The Internet tends to be exactly like the people who use it: entertaining, informative, and stupider than anyone might have imagined. The latest example of ignorance comes from Breitbart, Texas, whose managing editor Brandon Darby traveled along the Rio Grande to inform us Mexico is on the other side of the river.
Darby starts his idiotic odyssey near Fort Hancock, just east of El Paso on the river. In a series of videos he entitles, “How and Why ISIS Will Use Texas to Enter the U.S. If They Choose to Cross the Border,” Darby is disturbed to learn that the border fence does not run the full length of the frontier, and that it has some rust!!! He has discovered one of the locations where it ends, just east of Fort Hancock, and he wants us to know that ISIS could cross there. In fact, he breathlessly informs us that Osama bin Laden could have crossed there and gotten to Interstate 10, which is two miles away across the desert.
Osama didn’t, though, he got a couple of taps to the head by U.S. Navy seals before he could dream of escaping to remote stretches of the Rio Grande in Mexico and Texas. Of course, if Osama had made it to I-10, he would have had a hard time getting a ride. People are blasting through at eighty miles per hour, and, even if he got a lift from a friendly trucker, the checkpoint outside of Sierra Blanca would have spelled trouble for Osama. He looked too much like Willie Nelson and those agents at the I-10 checkpoint are always popping guys with beards and bands.
Meanwhile, back at the river, Brandon Darby is concerned he has been there in the middle of nowhere and the Border Patrol has not arrived to ask him questions. Maybe he cannot get over his amazement there is a highway not too distant. This is only exceeded by his astonishment that Mexico is just the other side of the river. And because he put it in his video, now stupid ISIS!!! knows the location, too. (Of course, they might be smart enough to know, unlike Brandon, that there are hundreds of miles of gaps in the border fence because we do lots of international commerce with Mexico, the U.S.’ largest trading partner.)
When he got tired of waiting on the Border Patrol, Brandon took off for Presidio, unaware that maybe the reason he got no attention was that people who have worked along the river know where the crossing occurs and they do not have to patrol every section because there are pressure sensitive devices underground and hidden motion detectors. The BP also drags the dirt tracks along the river and then returns to check for footprints, which makes it considerably easier to pursue illegal crossers. Brandon might have thought about such things if he weren’t just so crazy shocked that Mexico is right there on the other side of the river.
And, oh yeah, ISIS!!!!
Too bad he didn’t go into town and learn a little bit about Fort Hancock. A town of Mexican-American immigrants, their six-man football team is legendary and has won the state championship five times. ISIS better hope they don’t encounter the mighty Mustangs.
Instead, Brandon takes his indignation to the next riverbank outside of Presidio, a resilient and prosperous community situated on the Rio Grande and across from the Mexican community of Ojinaga. Although Brandon’s cameraman has an Hispanic surname, Breitbart Texas’ editor still manages to mispronounce the name of the Mexican town and calls it “Oh-heen-a-gah.” His camera makes a slow, ominous zoom of low buildings on the horizon and he let’s us know that Oh heen a gah is controlled by the Sinaloa cartel, and that there are no excuses for there not being a physical barrier between Oh heen a gah and Presidio because ISIS!!!!
Maybe the citizens of those two communities should build barriers instead of getting ready for their Binational Cultural Arts Festival March 24-28 with events in both Oh heen a gah and Presidio. Mayor John Ferguson of Presidio and Miguel Carreon of Ojinaga and their city staffs have been working very hard together to pull off the upcoming festival. (For details visit: www.presidiotx.us/arts) Maybe they don’t realize that while they are looking at pretty pictures and listening to music and watching dancers that just down the river ISIS!!! could be crossing.
Instead of putting up more walls to make the uninformed alarmists like Brandon Darby happy, the people of Ojinaga and Presidio are building bridges. The two communities are sister cities and promote mutual commerce and tourism and consistently endeavor to eliminate barriers that might impede economic development.
“The river joins us,” said Brad Newton, Presidio Municipal Development District Executive Director. “With the excellent operations of CBP in Presidio, the bridge is for legal trade for the benefit of all who come. We don’t need fences between us, we need a bigger bridge.”
The city and county of Presidio recently formed the Presidio International Port Authority (PIPA) to begin the authorization and funding efforts required to double the Presidio-Ojinaga bridge capacity. ISIS!!! should probably wait and cross then when the traffic moves more efficiently across the river, which, as Brandon Darby wants you to know, has Mexico on the other side!!!
Brandon continues with his camera to Laredo where he discovers a city that is right across the border from Nuevo Laredo!! OMG, they have Mexicans over there, just the other side of the river. His attempt to gird political forces to build a giant wall between the two countries is built around a Blair Witch Project type of night time video where he whispers about a storm drainage pipe he calls, insidiously, a tunnel. There appears to be brush and a shopping cart placed in front of this “tunnel,” which Breitbart Brandon believes was an attempt by the Border Patrol to keep ISIS!!! and drug smugglers from entering.
In the video, he explains that the tunnel leads to a series of connections that will get smugglers “deep inside of Laredo.” Unfortunately, he does not seem to understand the way storm drainages work, particularly in arid communities like Laredo. In the unlikely event it ever rains, most water drains above ground along the curb until it is dumped into drain pipes much too small for human passage, The flow, eventually, reaches pipes big enough to manage the accumulating water flow before it reaches the river, which has Mexico on the other side!!!!
There isn’t any way people are moving “deep inside of Laredo” through storm pipes. They end up confronting smaller and smaller dimensions until they would freak out and wonder who in the hell told them to crawl in the pipe and why did they watch that dumb video by the Breitbart Texas guy? Brandon seemingly has no idea that immigrants find a place to hide when they cross the river, and back up into a pipe with branches obscuring their presence works quite well until they can make their move north.
He’s also concerned that the Border Patrol is not allowed to crawl up into the pipes in pursuit of ISIS!! or smugglers and fails to understand there is no reason, and even regulations that prevent agents from unnecessarily placing their lives at risk by crawling into dark pipes. The Breitbart boob informs his viewers that only the Laredo Fire Department can go into the “tunnels” but they won’t bother, and why should they? No one in there is calling for assistance and the fire department has other challenges like, well, fires.
Brandon Darby is also quite concerned that no one has ever thought to put grates across the front of these outfall pipes, which he thinks are tunnels for ISIS!!! Of course, if you put a grate across a flood control outlet you discover that flowing waters from urban landscapes carry debris and the grate traps it and that plugs up the pipe and sort of negates the whole reason you put the pipe there in the first place to take the water to the river. But ISIS!!!
Brandon ends his video review of the river that has Mexico on the other side OMG!! by whispering that he’s right there on a river bank and a house across the river is supposedly where the cartels keep a lookout. Brandon, in broad daylight, continues whispering because god knows he doesn’t want ISIS!!! to hear him, and then he crouches in the brush telling us he’s going to see what he can see, which is where the video ends, so, apparently he saw nothing.
Which is exactly what anyone see if they watched this idiotic series of videos: nothing, unless you didn’t know Mexico was on the south side of the Rio Grande. We did learn, however, the biggest load of dope on the border is Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby.
