Cheap shots: It's gone, boom!

Image via Arizona Star.

The former neurosurgeon ate at the Silver Saddle Steakhouse on the south side's East Benson Highway, a day after speaking to thousands of people at the Phoenix Convention Center.

He drew national attention as well, after commenting later in the day that he supports the use of military drone strikes to help secure the border....

In January, comedian/actor/director/screenwriter Adam Sandler stopped in to the Silver Saddle to have dinner with his sister.

That Silver Saddle wouldn't by any chance be an advertiser or anything, would it, Star?

Anyhow, what does Dr. Ben Carson mean by "drones" in his stump speech, as at his Phoenix rally last Tuesday?

“What I have said consistently is that we need [to] seal our borders,” he said. “We can use a whole series of things to do that, not just fences and walls, but electronic surveillance and drones.”

I mean, given that US Customs and Border Patrol has been using surveillance drones since 2005, to virtually no effect, although they have managed to crash 23 unmanned planes, one 100 yards from somebody's house in Nogales? What use other than surveillance did he have in mind? He wasn't planning to kill anybody, was he? He wasn't planning to use armed military drones, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus law (funny trick for a small-government Constitutional conservative, I must say), was he?

Well, yes! I mean, not exactly to kill anybody, but, as Tucson News Now explained it reporting his press conference the next day:

He said if the military asked for armed drones, he'd approve.

"Especially for the caves," he said, referring to places where smugglers hide out and hide drugs.

"It would only take one missile and it's gone, boom," he said.

And what caves would those be? Other than the mountainside caves he'd just seen that morning, according to AZCentral, on his helicopter tour with fascist Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu? The ones that are 70 miles north of the border? The ones used by the weed smugglers they busted in June 2014 when they caught the driver talking on his cell phone while driving? They need to blow up those caves from the air, without worrying about whether there's anybody inside?

Or maybe it's these caves?

Nah, just kidding. I can imagine, though, how our Masters of Glib might only read half that headline and conclude that the White House was building special caves along the Rio Grande to house the aliens in luxury while awaiting the fiendish opportunity to, um, what, exactly?

Speaking of Masters of Glib, here's Tucker Carlson on Fox & Friends speaking against disrespect to the Confederate flag, via Crooks&Liars:

according to the hosts of Fox & Friends, Confederate flag bans across the country had always been an effort to squash patriotic displays.

"This is not about a school district in Tennessee," Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on Sunday. "This is a about a long-term trend where the people who run everything -- the elites in Washington, New York and L.A. -- despise rural America and its culture, suspect anybody that doesn't live in their cities of being a bigot, and they're trying to crush that culture by banning its symbols."

"Not just the Confederate flag, but the American flag," he continued. "They hate expressions of patriotism. It makes them uncomfortable. Let's be honest."

Because nothing says patriotism like waving the flag of the country that killed 364,511 of our troops in the second deadliest war in our country's history.

What is Tucker Carlson's profession, anyway? I mean, he's clearly not a historian (apparently the longstanding rumor that he did not graduate from college is false, it's just that he took five years to do it; but he is on the record as saying, in language Ross Douthat might appreciate, "After four years I had met a lot of interesting people, gone to a couple of classes and restored a motorcycle and that was it. And so I wasted my time at college"). But is he a journalist or something?Check out his IMDB profile for an alternative hypothesis.