Texas Governor Rick Perry has accused President Barack Obama of “gambling with American lives.” This after a bullet from a Mexican gun battle illegally entered the United States and pierced a glass panel in a door at University of Texas’s Bell Hall. “For the second time in two months, bullets from a gun battle in the escalating drug war in Juarez have struck a building in El Paso . . . By the grace of God, the stray bullets from these incidents have yet to injure or kill a Texan . . .
I guess God isn’t very happy with the Mexicans involved with (or in close proximity to) the drug wars raging south of the border, funded by American drug users. Some 30,000 of our neighbors to the South have died in that internecine conflict. I digress . . .
It’s time for Washington to stop the rhetoric and immediately deploy a significance force of personnel and resources to the border.
In an open letter to President Obama [click here to download], Perry’s political polemic loses some of its force, replaced by a straightforward request for 1000 Title 32 National Guard troops. O.K. relatively straightforward:
In Texas, just as in our nation as a whole, border security affects our safety, job creation, quality of life. America cannot have a rational discussion of immigration reform without real, effective border security. The federal government must finally step up and do what it needed to secure our borders.
It’s a double-edged sword for the Prez: look tough on border security for illegal alien weary (and wary) mainstream Americans ahead of the mid-term elections, or alienate the Democratic Party’s left-leaning base, who sees U.S. Troops on the border as jack-booted thugs keeping out Mexico’s poor, huddled masses despite a Texas republican governor who’s Damien’s pet chimp (or something like that).
We shall see.
