Say Anything Blog

Well Mexico’s southern border:

Today President Bush announced his request to fund a new security cooperation initiative with Mexico and the countries of Central America in order to combat the threats of drug trafficking, transnational crime, and terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. President Calderón of Mexico has taken decisive action to fight drug trafficking and criminal organizations operating on both sides of the border. The Presidents of Central America have clearly expressed the political resolve to join forces to strengthen regional security and seek additional tools and capacity to execute such will.

To achieve these goals, President Bush has requested $550 million as part of a multi-year program to provide:

Non-intrusive inspection equipment, ion scanners, canine units for Mexican customs, for the new federal police and for the military to interdict trafficked drugs, arms, cash and persons....

This news is a bit old but I haven’t seen it before.  If this is old news you have my permission to ignore me. 

So what is important to America?  Keeping drug dealers and the like out of the United States or out of Mexico?  I would say the citizens want to keep the US safe first.  After all securing Mexico, as if we could, isn’t going to help us against criminal drug gangs that are based in Mexico.  Also given the rampant corruption in Mexico it’s more likely that our money will go to line the pockets of Mexican government officials rather than make Mexico, let alone the United States more secure.

Meanwhile the US government and presumably the Bush administration is dragging it’s feet from doing something meaningful with the US/Mexican border situation.  Why don’t we have the fence that we wanted and was approved by Congress? 

The other thing that gets me is the rank hypocrisy of the Mexican government.  They are oh so outraged that we should protect our border but they’re just fine with accepting our money to do a better job on their southern border.  Of course this is nothing new.  They have their own illegal alien problem which they deal with harshly but feign outrage when we talk about illegal aliens from Mexico not being welcome. 

Of course why we should care what they think about the situation is beyond me.