I’ve never been the parent of an infant, but, at the risk of seeming smug (which, on a side note, is the extremely apt acronym for the Syracuse Mac Users’ Group, surpassed only by the Onondaga County Water Authority for best local acronym), I’m fairly certain I possess enough latent parenting skills (and, oh, I dunno, common fucking sense) to know better than to give a baby a bottle full of prescription pain killers as a rattle. Actually – and, again, I haven’t read any of the books or anything, so this may be going out on a limb a bit – I think that probably goes for non-prescription drugs, too. If nothing else, I’m pretty certain that if there was an infant in the house, I’d need those drugs. This, as Sue would point out, is what happens when you teach to the test (as opposed to trying to give people the skills required to “think”). You can’t possibly put everything on the test, and clearly the one about giving drugs to babies wasn’t in the rotation. Granted, it does appear to be a pretty good way to get them down for a nap, but there seems to be an issue with the whole getting them back up again thing. Whatever happened to soaking their binky in brandy?

Speaking of somebody who’s apparently been soaking his binky in brandy, not only does Herman “Abel” Cain (BTW, set your DVRs, as he’ll be on Press the Meat this morning) want to dig a moat between Mexico and the US and fill it with alligators (thanks to Gail Collins via Sue for the tip), but he also wants to build an lethal electrified fence along the border as well.

No details on whether it would be moat-fence, or fence-moat, but it seems pretty clear that – care and feeding of the alligators aside, these are not financially feasible proposals.

I mean, Herm said he wanted a “really big” moat, which kind of goes without saying – I mean, if it’s gonna cover the entire US/Mexico border, by definition it’s gotta be pretty big. He didn’t say if he meant “big” as in wide, or as in deep, but, presumably it needs to be pretty wide (or you could just throw a 2×4 across and walk over).

Now, unlike Herman Cain (who is a very successful CEO and serious Presidential candidate), I haven’t crunched all the numbers, and wouldn’t be certain how to go about estimating construction costs. The Erie Canal might be a good start. It’s something like 360 miles long (or it was when they finished it), but it’s only 40 feet across and 4 feet deep. That might be sufficient for mule-drawn flat barges, but it doesn’t seem Herman Cain “big” to me (and certainly not big enough to keep out those pesky Mexicans, unless you keep it pretty densely stocked with alligators, which they’d probably just catch and eat anyway – I mean, if this idiot can catch ‘gators, I’m thinking it wouldn’t be much of a challenge for Mexicans).

So let’s think “big” – like, Panama Canal big. Now, the Panama Canal cost $375,000,000 to build (BTW, if you search for information on the Panama Canal, be prepared to look at some truly ugly websites). But that was in, like 1914, which would be roughly $8.2 billion today. Of course, the Panama Canal is only 51 miles long, and the US/Mexico border is over 1,900 miles long, so, extrapolating from there, a bigass moat would cost over $300 billion. And that’s just initial construction. Presumably the annual maintenance would be rather astronomical (keep in mind that we couldn’t really use cheap Mexican labor for all this ‘cuz, well, they’d be building in back doors and stuff (and the Irish don’t work as cheap as we used to) – though I suppose we could use prison labor, though in this “prisons for profit” world we live in, that would probably still be pretty expensive.

On the bright side, alligators are free. Assuming Cain is Able to go and catch them himself.

And that’s not even for the electrified fence. Your basic electric livestock fencing (which doesn’t even contain cows when they have a mind to wander) costs about $6 a linear foot. So, let’s see here, 2,000 miles is like 10.5 million feet, so that’s another $60 million (which I guess is chicken feed, compared to the cost of the moat). Not counting the cost of electricity (I suppose it would be a good excuse to go solar, though). But you’d really need to construct something more substantial to string that across. So, well, let’s just say it would kinda cost a lot of money, though it might create a lot of jobs.

Now far be it for me to poo-poo Herman’s plan. One thing I’m bummed about is the loss of the “can do” American spirit. So let’s get out there and start digging. I mean, it took 10 years to build the Panama Canal, so it could take, oh, I dunno, 400 years to dig our moat (assuming we don’t want to employ any technology that didn’t exist in the Bible, of course), so we have lots of time to figure out how we’re gonna stock it with alligators.