs down to the bone and make them affordable to Joe and Molly. It's why commercial aviation sucks. It's why WalMart. It's why the guy running that leaf-blower snuck in from Michoacan.

So unless we plan to start paying what we'd need to pay to give all those legal citizen busboys, maids, drywallers, chicken-gutters, and tomato-pickers a living wage the reality of people coming here outside the legal process is going to continue."

Read the whole thing, as the kidz say.

I hate to even admit this.

But.

I'm not TOTALLY hating on the totally-expected roundup-the-wetbacks directive from the new Administration.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a Trumpkin. I want to Make America Great Again. Ugh. I know.

Bear with me for a moment, though.

Now. Don't get me wrong. This thing will suck for millions of people whose crime is trying to get a piece of the American Dream for themselves and their families. I hate that on a purely personal, I-don't-like-to-make-things-suck-for-innocent-people level. As a person, I hate it.

As a citizen, as someone who thinks about politics and governing...well, let's start with this; to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States.

(In case you're interested, I wrote a loooooong post over at my other joint three years ago where I discussed what I see as the vast, almost insoluble complexity of this problem, which concluded with the following:

"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance, and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by "Real Amurikans" (that is, legal citizens) who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things."

But this post isn't about those things; it's about the Trump-promising-to-deport-the-beaners-and-going-ahead-and-doing-it.)

As opposed to the ban-the-raghead rule, which really was poorly thought out and complete geopolitical foolery, the idea that the United States should police its borders and return those who have entered the country illegally to their homelands is not, on its face, as freakishly boneheaded as most Trump stuff.

But...

(...and you KNEW there'd be a but, here, right, because, well...Trump.)

Here's the problems I DO have with this.

First, I can see a gajillion ways that this is going to be a fucking total shitshow. American citizens will be grabbed up and deported by mistake. Sweeps will result in a seething mob of people shoved into FEMA trailers without any sort of organization or preparation. Screening will be a disaster. The optics - "jackbooted ICE agents handcuff adorable tiny Latino kiddies" - will make the Land of the Free look like the Land of the Assholes. People will get stranded in Mexico City airport with nowhere to go and no hope of relief.

I can see about a dozen ways this will be a smoking crater - it's Trump, for one thing, who seems to have a gift for employing people who couldn't run a child's birthday party - that will make the Iraq War look like VE Day.

Second, I can also see how this could turn into something far nastier and far worse, along the lines of the Japanese internment of 1942. There's always been a hell of a strong strain of race hate and xenophobia in America (as there is in about...well, pretty much everywhere humans live...) that could take this from a calmly conducted law enforcement process into a screaming ratissage against every person or group of people that every whacko wingnut hates and freaks out over (Hello? Alex Jones? Hello?).

And, finally, I think that, even if this isn't a dumpster fire, that the results will be at best underwhelming. The promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee will turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals.

The result of all this huge slug of spending - surely paid for by a tax hike, right? - will be, outside of personal hardship for those involved, a vast expanse of...very little.


What do you think?

Let's get this straight up front: George Will is a curmudgeonly old stick who has managed to lose whatever common sense and humanity he ever had toadying to the power brokers in today's GOP. He's become Rush Limbaugh in a tweed jacket.

Still, the man is what passes for an "intellectual" of the Right. I can only assume that this is the only reason that today's Oregonian ("We're the Worst Newspaper In the World But We're The Only Newspaper In Portland!") was willing to front up his appalling screed on the Arizona "Papieren, bitte!" immigration law.

As usual, Will takes his little conservative sawed-off shotgun of Deep Conservative Thinking, aims it at the Godless Lib'ruls, and blows off his own foot. And, no, I'm not going to link to the sunovabitch. Google "George Will" and "Arizona immigration" and you'll find his worthless ass.

Specifically what he does is he manages to completely miss the whole point of those of us who find the new law so frigging stupid.

It doesn't have anything to do with racism. Or fascism. Or anti-Mexican prejudice. Or the damn Tea Party idiots and what they do or don't believe is true.

Nope. It's in the process that's stated in S.B. 1070 in these words: "For any lawful contact made by a low enforcement official or agency...where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a resonable attempt shall be made, when practical, to determine the immigration status of that individual."

"Where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States..."

Do you see the problem here?

Let's say that I am Canadian. I slipped across the border into Oregon, applied for a state ID (which in my state does not require proof of citizenship). I have a job, a house, am in all ways indistinguishable from someone born in Portland or Gresham except that I'm not a legal U.S. citizen.

How is a Maricopa sheriff's deputy going to know that?

Should I wear a Canucks jersey? Go around saying "eh?" a lot? Wear snowshoes in Tempe and run gallumphing away when the county cruiser drives by?

Let's cut through the bullshit being spouted about this and man up to the fact that there are only two ways to enforce this law:

1. Target groups or individuals who are "likely" to be in the U.S. illegally.

This is clearly what the law intends. It is designed to smoke out Latinos; Mexicans, Salvadorians, Hondurans, Guatemalans, who are in the country without their papers. Will's column admits as much. He describes it as a "cry for help" because the feds have failed to control passage through our southern border. In the process he also makes the fairly specious claim that Democrats and liberals who are objecting to this are doing so only to win Hispanic votes, but, nevermind, it's George Will. Will makes the assertion that this is merely federalism at work, and that we who know Hispanics only as people with leafblowers in our front yards at noon - rather than in our backyards at 3 a.m. - need to get over it and let Arizona get on with the job.

(Let me also observe the nasty implicit racisim in the notion that because the Arizonans who like this law are more "familiar" with brown people they have more reason to suspect that many of them are criminals. But, nevermind, it's George Will.)

If this is the intent - which it is - the law is clearly both wrong in intent and illegal in practice. If it becomes obvious that Arizona lawmen are stopping hispanic-looking people and asking for their papers the disparity and prejudicial intent of the law will be legally unavoidable. When the first Hispanic U.S. citizen unable to produce the appropriate papers is arrested (and at least one will be - the Border Patrol and the USCIS, charged with enforcing immigration law, do this all the time) the violent and debilitating payout of taxpayer funds in lawsuits will begin. How many deputies and librarians will Arizona counties have to lay off before realizing that this is a mug's game?

2. Begin asking random individuals for their proof of citizenship.

Game over. The "Papers, please!" chestnut is the oldest shorthand for dictatorship we know. When and if this happens, Arizona will have officially become the rubber bobo head for all the dumb nativist beliefs spouted everywhere in the U.S. And yes, I'm looking mostly at you, conservatives. You've embraced this tarbaby all on your ownselves.

More to the point, none of this really has anything to do with dealing with the problem of controlling our southern border and why it is so difficult.

I have no doubt that this law has something to do with hating on some Mexicans and something to with the a certain type of person's approach to a problem being to find the biggest stick possible and beat on it. But that's not the problem.

One problem is that this law is an unenforcibly bad law; it requires Arizona cops to choose between racism and authoritarianism. It's said that hard cases make bad law. Well, bad law makes for hard cases, and this one is going to be as bad as can be. But that's not the problem, either.

The problem is that this law is a symptom. The problem is that this is a symptom of the kind of bad, stupid, things that people do when they have no patience and no intelligence to come up with a complex solution to a complex problem. The problem is that this law isn't all that much different than doing bad, stupid things like launching land wars and occupying lands in central Asia in retaliation for an act of civilian criminality by a handful of raggedy-ass guerillas. It's not all that much different from doing bad, stupid things like passing legislation that let slicky-boys run financial Ponzi schemes and then refusing to change anything when their greed and dumb stupidity impoverish others.

Back in June of 2007 I talked a lot about this. About how the "illegal immigration" problem isn't really an "illegal immigration" problem but a multi-car pileup of social, economic and political ills in Central America, economic imbalance across the Border, pig-stupid U.S. drug and labor laws, wishful thinking and reality-avoidance on all sides wrapped up in the bone-deep simplicity of the sort of people like Arizona's governor and her fellow thumb-hammerers in the state legislature. About how this does nothing more than punish people desperate to help themselves and their families while doing nothing, less than nothing, about the problems and structural instability that brought them there.

I have no hope that the sort of people in Arizona who thought this law would work will suddenly get smarter. In fact, I have little hope at all that my nation as a whole can avoid the long slide into magical thinking and stupid answers to difficult questions that this law represents. All I can do is repeat to Governor Brewer and the idiotic legislators of Arizona now what I said then:

"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything wil be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real Amurikans (actual Citizens) who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."

Hadrian used stone to build his wall and try and keep the Pictish wetbacks out. It was a warlike act and as such it worked for a time. But eventually the pressure from without and the rot from within knocked the rocks down.

I have no idea of what it means that the only rocks involved here are inside people like Jan Brewer's and Russel Pearce's and George Will's heads.