I was going to send xenophobic congressman Tom Tancredo a Cinco de mayo greeting card, but then I thought, “Nah, why make his day when he has so many other things to feel chipper about?”

You know, stuff like the U.S. is now home to over 30 million Hispanics, and that a state like Texas will be majority Latino by 2040, if not sooner, or maybe how kids named Mallory Hernandez are getting into UT-Austin with such frequency that the university recently opened an office in Harlingen to attract even more youngsters from the border.

There’s lots of good news around here. That’s why we need the border wall. See, when a border region that has had its share of knocks gets some momentum going, why not stick a 15-foot wall up to blight the scenery, alientate the local populace that never asked for the thing, and bring the added benefit of making right-wingers in Iowa feel better about border security?

It’s a three-fer.

A congressional panel headed by Democrats hostile to the building of the famed wall came to Brownsville last week. They put on a good show. The local bishop said the wall was no good for various reasons, such as throwing off the spirtuality and karma of our border communities. Some lefty representing some lefty group of some sort said we are all one, we are the world, we are the children, open borders, baby.

But mostly, it was common sense stuff. El Paso congressman Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol sector chief, (what does he know, right?), said border fencing will only work in concentrated stretches and not over the expanse of spaces advocated by the seal-the-border crowd. UT-Brownsville President Juliet Garcia spoke of her institution’s longstanding opposition to the fence for various reasons, including the small detail of how the original fed plan would have cut her campus in two, (is that all?).

Tancredo and his fellow right-wing fence builder in Congress, Duncan Hunter, smirked through the whole thing and were likely thinking, “Dang, there’s lots of Mexicans here!” Terrible Tommy sneered at the good bishop and suggested that the scholarly religious leader of the Brownsville Diocese didn’t really believe in having borders at all. No, no, the bishop said, he did believe in borders, but Terrible Tommy cut him off before he could complete his answer.

Hunter, meanwhile, crowed about how well a border fence had worked in the So Cal/San Diego district he’s from. Any objection to having such a thing here was met by Hunter bragging about how his border fence south of San Diego had cured many ills, and heck, building a border wall is the humane thing to do, Duncan said.

Hunter’s constant mentions of So Cal were so frequent that I kept waiting for a blond skater kid to roll in and tell him, “Dude, this isn’t San Diego. It’s totally different here, like, we have Charro Days here, and everything.”

But, alas, leave it to Tancredo to provide the headline for the day. All the carping about building a border fence finally got to Terrible Tommy. Maybe, he sneered, the feds ought to build a border fence north of Brownsville. Get it? That way Brownsville can be on the Mexican side of the fence where it belongs.

Nice touch, Tom, but I’m wondering. Did you get a chance to stop at Taco Palenque on your way out of town? Good eats, bud, and they might even speak a word of English or two, too, always an added bonus.

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