The mess at our southern border is, without any shred of doubt, attributable to the gaggle of Incompetents in our nation’s Capitol. The nincompoops in Washington D.C., namely our Congressmen, Senators, and especially our president, are the enablers of this fiasco.

My most recent furor over our broken border was triggered by the newspaper column I read last night. I’ll reproduce parts of it in red below so you can evaluate the man’s arguments, which align with my own. The column began as follows:

“Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the . . . illegals among us.

The columnist acknowledged what most of us feel, namely that no one of goodwill wants to see illegals suffer. Then he brought up the obvious: each time we legalize illegals (as of course we have done), we thereby create an incentive for more folks to slip into our country illegally. He documented this by pointing to the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform law of 1986. That law allowed some three million illegals then living here to get permanent residencies here.  But, the columnist said, there were far more illegals inside our country as he tapped his keyboard, evaluating the mess at our southern border.

He offered a strong recommendation, an option we all know about: “Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won’t do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put cameras. Put sensors. Put out lots of patrols.  . . .”

“Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don’t tell me this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that’s a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that’s sovereignty.  . . . Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn’t have to be.  It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle.

“This is no time for mushy compromise,” he wrote near the end of his column. And indeed it was not; nor is it now. Let me explain. This is not a recent column. It was written nearly two decades ago. First A Wall –Then Amnesty appeared in the April 7. 2006, edition of the Washington Post. For reference, George W. Bush was president at the time. Yet now, the wound at our southern border is festering with greater urgency than it was when Charles Krauthammer’s column was written. The mess at our southern borders continues.

Question of the day: What is the current crowd in Washington doing about it?

FYI: The column I quoted from was republished on page 169 in this collection of Krauthammer’s columns (See reviews of that book here).

NOTICE: As I mentioned in my previous post (way back at the beginning of this year, by far my longest pause since I started this blog) I planned to be absent for a while. The immediate cause was my temporary frustration over losing key additions to my post evaluating Joe Biden (see that here), but I also had other compelling reasons. I had been dawdling over a couple of major projects that needed to be finished. Since then, I’ve made some progress on those (but alas, they are not yet completed). I think I understand why I’ve been a laggard. The reason seems obvious. Having logged over 92 years on this planet, I still resolutely step to the beat of my drummer, but his rhythm has slowed, his beat grown fainter. Yet I am thankful that he marches on.