Donald Trump offered an interesting lie compounded by a fuckup this weekend in support of WALL, which is good and smart and, like WHEEL (which is older than WALL ), so obvious that no one should question it, especially since it is LIE. Honestly, we don't even know why we need to write the rest of this article now, since that lede hit all the main points. But for the slowpokes among you, Trump said the benefits of WALL are obvious when you consider how border crime dropped following the construction of a border fence in San Antonio, Texas, which if you want to get all nitpicky is actually 150 miles from the border and has no wall, unless maybe you mean the 4-foot-thick lower walls of the Alamo, which didn't do such a great job of keeping Mexicans out during the Battle of Pearl Harbor on Cinco De Mayo in 1492. This is why we must all Remember the Maine.
Before his sham border "compromise" in which he generously offered to not deport Dreamers or immigrants with Temporary Protected Status who are already protected from deportation by federal court orders -- and the promise would last for all of three years -- Trump took a moment outside the White House Saturday toexplain how much better things in San Antonio have gotten because of WALL, so we need MORE WALL:
Everybody knows that walls work. You look at different places, they put up a wall, no problem You look at San Antonio, you look at so many different places, they go from one of the most unsafe cities in the country to one of the safest cities, immediately, immediately.
Most observers concluded Trump was pulling a common Doktor Zoom and mixing up place names, because last week Trump just plain lied and said almost verbatim the same line about El Paso, which scholars note is also a city in Texas with a Messican name for some reason.
In El Paso … it was one of the most dangerous cities in the country. A wall was put up. It went from being one of the most dangerous cities in the country to one of the safest cities in the country overnight. Overnight. Does that tell you something?
Yes, it tells us Donald Trump sure does like lying a lot, regardless of whether a place has border WALL or has not border WALL, which San Antonio does not because, as noted, it is not on border at ALL.
The only true part of either statement is that El Paso did have a border fence constructed between it and Mexico. That construction was completed in 2009. But no, El Paso was never among the nation's most dangerous cities, and the crime rate wasn't changed appreciably after the wall went up, as FactCheck dot org is quite happy to explain:
El Paso has never been "one of the most dangerous cities in the country." The city had the third lowest violent crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 – before construction of a 57-mile-long fence started in mid-2008.
There was no "overnight" drop in violent crimes in El Paso after "a wall was put up." In fact, the city's violent crime rate increased 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2010 — the years before and after construction of the fence, which was completed in mid-2009.
Along with the rest of the country, El Paso's violent crime rate spiked in the early 1990s and has been trending downward ever since. The city's violent crime rate dropped 62 percent from its peak in 1993 to 2007, a year before construction on the fence began.
OK, smartypants facters, but maybe the criminals all knew a fence was coming and just amscrayed in fear of the mighty WALL, did you even think about that?
It's worth noting that El Paso's sister city, Ciudad Juarez, has actually been one of the most dangerous places not only in all May-hee-co, but in the world, thanks largely to the drug trade and its attendant corruption in the Mexican government. But even as Juarez's murder rate spiked, the violent crime rate in El Paso, even before WALL,
has been well below the rate in other big cities in Texas, such as Houston, Dallas and Forth Worth, and has consistently been well below the national average for cities with 500,000 or more residents .
That would include the lowest murder rate of the top six Texas cities, too, going back all the way to 1985, as well as a murder rate well below the national average for large cities, going back decades. Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, you are more likely to fall in love with a Mexican girl than to be in a desperate gun battle, and if you will note, the violence in that demographically dubious song is perpetrated by the Anglo cowboys and their toxic masculinity, not poor Felina. As for San Antonio, we hear it has nice roses.
In conclusion, congratulations to El Paso for its low crime rates, and to San Antonio for keeping killer illegal immigrants away not via a wall, but instead with its Riverwalk, where the chi-chi shops are too pricey to attract the murderous bandito stereotype demographic anyway.
And look for an announcement from the Trump administration that it will move the Alamo to El Paso, because Donald Trump is never in error.
Yr Wonkette is the best website ever to mix up Tennessee and Kentucky, and it is 100 percent supported by reader donations. Please send us money, no matter what part of Toronto/Tirana you've from.
why or why not?/sn
He pissed on the Alamo the morn of 19 February, 1882. The Texas Marshalls banned him from returning for the rest of his life.