Bizarre Nutter Idea of the Day: Build the Israeli Wall on the Mexican Border

This post has been cross posted at the much better site - Comments From Left Field - where I participate in a group blog. If you like anything on this site, I would encourage you to check out CFLF for more content with greater analysis. Thanks for stopping by.

Rightwing immigration nutter extraordinaire - Ace of Spades - has come up with the nuttiest idea of the day.

He wants to build a wall that would stretch the entire 2,000 mile border between Mexico and the U.S. that would be in the nature of the biggest portions of the wall Israel is building on its border with Palestine.

Here are the details of what the wall would include:

a layer of razor wire, a trench to stop cars, the actual wall (including electronic sensors, radar, etc. so that the army could tell when it was breached), a dirt road that would evidence footprints of would-be crossers, an asphalt road for quick deployment to areas where crossing had been detected, and another layer of barbed wire

Because the Israel Defense Ministry claims it only costs $2 million per kilometer, the nutters estimate that our wall will only cost $6,280,0000,0000. Pocket change to nutters who believing in wasting $100 billion a year on a vanity war.

To bolster his argument, Ace (an unsightly man with an odd attraction to mocking others' looks) posts a graph showing an increase in successful interception of attacks that coincides with "IDF Presence in PA, Fence Construction Begins."

So I decided to engage the nutters and posted this comment:

There are so many twists of logic here it's hard to know where to begin --- Do you really believe American contractors can do this work for that price - presumably without immigrant labor?

Do we really want such a structure with the very few checkpoints Israel allows - it has put a huge constraint on legitimate Palestinian business with Israel? Do we really want a similar constraint on legitimate Mexican business?

But I like the graph. It shows you don't really have to spend all that money as the decrease in attacks coincides with "beginning construction." Thus, I propose an unfunded mandate on all the border States to "begin construction" on a wall.

Oh, what a silly little man.

Let's see how this goes.

UPDATE: I didn't expect the link at Crooks & Liars to this post (thanks, C Dog!). In any event, anyone interested in more detail about how nutty the wall idea is should read this report from the Houston Press. Building a wall isn't just a matter of the cost of construction. As the report makes clear there are tons of other costs - condemnation, accomodations for irrigation from the Rio Grande and the destruction of wildlife habitat, just to name a few. Of course, the nutters have completely failed to account for these costs which makes it as viable as the equally nutty idea of installing a 2,000 mile bug zapper for humans or a Star Wars missile defense shield.