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Stop that man before he washes another dish at sub-minimum wage!

This is the sort of guy Bush is trying to keep satisfied lately:



Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.


I question the wisdom of thinking you can please someone who goes to sleep in Hitler Youth® brand footie pajamas, but Bush is going to try with his asinine plan to send the National Guard to the border. Since there is no emergency situation to speak of, it’s safe to say there’s exactly no real reason to court violence on the border, but since when Bush need a reason to send troops to point guns at people? Hell, that it’s a warm, sunny day is reason enough to deploy troops in the hopes someone gets shot. Nice weather just calls for someone’s brains to be blown out all over the ground.

If I seem a little hostile to the idea of sending troops to the Mexican-American border, well that would be because I’m real hostile to the idea. Troop build-up on the border has led directly to a situation where someone pointed a gun at me many years ago and don’t think I’m going to forget it. It was 1997 and the spring semester had just ended and my college roommate decided to accompany on a trip back to West Texas to visit my family and take a gander at our quaint, retrograde way of life out there. Also, we were going to go hiking in Big Bend National Park. The day before we went to the park, I took her up from Alpine (where I’m actually from) and up to Fort Davis to see a town that resembles 1957 even more than Alpine. We stopped in the drugstore/soda shop for a malt (I’m not kidding) and a friend of mine from high school was working the counter. When we told her that we planned to hike in the park and even cross the border to get lunch in a teeny weeny town in Boquillas Canyon, she said, “Ah, be careful if you go to Mexico. There’s federal police and military all over the place lately.”

In retrospect, I probably should have taken that to mean that I shouldn’t have taken my roommate, who was from Nebraska after all, to Mexico. But hell, we figured this was our best shot at becoming world travelers, so we went ahead and crossed the Rio Grande to go to the town of Boquillas in Mexico. I suspect we were breaking some kind of law with the way we crossed the border, which was paying a guy $2 to take us in a rowboat, and therefore we certainly deserved what happened next when a Jeep full of federal police met us on the other side of the border, armed to the teeth and scared the living shit out of us.

“We’re here for lunch!” I said, trying to remember if I knew a lick of Spanish.

It turns out that tensions on the border were what you might call high because just a few days before the Marines that had been deployed to the border due to escalating drug war violence had shot and killed a teenager who was, depending on who you ask, herding goats or possibly just hanging out. (They weren’t indicted, even though the autopsy shows they shot him in the back.) The Marines defended their actions because there was no doubt the teenage boy, Ezequiel Hernandez, was carrying a gun, which in West Texas is roughly like saying someone looked suspicious because he was walking on two whole feet. The Marines claimed Hernandez was shooting at them; popular sentiment in the area was that the Marines were lying to cover their own asses because it’s hard to really argue someone is shooting at you when he is facing away from you. The government abandoned the idea of having the Marines on the border after that, though they didn’t abandon the War on Drugs, which was and is the only reason that there’s so much gang violence on the Mexican-American border in the first place. And the lesson was learned much too late to save Hernandez that military deployment to “protect” Americans from human beings and contraband that are only coming over because Americans demand it is a stupid idea.

Not of course that Bush ever shied away from an idea merely because it’s stupid. Perhaps from his viewpoint it’s not stupid. After all, he might hope that another horrible injustice like the shooting of Ezequiel Hernandez happens again, and that is sufficient to satiate the blood lust of the people hysterically calling for Bush’s impeachment and get them back on his side.

Posted by on 05/16 at 07:37 AM

  1. "Perhaps from his viewpoint it’s not stupid. After all, he might hope that another horrible injustice like the shooting of Ezequiel Hernandez happens again, and that is sufficient to satiate the blood lust of the people hysterically calling for Bush’s impeachment and get them back on his side.”

    Close.

    Haven’t you wondered why the same president whose administration floated a trial balloon a while back on a general amnesty for illegal immigrants would also back a proposal to man the U.S.-Mexico border with actual troops?  It seems a bit inconsistent, until you factor in the politics.  Immigration is one issue where I think the Bush administration - or, in this case, the president himself - is actually on the right side, which is to say he’s all for it.  At the same time, he does have to appeal the isolationist/racist portion of his own party, lest they upend the permanent Republican majority he’s trying to create (and let’s also remember that most Mexican immigrants, as socially conservative Catholics, are natural Republicans in many respects).  So, why not back some (largely) toothless motions at “securing our borders,” if he can couple the gesture with real immigration reform?

    Perhaps I’m giving the man too much credit, and we’ll get the gesture and not the substance; this seems to be the pattern in a number of other cases.  But in most of those, it was clear to anyone who cared to look that the substance was something that Bush was simply not interested in.  Immigration reform is, and so I’ll hold out hope that this is an exception to the rule.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  09:09 AM

  2. It’ll never happen. This was just a stunt.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  09:15 AM

  3. Self induced reverse male pattern baldness, too cool. Your would be mentat buddy promotes half a solution as his whole answer. In real life one nation’s deport is another’s import. The German solution referenced solved the import problem by engineering a process that converted deport to ash, dumped the ash in a pond.

    captcha: why.

    Posted by black dog barking  on  05/16  at  10:12 AM

  4. Thanks for your post; it’s the first comment I’ve heard since this foolishness began which raised the idiocy of sending armed troops, trained and paid to fight wars, to “defend” the US border against largely unarmed civilians who only want to find jobs.  Sure, it’s illegal; that makes it a job for cops, whose training is in dealing with a civilian populace in a non-lethal manner.  But I agree with the first poster, too; regardless of his motives--Bush isn’t wrong on everything, just most things--this is all intended to soften opposition to his limited amnesty plan, which would incorporate into legal society millions of people who fear discovery and deportation.  They’re here; they’re real; they work.  Do something to help them.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  10:27 AM

  5. I’m originally from West Texas and I, too, immediately thought of Ezequiel Hernandez when I first heard of the National Guard involvement.  Bush was governor when that happened.  Shame on him for not remembering—or worse, not caring.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  10:49 AM

  6. It’ll never happen. This was just a stunt.

    Am struggling in this instance to apply the ISO Standard Bush Adminstration Prediction Template:  Whatever they do will be worse than you think, even when you take into account that it will be worse than you think.

    So will the “failure of our pessimistic imagination"* be that they actually try to deploy them in some cluelessly hostile manner - or that they can just let it ride as such a shameless political stunt to appease the base. Following the rule, they will probably do something that covers both in some creatively inconceivable manner.
    For fuck’s sake these are the guys that performed this little dance on this very topic just last year. Headline:
    Bush budget scraps 9,790 border patrol agents.
    President uses law’s escape clause to drop funding for new homeland security force.

    The only question is whether anyone in the press will directly call him out on this specific point or his prior cynical exploitation of the Spanish-version National Anthem or etc., etc.

    ... and based on Elisabeth Bumiller’s latest public fellatory act in the Times covering the speech, don’t hold your breath.

    *phrase from Sarah Vowell

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  11:23 AM

  7. Just a couple of odd points.  Using the National Guard on the borders provides the opportunity to promote recruitment without suggesting Middle East service.  Of course this would be the smoke and mirrors, in that once recruited to “protect” our borders, these newly minted, and so inspired to serve, troops would need to be sent to Iraq for training. 

    Up, and out, here along the northern borders of WA, ID, and MT, it would be quite thrilling actually to have the National Guard posted to serve.  As you can imagine, Federally commanded personnel are not well liked here, especially by a citizenry that is vastly better equipped and armed.  Hell the Border Patrol is barely tolerated now, as they tend to interfere too much already with essential pleasures: snowmobiling, hunting, importation of pharmaceuticals and booze, and of course access to all those hemp products.  We do have a tremendous problem with undocumented workers running across the border, but most of them are Russian, and you really can’t tell the difference between those that have been here since the 1800’s and those that snuck in last week. The Asian ones seem to arrive in droves along the coast, moving between the innumerable islands and riding with fishing fleets and container ships.  But that sort of interdiction is up to the Navy to stop.  Submarines might work???

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  01:38 PM

  8. I can’t believe Bush laid out separate plans for border control and immigration. I thought he’d combine the two - no National Guard, just hire those Mexican guest workers to patrol the border. That’s two birds with one time-tested business plan!

    It’s a platform to get elected on.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  03:03 PM

  9. Tim! Brilliant! Then the Administration could get McKinsey or Booz Allen or Bain (or all three!) to bless this plan as a triumph of synergy, and all the business-side Republicans would immediately sign on.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  05/16  at  03:49 PM

  10. "Is George Bush Over?” Illustrated, graphically. (Guidance suggested for minors.)

    Posted by gringoman.com  on  05/16  at  04:13 PM

  11. fok, michael: you’re from ALPINE?  i had no idea!  now i have a (good) idea!  viva terlingua!!!

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  07:01 PM

  12. Hi, publia—I’m not from Alpine (or, as Lyle Lovett would say, “that’s right!  you’re not from Alpine"), but guestblogger Amanda Marcotte is.

    Me, I’m from Queens.  My official name is Michael Bérubé of the Flushing, Queens, Bérubés. 

    Posted by Michael  on  05/16  at  08:58 PM

  13. For all of you tempted to try it, that picture at the top is a gruesome reminder of what tragic results await when you try to give your head a bikini wax.

    Posted by  on  05/16  at  09:07 PM

  14. Would it be terribly Karl-Rove-is-really-three-steps-ahead-of-us-all style paranoid to suggest that Bush’s foray into immigration has done exactly what it was intended to do? I have the sense that immigration at this juncture is a kind of wedge issue within the Republican party, which is to say that in going in front of the cameras Monday night, Bush was taking one for the national team. He may not have “appealed” to his base, but he certainly got them fired up, nicht wahr? Fired up enough to go out and vote for congressional candidates preaching Final Solutions in November? Hard to say, and I don’t really want to venture too far into the fascist mind to speculate. But from the looks of Glenn Greenwald’s post today, it seems like righty pundits think that if they cast GWB as an abject loser with all the vitriol they’ve been accumulating as they’ve been played for dupes for the last five years, they might get their people to the polls.

    Posted by  on  05/17  at  01:23 AM

  15. One little effect of Bush’s announcement that
    he’ll send National Guard to the border is that
    he just lost the Latino vote. A lot of Latinos voted for him in 2004 who won’t vote for Republicans
    in 2006. They’re quite aware Bush endorsed HR4437 saying that immigrants are criminals & then sends
    the National Guard to patrol the border!

    The big problem for the Republicans with using Latino immigrants as scapegoats for the failing economy is those you scapegoat don’t want to vote for you. In California after Pete Wilson tried to scapegoat Latinos they voted Democratic for the next decade. Well, that gives us all something to look forward to.

    Posted by  on  05/17  at  02:51 AM

  16. "… but alpine wants you, anyway.”

    Posted by  on  05/17  at  06:23 AM

  17. Is that picture the guy who wrote that crap? If so, somebody should point out to him that if you’re a skinhead who gets your kicks from beheading duck-billed platypuses, you shouldn’t put the evidence on your head. I don’t care if that’s ad hominem, he probably doesn’t count as a hominid.

    Posted by  on  05/17  at  09:50 AM

  18. hey i took that rowboat ride as well.  did you ride the donkey?
    I try to console myself that this is all a big joke, and then I think, hey, they are putting troops on the border.  I have to say it freaks me out just a tiny bit when that image mixes with the phrase that has been bouncing around in my head for a while, the one that starts with police, and ends with state.

    Posted by  on  05/17  at  04:00 PM

  19. How could Bush lay down different plans for border control and immigration. Hiring Mexican guest workers to patrol the border and all the business side republicans would immediately sign on.

    Posted by Henry  on  05/18  at  02:06 AM

  20. Actually the little snipe, Ted Beale, is not washing dishes for minimum wage, but is the son of wealthy Aryans, graduate of a gated “community” in a suburb of St. Paul that I understand his parents once organized to keep out Jews.  He now lives in Italy.  From the comfort of his Daddy’s velvet pillows, he sends home hate about the poorest people in America.

    Posted by  on  05/18  at  02:27 AM

  21. Why Bush is making it all the more complicating for the border control and immigration? Solution lies with the Mexican guest workers.

    Posted by jack  on  05/19  at  01:36 AM

  22. Different plans for border and imigration! Why so much of mess? Can’t they make it simple?
    What the whole idea is about!

    Posted by Anna  on  05/23  at  07:43 AM

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