19 October 2011 Blue flashes along the southern border.

Oliphant drew a pointed and brutally honest description of the GOP/teavangelists’ approach to border security.

          I can recall the first electrical bug zapper I saw.  It was hanging by the main door of a hospital in Arkansas.  I later discovered that the ER doors and the loading dock were also equipped with similar industrial strength systems.  When one considers that the location had been swampland until the 1930s and that the terrain was transected by drainage ditches, filled with stagnant water, at half-mile intervals; there probably should have been bug destroyers at the doors of every business in the county. 

          This was a major indicator that I was living in the southern U.S.   It was impossible to sit outdoors after dark without summoning hoards of mosquitoes.  Trying to eat outdoors was an invitation to millions of flies.   The blue flashes of light accompanied by a hissing pop were indicators of technology trying to catch up with biology.  Rather than eliminate the sources of mosquito and fly infestations, the southern solution was to feed them until they could be electrocuted. 

          The GOP/teavangelists have followed in the footsteps of Nixon’s and Reagan’s southern strategy – play the white evangelicals off against everyone else.  The preservation of racism, bigotry, and hatred provides a solid and continual base for the far right politicians.  They have managed to spread these traits into the non-southern states and attract those voters who are most easily persuaded that minorities and non-Christians are their enemies, trying to steal their jobs and to destroy what they believe to be a “Christian nation.”

          Enter Herman Cain into the mix.  Cain’s comment about electrifying the fence that Bachmann would build shows how desperate he is to obtain wealth and power.  The comment is racially and ethnically offensive.  To compare illegal aliens to insects is demonstrative of how little value the GOP/teavangelists place on life after birth.  Of course, until birth takes place, all women must be required to behave as incubation breeding stock.   Cain seems to fit into the teavangelist role all too well.  We can only hope that he falls out in the primaries as the token role he fills now becomes less necessary in the attempt at convincing minorities to vote against their own best interests.

          Someone should introduce Mr. Cain to an electrified fence after plying him with many cups of coffee.