January 24, 2004 -- WhitakerOnline is Bob's Opinion, not God's

January 24, 2004 --  The Drug War is a Vietnam

January 24, 2004 -- Our Whole National Policy is a Vietnam Policy

 Fun Quote:

I leave prophecy to others.

Even my hindsight needs glasses.

                                     WhitakerOnline is Bob's Opinion, not God's                                   

Last week I repeated my all-out support for space exploration.  A lot of you, including Rick, have a healthy suspicion of President Bush and said his Mars program was hogwash.

But Rick and the most of the rest of you hated to disagree with me openly.  I appreciate the respect and courtesy this shows, but you are missing the point of WhitakerOnline.

I am putting out the best ideas I can.  Your job is to chew them over and spit out what you can't use.   If you disagree with the old man, the old man wants to hear about it.   You do me the favor of reading my stuff.    That's all I ask.

I never know what to say when someone tells me, "You know, Bob, I can't agree with everything you say."

What I want to say is, "You been in this country long?"  It never occurs to a real American that anybody agrees with him all the time.  Somehow I am vaguely  insulted that anybody would think I would expect that.

I think WhitakerOnline readers are a special breed, and you know I don't deal in flattery.  I write for people with strong minds who can use what I say in their own way.   That is the only kind of person who is worth my time.

                                         The Drug War is a Vietnam                                           

 
A lot of people compare the Drug War to Prohibition.   Actually it is more like Vietnam.

America could have won the war in Vietnam, but to do that, we would have had to fight it. We would have had to fight a real war in Vietnam to win there.

The question is, would it have been worth it to fight a real war in Vietnam to win there?

And that is the question we never asked.  We sent our soldiers to die in Vietnam, but we never decided to make it a real war.   You can't get more immoral than that.

What we did in Vietnam was to send our men to fight with their hands tied behind their backs.   Meanwhile, we here at home lived a very prosperous life.   There were lots of ways for people with influence or money to avoid serving in Vietnam.  

A real war in Vietnam would have put the draft dodgers in jail. A real war in Vietnam would have put people who marched in parades carrying enemy flags in jail.    A real war in Vietnam would have risked a nuclear confrontation.  That would have endangered those of us at home. 

The only alternative to a real war in Vietnam was surrender.  Several people heard Lyndon Johnson state his attitude about that.  He said, "I will not be the first American president to lose a war."  So he spent tens of thousands of American lives so that the war would not be lost until Nixon was in office.

We have exactly the same situation in the Drug War.  Illegal drugs could be stopped if we clamped down on all our civic freedoms.  Big time drug lords, people whose names the police know very well, would be arrested and put away for good, or they would be killed.  We would trample on the sovereignty of any country that harbored drug lords.   We would get them, period.

There would be no more fashionable drug use among rich Americans.  They would be hunted down and punished as felons.

As in any war, your house would be open to search.  Rights would be suspended.

Is winning the Drug War worth all that?

The alternative is surrender.  Like President Johnson, every politician refuses to declare that we have simply lost the War on Drugs and call it off.  And no politician is going to openly demand that we make a total war of it.

So we don't fight and we don't give it up.  The Drug War is Vietnam.

                                  Our Whole National Policy is a Vietnam Policy                                 

We have another Vietnam on the question of controlling our borders.  The only place on earth where a third world country shares a border with a first world country is on the Rio Grande.

People who violate the law are either criminals or they are not.  People who break into Federal facilities repeatedly are not gently led back out.  They are convicted and they go to jail.

People who violate our immigration laws are either criminals or we shouldn't have immigration laws.

 "But, Bob, under the Constitution, illegal immigrants have rights, too."

 ‘Fraid not.  The Constitution specifically says it applies only to "Ourselves and Our Posterity."

This was not chance wording.  The Founding Fathers had just fought a war for our independence and they said our business was ourselves and foreigners were none of our business .  That is what independence means.

 If you do not regard the immigration law as a real law, then you should stop enforcing it completely.

 We have over two million people in our prisons because we cannot decide whether to treat criminals as criminals or be human about the whole thing.  This situation overlaps with our Drug War Vietnam.

If drug dealers are criminals, then we should go after them all out, wherever they are.   By the same token, every court room every day has people before the judge whose occupation is crime.   "He keeps getting into trouble,." they say.   No one mentions what that "trouble" costs one innocent victim after another.

"But, Bob, criminals have rights, too."

 I'm afraid not.  The term for someone who lives outside the law in Anglo-Saxon law was "outlaw."  He is outside the law. 

But we do not have the courage to decide.  In each case, the moral question is, "Is it worth total war or do we surrender?"

We are fighting an endless number of Vietnams because we do not have the moral courage to make the decision to fight or to surrender