Another winning moment from yesterday's townhall event in Anchorage. Blogger Steve Aufrecht reports on Joe Miller's response to a question on illegal immigration:
Miller replied: "The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. . . East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could."
Aufrect presents the comparison in its simplest terms.
It's a long way from the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of the United States to an East German style barbed wire fence with mined no-man's land, guard towers, machine guns, and German shepherds. I know what that looked like. When I was a student in Göttingen, Germany, the border was just a few miles east of where I lived and we rode out there now and then. It wasn't pretty. But it certainly cut down the flow of people escaping to the West.
Dave N.: Why of course! Let's use the East German role model: Create and enforce a totalitarian police state, and give shoot-to-kill orders on both sides of the border. Pretty soon, all the demand is from one side: inside trying to get out.
That's is how these so-called "libertarians" think: It's only "liberty" and "freedom" if by that you mean "the freedom to screw over everyone else". When it comes to actual civil liberties -- like, you know, freedom of the press and privacy rights and reproductive rights and sexual preference -- well, these are small sacrifices in order to have a perfectly functioning right-wing society, dontcha know?