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Tancredo: If you are going to ask people to actually vote for you for President of the United States of America, you'd better tell them what you are going to do about this problem, because I'm telling you it supercedes all other ... It's more important than healthcare. It's more important than education policy. It's more important than trade. It's more important than anything, because what does all of that matter if you do not do what is necessary to protect this country?

Really? More important than healthcare? More important than anything?

Pardon me for even entertaining the specious link he makes between illegal immigration and terrorism, but let's walk down that crooked path just a little, ok? Not to say the threat of terrorism isn't real or that we shouldn't do anything about it, because of course we should, but we should have a rational, sensible policy based on the real threat, not an over-hyped perception of one. The fact is that even "if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, ... your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered." Terrorists would have to pull off six 9/11s every year to equal the roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year coming from the more than 40 million uninsured (pdf) in this country, and if there is a terrorist with the will and the capability to pull that off, there will never be a border fence that will stop them, and nothing could be more dangerous to this country than a paranoid politician whose brain is so ate up with Lou Dobb's Disease that he's willing to sell every other issue down the river in search of a cure.