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As I see it
by Glenn Spencer -- February 22, 2008
Once again the American people are being bamboozled. Obama and Clinton act as if the Bush Administration is pushing ahead with the border fence with total disregard for public opinion. The fact is that the Bush Administration hates the fence and is doing everything in its power to stop it.
President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to build a 2-layer fence along the border with Mexico. It told him where it should go. Clinton and Obama voted for it. They all had their fingers crossed, i.e., they didn't mean it.
In the year following the signing fence bill DHS Secretary Chertoff did build some fence, but only five miles of the kind of double fence the bill called for. Moreover after building a bunch of fence in the desert east of Yuma where few people dare cross, the fencing effort ground to a halt.
On December 7, 2007, Chertoff issued a press release claiming 284 miles of fence were in place. This was a lie. American Border Patrol proved there was only 164 miles of fence in place, including only 84 miles of new fence, most of which was near Yuma. Shortly after the phony press release, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson rammed through an amendment to the Secure Fence Act giving Chertoff veto power over the fence. Chertoff quickly vetoed most of the new fence in Arizona, the main smuggling corridor into the United States.
Once that was done, Bush turned his attention to Texas. "I think that the way that the Bush administration is going about this, filing eminent domain actions against landowners and municipalities, makes no sense," Clinton said in the February 21 debate. It made perfect sense if you want to stir up public opinion against the fence, and that's what DHS set about to do.
So once again, the American people have been bamboozled by the power-elite.
Obama and Clinton do not oppose border security, so they say. John McCain has promised to secure the border before any discussions of what to do about the illegal aliens in our midst.
This presents us with an opportunity. If we can find a way to establish an acceptable definition of what border security means and an independent way to measure it, we could then ask the candidates if they would agree to install a border security system that meets these criteria.
It would be a start.
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