Sinking into insignificance in the presidential polling, Scott Walker has now suggested that building a wall along our border with Canada may be necessary to preserve our national security.

Putting aside what this emphasis on walling out the world indicates about the current state of our national psyche—or at least the Far Right psyche—the proposals for these walls along our borders expose the incoherence of the values ostensibly being preserved. Unlike Donald Trump who seems blithely unconcerned about the cost of constructing a wall along the much shorter border with Mexico, Walker claims to be a very determined fiscal conservative and yet has proposed what would surely be the second most expensive public works project in U.S. history—with only the interstate highway system surpassing it in cost.

But this is what happens when your presidential campaign is floundering: you ignore principles that are momentarily inconvenient in order to get some air time—any air time.

Such moments of blatant political incoherence in pursuit of political ambition give one some slim hope that, perhaps, at least some of those voters in Wisconsin who have supported Walker may eventually come around to asking whether his attacks on the state’s labor unions, on its public education system, and on its universities have served Wisconsin and the average person in the state as much as they have served his own political ambitions.

In any case, well before Walker suggested that we build a wall along the Canadian border the comedian Lewis Black offered a rationale for such a wall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kod1nIxteWQ

More recently, Black also offered this commentary on Trump’s advocacy of the wall along the Mexican border:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgkZfrmiRh4