September 26, 2014 3:22 PM

Stanford: Bomb Mexico

From the left--Foreign policy pronouncements for two GOP candidates are just jokes....except they are not

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a politician is crazy or just joking. The problem is usually that no one is laughing. Such was the case recently when two candidates offered a radical solution to the humanitarian crisis on the Texas border: Bomb Mexico. Serious or not, it shows how far the anti-immigrant tide has carried some politicians from realistically addressing border security and immigration reform.

The first example of this idea to turn South Texas into a war zone happened in June at a Republican candidate forum in North Carolina. Typically, these affairs encourage candidates to try to get to the right of each other in front of audiences of Republican activists, but even in this environment what Mark Walker said was so out there that Dick Cheney would have gasped in admiration.

In response to a question about drug cartels sneaking over our southern border, Walker, a Baptist preacher, preached war: “If we gotta go laser or blitz somebody with a couple of fighter jets for a little while to make our point, I don’t have a problem with that, either.”

The rest of the Jason Stanford's column can be found in today's R&D Department.

By Jason Stanford