Sunday, May 14, 2006

Disaster in the Making

Updated Below:

If this turns out to be true...that Bush will position several thousand National Guard troops along the U.S. and Mexico borders then we have the makings of a disaster. According to Reuters Bush will announce the measure tomorrow night to coincide with the resuming of debate in Congress on immigration reform.

George Bush and his henchmen are insane. In their desperation to do anything that will make them not appear incompetent they are going to ignore the fact that the military and especially the National Guard is already overstretched and use them for a strictly political stunt. Does anyone want to guess how much this little debacle going to cost us?

What is even more insane is that this is the same administration that just two years ago took a huge knife to the border patrol budget and cut some 10,000 agents from the force.

The National Guard is a military force and one of their jobs is to shoot people who are breaking the law. Remember Kent State? How long do you think it will be until a well intentioned National Guardsman shoots a Mexican man as he crosses the border or God forbids a woman or child? What do you think will happen when this occurs and occur it will? I don't want to even imagine the uproar and chaos in the streets of American cities and towns.

This plan, if true, is nothing but a publicity stunt. These proven idiots in Washington have not thought this through just like they didn't think through Iraq, Katrina and everything else they have touched.

As I have said so many times...we know Bush is going to shoot himself in the foot. What is amazing is how fast he can reload. The real tragedy is that it always someone else that takes the bullet in these disasters.

Imagine a bunch of ducks trying to gang rape a football.

Update: Georgia10 at Kos has more.

Update Number Two
Holden at First-Draft brings us non-Texans up-to-date on what happens when the military patrol the border. He reminds of this incident in 1997. This is the type of tragedy we will be facing if Bush posts the military on the border.
From the Drug Policy Forum of Texas memorial page: On May 20, 1997, Esequiel Hernandez, Jr. was herding his family's goats 100 yards from his home on the US-Mexican border in Redford, Texas, as he did every day. Six days before, he had turned 18 years old.

Unknown to Esequiel or any of the other residents of Redford, a group of four Marines led by 22-year old Corporal Clemente Banuelos had been encamped just outside the small village along the Rio Grande River for three days. After watering his small flock of goats in the river, Esequiel started on his way back home when the Marines began stalking him from a distance of 200 yards.

The four camouflaged Marines were outfitted with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and weapons. Esequiel carried an antique .22 caliber rifle -- a pre-World War I, single shot rifle to keep wild dogs and rattlesnakes away from his goats. The autopsy showed that Esequiel was facing away from the Marines when he was shot. He probably never knew the Marines were watching him from 200 yards away.

Thus it was that a 22 year-old United States Marine shot and killed an innocent 18 year-old boy tending his family's goats. This outrageous act was the inevitable consequence of a drug prohibition policy gone mad. Esequiel Hernandez was killed not by drugs but by military officers of the United States government.

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