A joke: Two morons rent a rowboat and go fishing. They have an especially bountiful day, hauling in six fish. At the end of the afternoon, one of the men turns to the other and says, “This must be a lucky spot in the lake. Let’s mark it so we can come back tomorrow and get more fish.” With that, he takes a crayon and marks a large “X” on the back of the boat, explaining that “X marks the spot.” His friend does a face palm. “You imbecile,” he says at length. “You’re not using your brain! What if the rental place gives us a different boat?”
If you didn’t like that one, try this one: A TV news reporter goes to McAllen, Texas and visits a stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border that has a steel-slat fence running along it. Says said reporter:
And here are some of the steel slats the president has been talking about. … As you can see, yes, you can see through these slats to the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border. But as we’re walking along here, we’re not seeing any kind of imminent danger, there are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence. … Matter of fact there’s some businesses behind me along this highway.
I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today. pic.twitter.com/KRoLdszLUu
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 10, 2019
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
This bit of journalistic wizardry comes to you courtesy of CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh, obviously, from a day of fishing. Let’s see if we can help explain his conundrum.
Maybe for starters he should consider that migrants looking to sneak into the U.S. are more likely to choose remote places, where there are no businesses on the opposite side whose owners might notify the Border Patrol. Or maybe Acosta sees no migrants here precisely because there is a fence there that they would have to scale.
Then again, maybe he happened by with his camera crew at the wrong moment in time. Maybe he’d have better luck if he came back in the middle of the night or, better still, if he “staked out” the location for several days.
According to a Pew Research Center poll, an average of 386,000 illegal aliens entered the U.S. annually between the years 2011 and 2016. During that period there were 3,153,600 minutes. Since there are approximately 2,000 miles of border between the U.S. and Mexico, the probability of visiting a random location at the exact moment when an illegal alien violated our nation’s sovereign laws would have to be exceedingly tiny — as minuscule almost as some reporters’ brains.
