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Opinion

Leaders need plans, not gripes; Kinky offers sound ideas for border security

Zach Lee
Opinion Columnist

 Often it’s difficult to read through the utopian tripe that subtly spreads through almost every college campus, and the rebellious individualism that accompanies the newfound freedoms of college-age men and women makes attacking the status quo -- no matter how ineffective the other possibilities -- as cool as smoking or riding a motorcycle.      And sometimes it can be just as dangerous.

     Voting Democrat just to protest the actions of President Bush is short-sighted and reactionary, and voting Democrat because of recent scandals in the Republican Party is not much better. The Democratic Party has kept up with the GOP scandal for scandal, and it would be silly to vote against the Republicans because they were in power when scandal broke out.

 And if partisanship and Capitol Hill gossip are taken out of the equation, which they should be if voters would elect the candidates who will be best for the country as a whole and their districts in particular, the only thing that should be considered is the political platform.
 By and large, Democrats don’t have one.

 Sure, a couple ideas are being passed around on the left side of the aisle, but most Democrats are happy to pick at Republican plans without offering their own alternatives. Now that Bush has decided against "staying the course" in Iraq, the Republican plan is evolving and shoring up the holes that left it vulnerable to political attack for the past two years.

 It was the Republican plan that resulted in the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein, which in turn resulted in the guilty verdict and death sentence for the man who committed genocide nearly 20 years ago shortly before he tried to wipe another country off the map.
 Every plan has problems, but the important thing is a willingness to fix them, something Bush and the Republicans demonstrated when they left the "stay the course" paradigm that was central to policy in Iraq. And even though the 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most obtuse ideas to ever be put forward, the idea behind it is vital to effective national security, something we must value in this post-9/11 world: keeping track of those who enter U.S. territory and stopping the flow of illegal immigrants.

 Because Texas is vital to any change in the United States’ current look-the-other-way policy toward Latin America, we are in a unique position to affect the nation’s immigration policy and strategy toward the region, even when it comes to voting for state offices. The governor of Texas, for example, will play a huge role in finding a solution for this problem, and on this front, Gov. Rick Perry has not done nearly enough in his time in office, content to rely on the federal government to control the border while other border-state governors have sent National Guard troops en masse to take care of something local police simply are not equipped to do.

 For all his comedic faux pas in the past, Kinky Friedman is straightforward and has the right strategy for Texas when it comes to the border. He pledges to bring 8,500 more National Guard troops to the border, enforce laws against hiring illegal immigrants, fine companies who ignore those laws up to $50,000 and issue taxpayer ID cards to foreign nationals who pass criminal background checks and want to remain in the United States to seek employment. That way, we can monitor who comes in and who goes out, and the Texas government — and Texans in turn — get to enjoy the benefits of taxes collected by people who will be working here.

 Friedman also promises to legalize gambling in Texas to pay for embarrassingly under-funded public schools in Texas, an idea that will undoubtedly lose him the morally straight-laced vote, but it’s also an idea that is unapologetically pragmatic. And let’s be honest, Texas is historically a part of the Wild West — real Texans have never been morally straight-laced. 

 Remember when you go to vote today that knowing a candidate is "against" something or someone doesn’t tell you anything. What matters is the list of things they support, and if they’d rather wait until they’re elected to let you know what that list is, you should think twice before you pull the lever.

Lee, an English/Spanish senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu