Edge of Battle

my friends, I don’t.

“In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here, in case you’ve been living under a rock or hugging a tree or counting snail darters in Lake Mead with your head underwater and your brains up your butt, I’ll bring the ignoramuses in the audience up to speed,” O’Rourke went on. “Yesterday evening, four United States Border Patrol agents were gunned down just off Interstate 10 between Blythe and Indio, California. No, wait, just hold on. ‘Gunned down’ is too soft, too gentle, too Fonda. Let’s call it what it was: they were slaughtered. They were shot to death by automatic gunfire as they were making an immigration stop. These men were executed. And for what? For enforcing the immigration and border security laws of the United States of America, that’s what.

“The assassins didn’t stop there, my friends, oh no, not by a long shot. They killed a total of ten Mexican nationals, including a pregnant woman and an eleven-year-old boy. The killers then made off with a Border Patrol vehicle. Incredible. Simply incredible. Horrifying is more like it. This is the worst killing in the line of duty in the history of the Border Patrol.”

As if he needed something to get him even more hopped up, O’Rourke took a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans and popped them into his mouth before continuing: “So what’s the status of the hunt for the killers? I called Mr. James Abernathy, director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the folks who run the Border Patrol. He said he could not comment because of the ongoing investigation. Same response from Attorney General Wentworth. Fair enough. I’m not going to aid and assist the terrorists by pushing the investigators into revealing any clues that might make the killers scatter.

“But I asked both gentlemen what’s being done to secure our borders and prevent another attack like this from happening again, and do you know what they said? Mr. Abernathy’s spokesperson said, ‘We’re doing everything possible.’ Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman said, ‘Everything legally authorized is being done, with all due respect for the rights of those involved in this activity.’ Excuse me?”

O’Rourke hit a button and the recorded sound of a large steel trap snapping closed went out over the airwaves. “I sense fresh meat in the O’Rourke trap, my friends. “‘Everything possible?’ My friends, do you realize that the four agents killed yesterday represented one tenth of all of the agents assigned to patrol the eastern Riverside County area of southern California? Ten percent of the agents assigned to ground patrol duties were killed in one night. Forty agents assigned to patrol about twenty-five hundred square miles of some of the busiest illegal migrant activity in the southwestern United States? That’s one agent for roughly every fifty square miles. Imagine having two cops to patrol a city the size of Las Vegas. How many crooks do you think they’re going to capture?

“Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman said that the government is going to respect the ‘rights of those involved in this activity.’” The snap! of the steel trap closing sounded again. “Wrong! I believe Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman is referring to respecting the rights of illegal migrants, migrant smugglers, and maybe even the rights of murderers. Is he actually suggesting that we consider the rights of the trespassers and murderers versus the rights of endangered American citizens before deciding what we’re going to do to combat these border incursions and attacks?

“As all my loyal listeners around the world know, I always have a copy of the Constitution of the United States right in front of me, and I refer to it often in questions like this. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution says that all rights, liberties, and protections of the Constitution apply to citizens of the United States. It also says that no state can deny any person—including illegal aliens and murderers, I suppose—life, liberty, property, or access to the legal system without due process. My question to Attorney General Wentworth is: what further considerations are you bound to give illegals and murderers before deciding how to enforce the law? We have laws against murder and crossing the borders through other than regular border crossings; we have agencies legally set up to enforce those laws. No one is being denied anything. So why isn’t the government acting to stop illegal immigration?

“The bottom line: this wishy-washy feel-good politically correct nonsense has got to stop, my friends, before we blindly allow more violence across our borders,” Bob O’Rourke went on. “This namby-pamby mealy-mouth tap-dancing rhetoric regarding such a basic, fundamental, and important national policy such as controlling immigration, sovereignty, and security is a national outrage. An estimated one million persons illegally cross the borders of the United States every year. Estimates of the number of persons illegally in the United States at any given time range from ten to twelve million, and the number is increasing every year despite the attacks on Nine-Eleven and the recent Consortium terror attacks. The United States can put a man on the moon, read newspapers from twenty-one-thousand miles in space, and fly a plane across the country in two hours, but we can’t stop poor uneducated Mexican peasants from strolling across the border?

“I say we can, my friends, and I say we do it now, before any more law enforcement officers get slaughtered. Those four men left behind wives, children, family, and friends, and our country owes it to them and owes it to all citizens to do something right now to stop this tidal wave of illegal immigration.

“As you all know, because I’ve been harping on it for months now, the effort to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act is stalled in Congress, and President Conrad seems unable or unwilling to push it. This is another outrage, and the President had better have the guts to take the hands of the wives, children, and mothers of those slain officers in his, look them in the eye, and promise he’ll get the job done. What else will it take? Will more officers and illegals have to die? Does another city have to be attacked before this President gets off his best intentions and puts his political and personal reputation on the line to repeal Posse Comitatus and protect the borders?

“All of my loyal listeners across this great country know my plan, but in case you’re tuning in for the first time or you’re just a bleeding-heart liberal illegal-hugger like Fonda, here it is, so listen up. It’s simple: bring every National Guardsman home from overseas and put him and her to work patrolling the nation’s borders. We’ve had experts on this show many times that say the U.S.-Mexico border can be sealed off with fewer than ten percent of the entire manpower of the Army and Air National Guard, or twenty percent of the manpower of the Guard just in the south border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and Texas. The National Guard was originally established to protect, defend, and secure the individual states and the United States, and only secondarily to augment the regular forces. We already have a nationwide declaration of war against terrorism—the governors don’t need any more authority or repeal of Posse Comitatus to deploy Guard forces in their own states.

“But the active-duty military forces have the real equipment, training, and manpower to make this work, so they need to be brought in as soon as possible. Therefore, step two: Congress should repeal the Posse Comitatus Act immediately, or at the very least the President should suspend it while the country is in a state of war, as we are now, and all of the strength and capabilities of our military forces should be brought to bear to secure the borders.

“I’ve been in the Air Force command centers up at Beale Air Force Base in California watching unmanned Global Hawk aircraft twenty thousand feet in the sky locating and tracking individuals from half a world away; I’ve seen infrared detectors spot individuals hiding under trees or even in underground spider holes; I’ve seen Joint STARS aircraft identifying and tracking hundreds of vehicles by radar over thousands of square miles. Guess how many Global Hawks we have patrolling Iraq and Afghanistan right now? Seven, according to the public affairs folks at Beale Air Force Base. How many do we have patrolling anywhere in the U.S.? You guessed it—none! How many Joint STARS patrolling Iraq and Afghanistan? Six—that’s all we have, my friends, leaving none to protect our own borders. We have less than twenty percent of the Air Force’s fleet of smaller Predator unmanned reconnaissance aircraft patrolling our own borders.

“Technologically, I know we can do it—the question is, do we have the political will to do it? You will hear that illegal immigrants do work that Americans don’t want to do.” Again the sound of the trap snapping shut. “O’Rourke says ‘hogwash’! Farm owners prefer immigrant labor because they’re cheap, plentiful, work in absurdly deplorable conditions, and don’t complain or cause trouble for fear of deportation. If farmworkers were paid an honest wage instead of a slave laborer’s wage, more Americans would do those jobs, or the farm owners would modernize their equipment and procedures to make farming even more efficient and profitable. Any higher costs would just be passed along to consumers anyway, where the market would then dictate prices—but undoubtedly unemployment would go down in the meantime.