Keep This Shit Up, Democrats, and Your Time in Congress Will Be Short, Indeed

When stories such as this are planted in the newspapers, you know what is coming next.

I had thought that the Democrats were too smart to fall for this shit, but I am ready to be surprised. After all, the party of Hoover cannot give up their addiction to tax cuts for the rich and massively increasing federal deficits while complaining about it, why should I be surprised that Democrats are also not similarly self-destructive.

Get a clue, you fucking morons. The Brady Bill cost you the Congress in the 1994 elections. Very long serving Democratic congressmen, such as Tom Foley, who was the Speaker of the House, were defeated because they voted for the Brady Bill.

We face some serious problems in this country, a need to reinstate the Brady Bill is not one of them. If we were really serious and gave a shit about the issue of how drug smuggling is creating a culture of violence in Mexico, there is one thing that we could do that would put the drug smugglers out of business once and for all and it could be done without curtailing the freedoms of Americans:

Make the use of drugs legal.

The hatchet-wielding humorless Prohibitionists at the beginning of the last century campaigned to outlaw alcohol and they succeeded in both outlawing alcohol and in fueling a massive growth in organized crime, which had, as its side-effects, a lot of violence, for reasons that do not require belaboring. Much of that faded away (not all) when the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933.

President Nixon declared a "war on drugs" 38 years ago. You can buy drugs in every city and most towns as easily now as you could have in 1971, if not more so. The War on Drugs has resulted in massive growth in the prison industry, turned much of our police from "Officer Friendly" into paramilitary goon squads and the drugs are still there.

What is clear is that the "Greatest Generation" and their offspring are not as smart as the parents and grandparents of the GG's: It only took them fourteen years to figure out that Prohibition was a failure. We haven't had the political will to realize that the War on Drugs is a lost cause and move on to (a) legalizing drug use; and (b) taxing the shit out of it in the same way we tax alcohol and tobacco.

But no, that requires real political courage, something that is lacking. That requires the spine to tell the truth to the American people and stand up to the Bible-waving totalitarian moralists in our midst. Which isn't going to happen, so we'll carry on with the same sort of freedom-destroying measures that both parties seem to love.

Gun control is the preferred poison of the Democrats. If they sip from it, it will make their time in Congress short in a way that the Hindenbergs of right-wing radio could only dream of doing.