Monday, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett commented that when ideology is at the root of one’s position, contrary reality cannot be acknowledged. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas had declared on the Sunday news shows, “The border is closed.” On video, strings of human pack-mules hiked fentanyl over the Texas horizon, Central Americans flocked into the United States unimpeded, but Mayorkas stood his fictive ground, smirking defiantly, the B-movie version of a Bond villain.

Like the Soviet ideology supervisor to the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Mayorkas cannot admit that border policy is in meltdown. For that reason, this disaster will be much worse than it has to be.

The uncontrolled trespassing hordes were not exactly unbidden. Even illiterates can read between the lines of official entreaties that sound like, “Don’t come now — we haven’t finished the A/C in your new condos.” That they come regardless is no problem to this White House gang. In Tim McGraw terms, they like it, they love it, they want some more of it. Their only problem is the bad publicity that has somehow escaped their near-total control of the messaging.

The crossing of the Rhine on New Year’s Eve in 406 A.D. into Roman Gaul, by barbarian tribes pressured by Hunnic expansion from the east, began the end of the Western Empire. This resembles that debacle.

We cannot see clearly who is pulling the levers of White House power in this matter or any other. Clearly enough, it is not plausibly President Biden himself. He calls to mind the booming, gas-flared projection in “The Wizard of Oz.” We have no little dog Toto to open the drapes and expose the operator vainly shouting, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

No inside whistleblowers will come forward until four years hence, when the advances on their book deals are collected and the next presidential cycle is over. Before we can crawl to the mid-desert oasis of the next congressional elections, it is likely that our great republic will have sunk into Brezhnevian stagnation. Meanwhile, China marches on.

King Alexander

Lake Charles