Today's banner headline featured as the #1 "news" story on WashingtonPost.com, the company newsletter of Empire, Inc., is:
Critics target cost of Guard troops on border
Ah, yes, the crushing cost of deploying 1,200 National Guardsmen to the 1,952-mile southern border. Don't you see this vast expense might endanger the Pentagon's budget for deploying over 100,000 troops in strategically crucial Afghanistan in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world? What's more important to America? Afghanistan or Arizona? Afghanistan, obviously. Those Arizonans are racist.
Furthermore, while you immigration skeptics have been proven right that massive illegal immigration would be bad for the economy and would be cost-effective to diminish with fences and guards, the fact that you were right and we at the Washington Post were completely wrong just goes to prove that everybody should ignore you. Instead, we want America to open up the borders wide so if the economy ever recovers, then there will be another massive influx of undocumented workers just in time for the next recession. What could make more sense than that?
According to Barack last year when he announced it they aren't allowed to catch illegals. They're for "intelligence and reconnaissance." What's your interest in this bureaucratic feint, Sailer? Bush spent almost 10x on a similar operation, that's on the 2nd page btw.
ReplyDeleteAccording to rules of engagement set by the Pentagon, Guard troops are not allowed to pursue, confront or detain suspects, including illegal immigrants, or investigate crimes, make arrests, stop and search vehicles, or seize drugs. Nor do they check Mexico-bound vehicles for bulk cash or smuggled weapons headed to the drug cartels. “We are the eyes and ears, mainly. We do not have a law enforcement role,” said Maj. Gen. Hugo E. Salazar, head of the Arizona National Guard
maybe Obama could cut back on suing states for enforcing immigration law, that should free up some of the budget.
ReplyDeleteDoes even a whiff irony cross the minds of editors dreaming up these headlines?
ReplyDeleteA better knee-jerk blog post would be the hand-wringing press coverage on Toyota & Mercedes managers detained in Alabama under the new law (though I doubt whether foreign administrators getting inconvenienced by Smokey will yield much sympathy in the present economy). Good proof-of-concept on that law AFAICT; proceed with roll-out to Maryland & Va
ReplyDeleteClinton deported about 20,000 illegals a year, Bush about 180 (not a typo) - (source: P. Buchanan)
ReplyDeleteObama isn't even doing that... we have an elite who hate us and are trying to (sucessfully thus far) marginlize us, meanwhile white kids riot over a coach being fired for protecting a gay child boffer.
Anon and A-G. They don't make the connection. They really don't. That's why we have critics.
ReplyDeleteThat may sound overly critical and condemning, but it's human nature exactly. We all have a hundred blind spots like this where action A is not perceived to have any connection to Action A1 despite their similarity. It's all very Nicholas Nassim Taleb, very installed-narrative, very Dunning Krueger.
Not to let them off the hook, though. The key is What do you do when someone points out the inconsistency/hypocrisy to you? And that is where our ruling class fails.
i don't understand, if policing borders doesn't work why do the scot irish have a border fence on the Anglo-Scottish border?
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody have any numbers on the percentage Mexicans that come over legally and just stay illegally and the ones who sneak across the border? Why sneak across the border? Can't any Mexican come by car and just stay?
ReplyDeleteWe all have a hundred blind spots l
ReplyDeleteoh, I don't think it's a blind spot....
I'm sure the WaPo suggested some cost effective alternatives like eVerify and prosecuting employers - right? Wouldn't want the Federal Government wasting 120 million a year guarding the boarder.
ReplyDeleteThe military industrial complex learned its lesson at the end of the cold war - nothing is more expensive than winning. Now they're getting paid trillions a year to fight some muslim boogie man camped out in caves on the other side of the world. With zero accountability. No one expects them to win - win what? Now that we're fighting for "hearts and minds" no one even expects body counts any more. Why would any of those guys risk the gravy train of the century to trade their drones for chain-link fence, jeeps and paddy wagons?
i don't understand, if policing borders doesn't work why do the scot irish have a border fence on the Anglo-Scottish border?
ReplyDeleteI dont rightly know what to make of this comment. Are you being ironic, is it a joke, what?
The Anglo-Scottish border hasnt been properly militarised since the fall of Hadrian's Wall. Doesnt mean there hasnt been conflict and control of the border areas.
I think the figure I saw is that we're now spending $120B per year on our Crazy Afghan War. Since the WashPost people seem to think that those 1,200 National Guardsmen on the Mexican border are hugely expensive, that presumably means they cost something like $100M per year each, so their fringe benefits must be pretty amazing...
ReplyDeleteHere's my problem Steve with your "invade/invite" phrasing. ACTUAL, real empires (the British in 1880, Vienna in 1770, Madrid in 1590) don't have a tidal wave of people invading. If you don't have patriotism, military pride, and accomplishment, you become like say, the British or French now (inundated with Muslim/African immigrants) or Sweden, former empire in ... the 1630's, over-run by Muslims from Pakistan and Morocco.
ReplyDeleteYour criticism IMHO has echoes of Calvinism, America is being "punished for the sin of imperial nationalism" which is pretty much the point of the Open Borders crowd. America sure as hell invaded the world in the 90's -- the 1890's, with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and a nasty thirty year insurgency in the Philippines. And we didn't have a whole lot of non-Whites outside the descendants of slaves in America either.
Without patriotism, pride, and achievement in military affairs, Western AND Eastern nations degenerate into easy prey for the Open Borders types, who argue that America MUST BE PUNISHED for "sins" by drowning it in Third World immigration.
I mean really Steve, the experience of history shows that actual INVASIONS correlate nicely with secure borders and not very many immigrants. Immigrants legal or otherwise flood into failed states that are no longer successful militarily, think China after the 1700's, Egypt after Napoleon, India in the early 1700's, the East Indies in the 1690's.
ReplyDeleteAmerica invaded Mexico, and fought there pretty hard and good (one of my ancestors fought in THAT war). We didn't invite Mexicans in either. Nor did we after the Spanish American War when we acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. France invaded and conquered Algeria, and colonized it, and was not over-run by Algerians. Nor Italy by Tunisians or Abyssinians or Eritreans. Nor was Germany over-run by Namibians. Nor was England over-run by Aborigines. Nor was Sweden over-run by Poles or Russians when it ruled over them.
Confidence and aggression go hand in hand, nations don't curl up and become Greater Switzerland unless they are small, easily defensible, and highly armed with a strong martial tradition.
This criticism and those of your commenters seem to echo that of Gibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" where he blamed the empire building itself as "immoral" (why did it last then from say, 200 BC to 300 AD?) and hence punished by Providence/God. If that's so, then God was awfully tardy in punishing the Empires of Spain, Holland, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Ottomans, China, and 19th Century America.
I'd argue that you have it wrong, only by restoring confidence and the swagger of a "winner" will Americans feel they have the right and desire to close the border. The border is un-defended because not enough Americans feel it is worth defending.
EVERYONE loves a Winner. They will not tolerate a loser. America ought to win a lot more wars, avoid those it loses, to restore confidence. France and Britain were finished when Suez was quashed by Ike. Ike had to do it, but it led inexorably to their state now, squabbled over by the Muslim and African rulers.
Want the WaPo not even DARING to run such trash? America has to win. The Vietnam defeat allowed the Left to run rampant, arguing that America was not even worth defending (basically the WaPo line). Because it lost.
Winning is everything. God doesn't punish or save nations.
I am Lugash.
ReplyDeleteI think there was a coordinated effort by the newspapers in favor of illegal immigration. This story, one in my local rag(AZ Republic) about three illegal high school students, and something in USA Today, today (no pun intended).
I am Lugash.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody have any numbers on the percentage Mexicans that come over legally and just stay illegally and the ones who sneak across the border? Why sneak across the border? Can't any Mexican come by car and just stay?
A Mexican citizen wishing to enter the U.S. must have the proper paperwork, which is a pain in the butt to obtain. Those who bother with following the rules are less likely to overstay.
An effective fence and interior enforcement are not mutually exclusive but rather go hand in hand. The advocates of illegal immigration always portray this as an “either or” dilemma in an attempt at misdirection. Fences are a force multiplier. They lower the number of troops needed to guard the border. 287g is still in its infancy but clearly it works. Not only are we beginning to deport illegal aliens from the country but we are removing the worst of the bunch. The more that get caught in the criminal justice grease trap, the more obvious this becomes. Once an illegal is arrested his fingerprints are taken electronically and his face digitized thereby anchoring his identity and as such he can never get back in through legal channels. Right now this is not a major problem for them because they just simply crawl back across the border as soon as they are released. But if we can make the cost of trying to reenter too high we will reduce the numbers through attrition. Furthermore, once we go to a system where we use only biometric ID we can use the fingerprints harvested from both the criminal aliens deported and the illegals illegal entry and prevent them from ever obtaining work, traveling, or conducting any sort of financial transaction. It won’t be that hard to do.
ReplyDelete"A better knee-jerk blog post would be the hand-wringing press coverage on Toyota & Mercedes managers detained in Alabama under the new law"
ReplyDeleteyeah, i saw this. the law is working correctly, a foreigner gets detained for a few hours for not driving with the proper, required ID that they must carry with them at all times, and then it's a quick jump for the liberals straight to the insults about southerners being racist, moron, backwards idiots.
over on autoblog.com they posted this story and it turned into the biggest clusterF of the year. most discussed article in 2011, with endless liberals, and a few openly hostile aliens, telling us all how incredibly stupid it is maintain some kind of control over our own nation.
It seems clear that the media are trying to reduce the dominance of white people by encouraging non-white immigration and miscegenation. This is causing America to look more and more like Latin America. Do the people at the New York Times and Washington Post really want to live in a country that looks more like Brazil and less like northern Europe? Apparently they do.
ReplyDeleteGibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" where he blamed the empire building itself as "immoral" (why did it last then from say, 200 BC to 300 AD? and hence punished by Providence/God.
ReplyDeleteCan you cite where Gibbon said this this?
Winning is everything. God doesn't punish or save nations.
A conflation of Vince Lombardy/High school football coach 'philosophy' and post modern nihilism/atheism. seems like a perfect, vapid, meaning-less ethos perfect for what's left of America.
I'd argue that you have it wrong, only by restoring confidence and the swagger of a "winner" will Americans feel they have the right and desire to close the border.
ReplyDeleteAnd fighting for public education and feminism in Iraq and Afghanistan does this how?
There is a more fundamental problem here: America is a number of different nations cobbled together into an administrative state. Those different, even antithetically opposed nations cannot agree on where the borders should lie.
The cost of 1,200 troops on the border can't be much compared to 12 million illegals in the US soaking up welfare.
ReplyDelete"Do the people at the New York Times and Washington Post really want to live in a country that looks more like Brazil and less like northern Europe? Apparently they do."
ReplyDeleteAs long as their neighborhoods still look like Tel Av... oops, I mean Edinburgh!
I can well imagine that those individuals and companies that make shed-loads of money from the deployment of US troops overseas would be annoyed that a piss-ant little deployment in the US might rob them of all those tax-payer dollars.
ReplyDeleteIt seems clear that the media are trying to reduce the dominance of white people by encouraging non-white immigration and miscegenation. This is causing America to look more and more like Latin America. Do the people at the New York Times and Washington Post really want to live in a country that looks more like Brazil and less like northern Europe? Apparently they do.
ReplyDeleteTheir group was heavily involved in the establishment of Mexico and Brasil on a foundation of miscegenation, so this should not come as a surprise.
Without patriotism, pride, and achievement in military affairs, Western AND Eastern nations degenerate into easy prey for the Open Borders types, who argue that America MUST BE PUNISHED for "sins" by drowning it in Third World immigration.
ReplyDeleteAmerica has all the "achievement in military affairs" it could ever hope for. The problem is that this "achievement in military affairs" is not linked at all to patriotism or pride, and it IS linked to open borders types. If the neo-cons had less influence we'd have less "achievement in military affairs", and we'd also have less open borders.
"Do the people at the New York Times and Washington Post really want to live in a country that looks more like Brazil and less like northern Europe? Apparently they do."
ReplyDeleteYes, the media elite have a racially based hatred on Northern European people that is largely motivated by envy. Once you understand that, everything they do makes perfect sense.
Pup, the "12 million" figure for illegals has been bandied around for years now - in reality it's much higher.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - plenty of Mexicans do just that - get a "tourist" (i.e. non-immigrant or visitor's) visa and never leave. Same thing with most "tourists" from the Caribbean countries or Africa or Asia or the Middle East. The few who bother going through the formalities use fraudulent marriages or other claims to "adjust status" and turn their visitor's visa into a green card. One of my fondest memories is of denying immigrant visas to Jamaicans who had remained illegally in the US for years after lying to get a tourist visa and then returned to Jamaica to apply for their immigrant visa once they had the means (i.e. American spouse, a job in a government certified "needed" field, etc.). Such lovely schadenfreude as they raged about their apartments and job commitments back in the U.S. (all illegally gotten gains, of course). I always extensively documented my refusals with evidence of their initial visa fraud and always got such permanent bans upheld on the grounds of lying to a consular officer. Unfortunately, most of my Foreign Service counterparts didn't give a rat's patootie and gave away visas like penny candy.
Whiskey said
ReplyDelete>Immigrants legal or otherwise flood into failed states that are no longer successful militarily<
So the way to make Mexican immigrants flee back to Mexico is to bomb Iran.
That's our Whiskey.
>Do the people at the New York Times and Washington Post really want to live in a country that looks more like Brazil and less like northern Europe? Apparently they do.<
ReplyDeleteAnswer: yes, they do. In the real world, not women but the Scots-Irish "hate, hate, hate" white European men.
Your criticism IMHO has echoes of Calvinism
ReplyDeleteWhiskey has, at long last, discovered a religious doctrine with a profound impact on American politics. Invade/Invite are linked by the elites that are running the policy, whether you like it or not. These are wars of Liberal imperialism. In fact, one of the chief arguments for passing the disastrous 1965 immigration act was how can we sell "freedom" overseas while not allowing the little brown people to flood into America. Spending billions and dying by the tens of thousands wasn't enough, apparently. You can't separate the Jewish lobby from the wars in Muslim lands, nor from the support and success of multiculturalism, and you can't separate Republican mania for these wars from their failure in the face of white-hating political correctness to prevent the dispossession of the whites who happen to make up the vast majority of their supporters. They send soldiers overseas to be brave for them (and to capture the yahoo vote) to cover up the fact they're too afraid to battle Liberal white-hating racism back home. It's all part and parcel of an anti-nationalist whole.
I read this story last night and I was quite impressed with the way the Post presents Latino activists as "Critics".
ReplyDeleteThe day prior the Post ran a story about how only 300,000 illegals were apprehended at the border instead of the usual 1,000,000. According to their logic the drop in attempted illegal crossings means the time for amnesty is now!
If the economy improves the number of people attempting to cross will of course triple or quadruple but I don't think they mentioned that in the article.
These Scotch-Irish are certainly relentless.
If the argument is that America shouldn't protect its OWN borders because of cost, then why should America protect the borders of South Korea, etc?
ReplyDeleteThe military industrial complex learned its lesson at the end of the cold war - nothing is more expensive than winning. Now they're getting paid trillions a year to fight some muslim boogie man camped out in caves on the other side of the world. With zero accountability. No one expects them to win - win what? Now that we're fighting for "hearts and minds" no one even expects body counts any more. Why would any of those guys risk the gravy train of the century to trade their drones for chain-link fence, jeeps and paddy wagons
ReplyDeleteNah, the military industrial complex is not making a killing from selling cheap'o drones and spare tires for humvees for Afgan operations. As a matter of fact a lot of money that would have gone into procurement of high tech weaponry (for ex. to potentially fight China) is now being diverted for low tech crap specifically tailored for low intensity operations. The American military is basically molding itself for low intensity combat, which is never a good thing for the likes of Lockheed, NG, etc.
This is for the poster who goes by the handle Whiskey. For God's sake you appear on every right-leaning blog I read, iSteve, Mangan's, SBPDL and some others. Other than pushing your white women hate beta males theme, which you lifted from Roisy, you can always be counted on to represent the neocon wing of the republican party.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Do you hang around neocon blogs and try to convince their readers that they need to dial it down a notch or so on their open borders, free trade, and interventionism policies? Do you let your friends at Commentary know that their push for open borders is scaring the hell out of us? Do you fill up their blog posts over and over again with the same comments chastising them to make common ground with us?
And if not, why not?
LOL! so according to obama, the US is going to fight for gay rights around the world now too. hey, at least america has a consistent message now in both domestic and foreign policy on the gay front.
ReplyDelete"Invade the World / Invite the World in a nutshell"
ReplyDeleteThe best summary I've seen was a sign carried by a Muslim protestor in England: "Sharia will be in London before democracy will be in Afghanistan"
"The 1,200 National Guard troops have helped Border Patrol agents apprehend 25,514 illegal immigrants at a cost of $160 million"
ReplyDeleteSo, the cost of putting 1,200 guardsmen on the border is less than the amount the federal government gives each year to PBS or Planned parenthood. It's less than the cost of hundreds or even thousands of random government regulations that create no discernible improvement in our lives.
More than that: it's less than the cost of a single day of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Actually, less than what we spend in 12 hours. $160 million x 365 days = $58.4 billion << money spent on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan each year.
But it's still too much money to spend. Because it's border enforcement.
Fuck these people. Fuck them. They can't speak honestly or intelligently about immigration enforcement for ten lousy seconds.
And the Democrats? If we offered to end the wars immediately AND slash peacetime defense spending by $50 billion on the single condition that one-twentieth the money we saved went to immigration enforcement, would they do it? Hell no. Not in a million years no.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats give a shit about this country or the people who elected them.
"so according to obama, the US is going to fight for gay rights around the world now too"
ReplyDeleteObummer is trying to lock up his identity group voters. It's the only way he might possibly win. Thus actions on immigration, gay rights, affirmative action, etc.
His website last time around had pages for 15 or so hyphenated groups. Not one of them, of course, was for "European-Americans."
Obummer is trying to lock up his identity group voters. It's the only way he might possibly win. Thus actions on immigration, gay rights, affirmative action, etc.
ReplyDeleteFreudian slip? I think "lock in" might be a more sensitive (if less vibrant) term.