This is win also too, from the land of also too:
“East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow” from one side of the border to the other. “Now, obviously, other things there were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, obviously to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could.”
Tom Hilton
I’ve been saying for years that what the nativist wingnuts want is for America to be more like East Germany. It’s almost refreshing to see one of them admit it.
Violet
So much for “tear down this wall.” The party of Reagan is dead.
dmsilev
Nice to see that Republicans re-enacting the worst that 20th Century Germany has to offer have moved from the Wafen SS to the Stasi.
Also, should he really be pointing at a Socialist Paradise as having the proper method for solving any problem? Isn’t that against the teabagger code?
dms
Joseph Nobles
“Mr. Gorbechav, tear down this wall! We need the bricks.”
Splitting Image
Until the country ran out of money and everyone who wanted to simply walked through the border gates.
There was a point I was going to make but I’ve lost my train of thought.
kuvasz
Lotsa’ West Germans trying to scale the Berlin Wall? Miller is a fucking idiot.
Ajay
Its ok because Reagan would have approved. What Reagan meant was that the wall was too short. You need to tear it down and build a taller barricade. Commies will come in otherwise.
Spaghetti Lee
Jesus Christ. If he needed to make this historically ignorant comparison, he could have at least used West Germany. He and Rand Paul must share campaign managers.
FlipYrWhig
His love for the Berlin Wall goes along well with his personal complement of
private securitysecret policeStasi.FlipYrWhig
Dammit, dmsilev, you stole my Stasi joke.
Ash Can
If the Tea Party gains enough actual political power, I’m betting the rest of the world would be only too happy to see us adopt the border policies of East Germany — to keep all of us walled up inside the US and not let any of us out to fuck up anyplace else.
Violet
@Ajay:
The wingnuts have a hard time reconciling their immigration views with what Reagan did on the matter. I remember hearing Hannity’s radio show one day when I called phoned in complaining about immigration and the caller had it all backwards as to what Reagan did. Hannity had to correct him and said it was “one of the few things he disagreed with Reagan about.” Cracked me right up. Even St. Ronnie is too liberal for them.
toujoursdan
The Berlin Wall completely bankrupted the DDR. Should I be surprised that a Republican would find that intriguing?
Cris
First we take Manhattan.
Fwiffo
Missing the “I can’t believe we’re losing to this clowns” tag.
dmsilev
@FlipYrWhig:Sadly, I’m not entirely sure it’s a joke.
I wonder what will be next. Some GOP candidate distributing copies of The Little Red State Book?
dms
Roger Moore
Honestly, this idiot needs a lesson in geography as much as one in history. The border between the two halves of Germany mostly went though well settled areas where building and manning fortifications was easy. The US/Mexico border is in much less forgiving terrain, much of it in the middle of nowhere. Even if we wanted to build something as tough as the East German border, building it in the Arizona desert or Big Bend would be tough, and keeping it staffed to East German levels would be insanely expensive.
Hunter Gathers
Sharon Angle wants a wall to keep all the Asian looking mexicans out of the country. Which is odd coming from the first Asian legislator in Nevada.
Loneoak
Like shooting everything that moved?
Wasn’t East Germany trying to keep people from leaving? Is he advocating that Mexico needs to start killing anyone who tries to cross the border northwards? And that is was right for Communists to kill people for trying to find a little capitalist happiness?
Everything about this is Fail. I love it.
Spaghetti Lee
@Roger Moore:
Not to mention that it’s, what ten times shorter than our border? If he wanted a good comparison in terms of distance, try fencing off Illinois from Wisconsin. (which I would support, by the way.)
gregw
@Joseph Nobles:
For the win.
kdaug
@Hunter Gathers: What about the asian-looking Mexicans?
Can we get some o’ that hate over here?
Mumphrey
Well, between this asswipe and Newt Gingrich, we’re learning which totalitarian countries we need to model ourselves on, and even more helpfully, they’re telling us which countries to model for which issue: East Germany when it comes to immigration policy, and Saudi Arabia when it comes to freedom of religion. Good to know.
They’re already looking to nazi Germany for tips on how to dress snappily and deal with minorities. Maybe next we’ll learn that the U.S.S.R. in the 20’s and 30’s had the best agricultural policy. After all, maybe if we just starved all the pesky poor and minorities to death, then the good, clean, upright rich white people cound at last have this country to themselves.
John Bird
He has a point. We’ve already demonstrated the ability of our great nation to detain without charges and assassinate its own citizens. Why, my brothers and sisters, why should we shy away when victory is at hand?
Stalin: Now More Than Ever.
kdaug
@kdaug: Or was that Mexican-looking Asians? I’m getting confused.
FlipYrWhig
Like Loneoak said, presumably what this means is “We should be opening fire on those bastards.”
El Cid
Now if we can just shrink the US-Mexico border down to about 90 miles long and be as well-built up as a capital city, we’re well on the way.
Or we can try and build a 2,000 mile long wall with the same 12 ft height as the Berlin Wall.
If we have an armed guard every 100 yards, that would only require about 35,000 on-duty guards for each 8 hour shift, so at least 105,000 or so guards alone, plus all the support staff which would presumably about the same number.
kdaug
@Mumphrey: Ah, got it – Arabian-looking Germans. Sorry for being so dense.
Cris
What good is the Berlin Wall against a Porsche?
John Bird
They are really giving us our own bumper stickers now.
Joe <3s East Germany
Newt <3s Saudi Arabia
Iott <3s Hitler
All we need is O'Donnell's measured, limited endorsement of Osama bin Laden, and we'll be good to go.
FlipYrWhig
@kdaug: OMG! Mesut Ozil! Run!
JPL
Miller the new Reagan.
Tear DownPUT UP THE WALLLet the unemployed protect the border.
Zifnab
@dmsilev:
It’s called “The Bible”.
BGinCHI
Shorter Joe: Why can’t we be more like the totalitarian, communist part of Germany?
Did anyone check his fucking Yale diploma?
Warren Terra
So do they specifically call for land mines, machine guns, and snipers?
I guess there is the ecological benefit to consider: apparently by creating a buffer zone trespassers into which would be shot on sight, the Warsaw Pact managed to preserve/restore a whole contiguous corridor of undisturbed wildlife …
My preferred version of the “kill them all” seal-the-borders mantra is to bring back that Republican icon of yesteryear (with bonus strikebreaking violence!), Douglas MacArthur. So far as I know, he was the last person to propose feasible governmental action to close a border troubled by a flood of illegal immigrants (in this case, the Chinese Army streaming into North Korea), when he propose nuking everything along the Yalu river. Would have worked, too, I guess, albeit at the cost of committing unprecedented atrocities against human life and the planet, not to mention the slight risk of escalation. And it would have showed those Commies who was the boss. Today’s Republicans are pikers.
ETA Oh, and of course their scheme required totalitarian control over Mexico, most especially a rigorous system of internal passports. But then the Republicans have always favored military dictatorships in Latin America – not to mention novel ways of drastically reducing the populations of potential migrants in Guatemala and El Salvador. The can’t sneak across our borders if the death squads already murdered them at home!
jl
@John Bird: No GOPer will heart Somalia, that libertarian paradise? They have lots of nice private police forces there, who know how to handle troublemakers. That should attract some notice.
Mike in NC
Yup. I didn’t have the stomach to read their moronic “Pledge” but no doubt it has a provision for a cop on every street corner to check your papers.
The teabaggers are very excited about erecting the equivalent of the Great Wall of China on our northern and southern borders. They’ll be paid for by tax cuts!
Zifnab
@El Cid:
I think you just hit on a jobs bill Republicans might support. Of course, we can’t just throw up any old wall with any old guards. We’ll probably want to contract this out to the highest bidder. And all those guards are going to cost a bundle. Where are we going to get a bunch of cheap laborers willing to work seasonally all through the American southwest?
JPL
@Zifnab: Privatize it and they’ll hire illegals in order to increase their profit.
Dee Loralei
@Mumphrey: They (Republicans) already have the Lysenkoisms down pat, so why the rest?
Omnes Omnibus
Pistols, yippee!
El Cid
@Zifnab: What’s even funnier is that the wall would never actually get successfully built, it would run 10 or 20 times the original estimated cost at least, much of it will be found to have been designed incorrectly or used incorrect materials due to lack of regulatory supervision, and of course, in the end, large cash payoffs to guards would mean there would constantly be open inlets.
Not to mention that the wall would be completely open anywhere NAFTA trade was coming through. Can’t slow down export labor, after all.
kommrade reproductive vigor
So we’ve got a guy who likes to dress up in SS drag and run around with fake guns. Now we’ve got Miller who wants to make America into a Soshulust Germany paradise.
And no, I don’t want to imagine the shrieking that would ensue if a Democrat said such a thing.
This comment + The post title = Too much awesome.
freelancer
@Zifnab:
This is the best thing I’ve read today, cause that’s how it would actually function:
“Eh, Papers pleez”
“I don’t have my papers on me, I left them at home. I live in San Diego, California. My address is…”
“Que?”
“I said I don’t have my papers on…”
“Que?”
“Jesus Christ, I- Yo no tengo mis paper…documentos. No tengo, Y tu?”
“Uhhh…Yo no se. Uhhhhh. Yo tengo mis documentos, pero
no se puede mirarlos.”
“Of course, no se. Listen, I’m going into this country, and you’re not gonna do dick about it, because I can call my congressman. He’s a Republican. Entiendes.”
“Si. Si…entiendes. No problem, ‘migo, no problem. Vamos.”
stagemom
@Spaghetti Lee: i’m getting sick from laughter! thanks for a superb comment!
PurpleGirl
OMFG. The stupid, it burns. I remember when the Berlin was built and why. (And the stories of what people did to get across anyway.) He is one stupid f**ker.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
And when the teatard bill proposed in the House to do just exactly this is voted down, the inevitable WaPo headline will be: “Liberals vote against middle class jobs program”.
FlipYrWhig
@Zifnab:
Undocumented immigrants from Mexico can go into the US military to crack down on Arabs, and Arab refugees can come to the US to be the border guards who keep out the Mexicans. It’s the cir-cle of liiiife!
Zifnab
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Oh please. The media will be too obsessed with the newest Justin Beiber nipple slip for this to even ping the radar.
John Bird
Hey, the Border Guard IS hiring en masse, by the way; it’s where two of my friends in the Army are going.
Republicans love a big, intrusive, fully-covered government workforce. As long as there is the possibility, however remote, that it will kill foreigners.
This is actually the solution to our infrastructure problems. Just give the public workers guns and deputize them as terrorist hunters or immigration enforcers. Republicans will be literally unable to vote the bill down. Their voting hands will refuse to obey their brains.
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
You’re forgetting that would require the guards to work 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. In practice, you’ll require more like 4.5 shifts worth of workers, which would bump it to about 150,000 total guards needed. Not to mention all the specialists required to maintain the wall, barbed wire, search lights, mine fields, etc. Of course if we didn’t have those evil goldbricking public employees unions, we could force the guards to work 12 hours a day without days off.
Stefan
“East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow” from one side of the border to the other. “Now, obviously, other things there were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, obviously to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could.”
I thought East Germany was a socialist state that didn’t have any private enterprise. By definition, they shouldn’t have been “very, very able” to do anything well, should they….?
Or is Joe Miller admitting that government can solve a proble…aiyee! Aiyeeee!!! AIYEEEEE!!!!!!!
Mnemosyne
@JPL:
You think you’re joking, but they’ve already caught the contractors working on the existing fence using illegal workers to build it. More than once, IIRC.
New Yorker
Everyone else has made the Reagan comments already, but I’ve maintained for a while that St. Ronaldus would have been burned as a heretic in today’s GOP. Reagan’s most famous speech contrasted with Miller’s rhetoric here makes the point far more simply and poignantly that I ever could.
Zifnab
@New Yorker: Ronny Raygun was a product of the 1970s. Saying that he would be pillared by modern conservatives would be like saying Disco would never fly in a modern nightclub. No shit.
If Ronald Reagen were alive today, he’d be either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. He’d be smiling with some of his CEO friends, while joking that the rich guy never had it so rough. He’d be praising Sarah Palin for her family values and Rick Perry for his work ethic. He’d be Arab baiting in a soft voice, then pounding his fist and declaring how we should be ever vigilant in a time of war. And he’d be taking money hand over fist from every corporation that looked at him sideways.
So, basically, he’d be every other Republican running for office right now. We’ve got dozens of Ronald Reagens running for office as we speak. Quipping that “Ronald Reagen would never have made it in 2010” simply neglects the fact that Ronald Reagen’s fingerprints are all the fuck over 2010. Back in 1980 we just had higher standards for our politicians, so he could get away with a lot less.
El Cid
John McCain continuing to be a noble, established figure in American politics.
Comrade Mary
Please don’t be waiting for me.
Kyle
Ironic coming from one of the biggest known assholes in the Senate; even some of his Repig senator colleagues refused to endorse him.
No, this would be a Blackwater-managed border wall, after it’s built by illegal Mexicans. Think of all the lovely kickbacks for Repig politicians.
Bella Q
Who wants to bet it’s probably best Miller didn’t buy a house near DC? He’s too out there even for Alaska, and that’s quite a trick.
And Another Thing...
@El Cid: Pedantic quibble: when you’re staffing a position 24/7 you actually need 5 people, as you have sick leave, vacations , training, weekends, etc.
But, your basic point is a great one.
PaulW
Anyone else notice how the Far Right tend to talk in terms and with ideologues that mimic the whole of communist thought? For example their intent to shrink the government down to a size where it would be non-existent: that in their methods the government will fade away and be replaced by their law-free utopia.
Even more noticeable: the Far Right’s willingness to indulge in party purges to clear out the sane, the moderate, the competent. All we need are publicly-televised “trials” of the poor excommunicated standing before a mob of Teabaggers pleading for forgiveness from the Party and it’ll be 1936 all over again.
And who was it in the Club for Greed organization that had a poster of STALIN (or was it LENIN) on his wall?
New Yorker
@PaulW:
Of course I’ve noticed it. Don’t forget that any talk of global warming or evolution is
capitalist imperialistlib’rul lies. Also, how about when 70,000 show up for a rally and the number is inflated to half a million by FOX News?PurpleGirl
@John Bird: Okay, now I see Peter Sellers’ right arm going up in a Nazi salute and his left hand trying to pull it down and beating it into submission.
asiangrrlMN
@Hunter Gathers: As I said over at Benen’s place, WE DON’T WANT HER! You white people have to keep her. No backs!
Cain
@Cris:
Didn’t the muppets already do that?
cain
kommrade reproductive vigor
@PaulW:
Karl Marx 1843: Religion is the opium of the people.
Republicans 1980: Hells yeah. Let’s give the proles their fix.
Sly
American conservatism is thematically very similar to Bolshevism, except simpler. You don’t have to know a lot of foreign-sounding words like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “dialectical.” If you have a fourth grade reading level, you can pretty much hit the ground running.
And, personally, I enjoy myself immensely when conservatives embrace their inner Stalin. Hannity once had a weekly segment on his show, wherein he would castigate prominent Hollywood liberals, called, I kid you not, the “Enemy of the State.”
Mumphrey
@PaulW:
I believe it was Grover Norquist. And this raises something I’ve wondered about now and again over the last few years: It’s weird how so many of what pass for “thinkers” in the Republican Party today–Norquist and Gingrich in particular–kind of behave like bolsheviks: they’re weirdos who have never really done anything in their lives but be, in their own way, revolutionaries. Just like Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and all those other revolutionaries in the late Russian empire. And like those early bolsheviks, they’ve never really worked at anything beyond bombthrowing in their lives (Gingrich’s stints as “history teacher” notwithstanding), and they’d be happy arguing arcane points of orthodoxy and excommunicating each other for perceived heresies till the the end of time. They are, in a word–and I know that it doesn’t fit perfectly, since they just aren’t that smart–intellectuals.
But their base, rather than tending toward the overwrought, arcane pointy-headedness of their leaders and their bolshevik heirs, are more fascist. By this I mean that they are feelers rather than thinkers; they’re visceral and emotional rather than sterile and cerebral. And fascism is, at its heart, an emotional and visceral kind of politics. Nazis were never interested in arcane theories of how the world worked; they appealed to people’s nationalism and race pride, just as the teabaggers appeal to raw feelings. Norquist likes to argue and write and theorize. Teabaggers like to scream incoherently and scrawl badly spelled slogans on big signs.
I guess what I’m wondering is how long these two disparate groups can work together harmoniously. And I also wonder if there have been other unlikely pairings like this before. I don’t know enough about communist or fascist history to answer this but maybe somebody else can…
El Cid
@And Another Thing…: I’m sure. Let’s go ahead and make it 250K employees.
El Cid
@Sly: American conservatism is hardline Marxism-Leninism, with the actors and goals reversed.
In American conservatism, inevitable historical forces lead the oppressed bourgeois class to rise up against the proletarians who exploit them, which of necessity involves the complete overthrow of the ‘superstructure’ of proletarian culture holding down the bourgeois from carrying out class revolution.
Linda Featheringill
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Opiate of the people.
One medical definition of opiate includes all the products from the poppy plant, at whatever stage of processing.
Another definition of opiate includes any efficacious painkiller.
But yes, we proles could probably use some.
Rafael
They really miss the Soviet Union and the Cold War, don’t they?
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid:
Cute. I like it.
Although, the last time the bourgeois class staged a revolution [1789?], they knew who to take down. They didn’t waste their time picking on the peasants.
El Cid
@Linda Featheringill: Karl Marx famously dismissed the peasantry as ‘a sack of potatoes’. Mao, however, built a revolution upon them.
OTOH, China still has approximately 700 million peasants, so, I guess that there’s a bit of a delay in raising them to the status of proletariat.
Linda Featheringill
China is in danger of developing a strata of proletariat these days: no longer on the land and fired from their industrial jobs.
TPTB in China are probably quite aware of this. I wonder if that is one reason they are going whole hog with infrastructure building.
r€nato
@Roger Moore: and of course if you ask the teabaggers who’s willing to pay the taxes required for this level of security… crickets chirping.
wag
@Roger Moore:
And you have both neglected the entire Canadian border, all 4000 miles worth.
How do you float a wall on the Great Lakes?
burnspbesq
@Cris:
I sentence you to 20 years of boredom.
jonas
@Roger Moore: I’ve said it over and over, for Republicans (and turn that up to 11 for Teabaggers) no amount of deficit spending is too much and no expansion of government too small as long as the point of the policy is to somehow put the boot in on poor and/or brown people.
El Cid
@Linda Featheringill: The CCP justified its change to a market economy by arguing that the original Marxist argument was that a society had to go through a capitalist phase and the development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in order to achieve communism and then presumably soshullism.
However, they argued, with the CCP in charge, the CCP can act as the bourgeoisie itself, thereby offering a coherent direction and smooth out the normal exploitation.
The irony is that they actually seem to be following that plan, but there is in fact now a class antagonism growing between the bourgeoisie (the Chinese government and its industrialist allies) and the desired industrial proletariat — and protests and work stoppages and slowdowns by workers are directed at the government, just as you would expect would be done against the capitalist class.
The Chinese government has thus created the very class conflict against itself which it claimed it alone could properly direct.
burnspbesq
@wag:
You don’t. You invade, and seize and permanently annex a ten-mile buffer zone on the north side of the lakes. Which will create a ginormous refugee problem as millions of residents of Greater Toronto flee their new Murkin overlords.
El Cid
@jonas: Not to mention that if the deficit were zero, if there were a surplus, there would be no less screaming about the size of government and the dangerous entitlements and Obama ruining the economy with his spendthrift Kenyonesian Stalinism driving business into the ground with all the taxes than there is now.
They don’t give a shit about the debt or deficit. Screaming about it is just one tool, but a highly effective one as they can usually get most politicians and commentators to basically agree that it’s the biggest issue out there because SHUT UP.
El Cid
@burnspbesq: What about just filling it with sharks, or piranha, or Sharktopi?
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
How about sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads?
jonas
@jonas: er, no expansion of government “too large,” that is to say. Gotta stop commenting after a couple of glasses of pinot.
El Cid
@Roger Moore: I thought we were going to put 1,000 lasers in the sky?
The Sanity Inspector
That was indeed a foolish comment he made. Cheap historical parallelism is fraught with pitfalls for the ignorant. It’s not as weapons-grade vile as that greenie video the other week, though.
mclaren
Since America already is East Germany, what’s the difference?
If you want to leave America, you can’t…without the government’s permission. A friend of mine travelled by train to Canada to attend an environmental conference. He was stopped at the border and refused egress from America by the DHS because he had been arrested for protests he did back in the 1960s against the Vietnam war and he was now identified as a “dangerous subversive.”
Get used to it, bitches. You live in East Germany now. Ihre papieren, bitte, Mein Herr!
Kyle
@Rafael:
I thought at the time, and have been Proved Fucking Right (and not in the Judith Miller head-up-her-ass way) that the end of the Cold War would leave the Repigs at wit’s end. Their fear-based, xenophobic ideology needs a scary ‘other’ boogeyman to stir up fear and hate and distract the proles from thinking.
They focused their hate on the Clintons and Gore for a decade until 9/11 gave them a new set of scary foreigners for the exploitable proles to go batshit over and a new excuse to shovel trillions into the maw of the military-industrial complex and its allied police-security state.
mclaren
@Kyle:
Exactamundo.
In all the foreign policy centers and all the study groups and all the pentagon war rooms, everyone simply replaced the word “Soviet” with “Islamic” and then continued on as before.
Why does America need to spend 1.3 trillion dollars per year on our military?
To protect the free world from the terrifying menace of the global
SovietIslamic conspiracy.Why does America need 11 carrier battle groups?
To ward off the deadly menace of the ruthless
SovietIslamic threat to the free world.Why does America need an anti-missile defense?
Because
SovietsIslamists are ingenious and unpredictable and capable of wiping us out in an instant if we’re not careful.Why does America need to turn itself into an armed garrison camp with universal surveillance and no civil rights?
Because the
SovietIslamic menace is so all-encompassing and existential that any sacrifice is worth it if it keeps us all from being annihilated in a nuclear fireball.El Cid
@mclaren: This was tried out with Libya and the like in the mid-1980s. The enemy was Islamic terrorism then, too.
Greg
You know what would be cool? If Mexico elected an actual Communist to be President and then all the illegals demanded asylum from the Communists. What would the anti-immigration Right do then, I wonder?
platonicspoof
Now I have to hope Prime Minister Redkitten will visit our self-imposed fenced-in country in twenty years, after the insanity has burned itself out, and rally the survivors with “I am an American!” to tear The Palin Wall down.
Thoughtcrime
November 2nd is the day for heroes.
artem1s
@wag:
if the Orange county repugs in Colorado have their way they’ll drain them all in a few years anyway, so problem solved.
Elf M. Sternberg
Who can forget Vox Day’s infamous (Godwin forgive me) quote on the same topic, scrubbed from World Net Daily, but preserved for all time:
Funny that Orac saved it on ScienceBlogs. I would have expected Ed Brayton to catch that one. He’s the World Net reader.