On the EDge: Looney Tunes on the border

December 17, 2018 Utah Channel 3

OPINION — The best part of Saturday morning cartoons used to be watching the hapless Wile E. Coyote chase the speedy Road Runner across the desert.

There was no dialog to these Looney Tunes classics, just a never-ending supply of tools – from cannons and jet-powered roller skates to catapults and a multitude of high-powered explosives the coyote would purchase from Acme, a precursor to Amazon.com no doubt, to land his prey.

It didn’t work, of course, as the roadrunner would inevitably find a way to outrun, outwit and outmaneuver the coyote with predictably hysterical results.

The events taking place at the Mexican border these days are nothing short of a modern-day version of those Looney Tunes classics, with the hapless coyote repeatedly coming up empty-handed.

Concertina wire, the stuff they used extensively since it was first strung as a nasty barrier between sides during World War I, is stacked in a number of key, high-visibility places along the border between the United States and Mexico.

It’s unsightly, to be sure as anybody who has seen the stacks sent to a few crossings would attest.

It’s not terribly productive, but when the 5,200 active duty military troops and 2,000 National Guard soldiers were deployed to the work the border, their mission was primarily to string the wire atop the existing walls and crossings. They really could not do much else because of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century federal law that restricts them from participating in law enforcement activities, which limits their scope at the border.

Under the law, the troops may not detain immigrants, seize drugs from smugglers or have any direct involvement or contact with civilians, including undocumented immigrants or those seeking asylum.

So, for the most part, the troops sent to the border have been kept busy repairing Border Patrol vehicles, flying reconnaissance missions, placing concrete barriers and installing concertina wire atop a few of the existing walls that separate the two nations. It’s a far cry from the hollow threat behind their deployment to keep out the rabble.

“I see it as a political stunt and a waste of military resources and a waste of tax dollars,” former Customs and Border Protection commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske told Military Times at the time of the deployment. “To use active-duty military and put them in that role, I think, is a huge mistake.”

He went on to call it “nothing more than pandering to the midterm elections by the president.”

It’s all good optics, of course, something set in place just before the elections to up the ante for the anti-migrant candidates trying to ride the administration’s coattails.

But, it has been about as effective as Wile E. Coyote and his jet-powered roller skates.

If you have been near the border recently, you have seen the piles of concertina wire. It’s all there, out in the open for show purposes. However, it looks a lot more imposing than it really is, as evidenced by videos of a man who, a couple hours after the barrier was erected near the border near Yuma simply showed up with some wire cutters, snipped it and walked through to the U.S. side.

As far as a dressing at the top of the existing walls, and there are plenty of them at the border crossings, all the concertina wire does is slow down anybody bold enough to climb the wall with a pair of snips available at just about any hardware store. You see, Acme supplies Mexico with tools as well.

Nobody, really, expected a few strands of concertina wire to solve the border dilemma. In fact, when troops were originally deployed to California, Arizona and Texas, they had a meager 22 miles of the wire to shore up the border.

At the time, military officials said they only had a total of 150 miles of wire available, anyway, hardly enough to span the 1,950 miles that spans the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Rio Grande. Not much, but it looked good on Fox News and gave the talking heads on right-wing radio something to thump their chests about.

How effective the effort has been remains to be seen.

I do know it is an expensive proposition that will cost taxpayers at least $210 million.

I do know that this border wall nonsense has severely put an edge on the already tenuous relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor.

I also know that it has proven to be a major problem for the many people who make their way to Mexico, whether as vacationers, snowbirds or family members traveling back and forth for visits.

The coyote could be in trouble, however, as the money supply will probably dry up in the new year.

A Democratic House is unlikely to give the administration much funding for more razor wire let alone a wall, and it will likely question why we have military troops that have no legal authority stationed on the border.

Besides, the new year will bring much higher priorities to the table, which we are learning daily as more of the Mueller investigation surfaces.

You can be sure that the optics of all this will continue to grow, but they will be merely a news cycle diversion to snatch headlines from the mounting legal problems of the administration, much as the Bush-Cheney White House used elevated terrorist threat level alerts to duck when things got a bit dicey when the search for weapons of mass destruction came up empty.

And, what better way to divert than to keep tabs on the Looney Tunes as they chase that roadrunner over the horizon?

Beep, beep!

No bad days!

Ed Kociela is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.

Email: edkociela.mx@gmail.com

Twitter: @STGnews, @EdKociela