“Beautify the Wall”? Military Painting Barriers at the Border

It should perhaps not be forgotten that whenever candidate Donald Trump promised to build a wall along the southern border, he usually heaped adjectives like “great,” “big,” and yes, “beautiful” upon his imagined construction. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the president wants to do a bit of aesthetic clean-up at the border and make sure that, just because we have a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, it isn’t a complete eyesore.

Naturally, it’s making Democrats very grumpy.

Criticizing it as a “disgraceful misuse” of taxpayer funds, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said, “Our military has more important work to do than making Trump’s wall beautiful.”

Correction, Dick: OUR wall beautiful. Also, anytime a liberal Democrat complains about the misuse of taxpayer dollars, we struggle to keep our lunch down.

“They are soldiers, they are not painters,” whined Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX).

Why not both?

From the Washington Post:

Members of the military deployed near the U.S.-Mexico border have been assigned to spend a month painting a mile-long stretch of barriers to improve their “aesthetic appearance.”

Lawmakers were notified of the action on Wednesday in an email message from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has asked the Pentagon multiple times in recent months to deploy troops near the southern border to support the agency as it faces an unprecedented surge of Central American families and unaccompanied children heading to or in between ports of entry.

According to the email, the text of which was provided to CBS News by a congressional aide, an unspecified number of service members were set to paint barriers in the California border town of Calexico. The task, according to the email, would last approximately 30 days.

“While the primary purpose is to improve the aesthetic appearance of the wall, there may also be an operational benefit based on our experience with painted barrier in Nogales, Arizona,” the email read.

This is really one of those non-stories that wouldn’t make a blip on the media’s radar under any other administration, but since it involves the border and Trump, Democrats want to use it to their advantage. There’s not much to be said here, though. To pretend like the only thing our troops do is fight on the battlefield is to not know much about the military. We didn’t see any Democrats complaining when our military was delivering food to illegal aliens, so it’s quite rich to see them complain about “misuse of taxpayer money” now. Why should our wall be ugly?