Quixotic Tales

The American public seems to negatively view American drug addition, personified by America’s celebrity drug use, as a minor morality issue but negatively view Mexico’s problem of Drug Lords’ violence, as a major international issue in which Mexico threatens the safety of the American democratic Republic. Congress idiotically responds by building a higher border fence and declaring war on drugs while at the same time, the States’ prisons are full, all government is broke, and the great border fence is porous.

Truth is, there can be no ‘war’ on drugs anymore than there can be a ‘war’ on poverty (or terror); war is armed conflict between sovereign nations. So, a war on drugs is inconsequential, it is ineffective, and the States can no longer afford to incarcerate more prisoners.

The source of the Mexico’s problem of drug lords are of course, the customers most of whom are admittedly American drug addicts. For Mexico to eliminate drug lords, it would be necessary for someone to eliminate illegal drug use in America or make drugs legal, taxed, and regulated.

For the sake of clarity, to resolve the drug problem it is first necessary to realize that the drug problem is not a stupid war. Like any problem, to find a resolution it is necessary to first find the CAUSE and then find a means of eliminating the cause; in this case, drug addicts are the cause.

Unfortunately, the addicts (customers) causing this immediate problem are primarily American addicts. That being the case, is the Mexican drug lord violence really, totally a “Mexican Problem”? What then is the proper American response?

Is America’s proper response to build an even higher fence along the border? Should America incarcerate all drug users or should America legalize, tax, and regulate drugs? Legalizing drugs creates many other problems but the current drug problem is severe.

Why can’t Americans and Congress be prudent about resolving these drug related issues.  Just what is Mexico’s problem and how can America best assist Mexico rather than blame her?

This is a review of the book Decision Points, a memoir by former President George W. Bush.

Forget it Mr. Bush, ‘The moving hand writes and having writ moves on; nor all thy piety and wit can erase a word of it’.

You, Mr. Bush, are the American tragedy of the 21st Century and truthfully the American democratic Republic perhaps will not survive.

You will not write the American History of your doing; it will be we Americans, the survivors of American military heroes of your senseless wars, and the American working men and women who built the great American nation with the sweat of our brow who will write the final chapters of the history of the disastrous George W. Bush Administration.

Your name, Mr. Bush will live in infamy, like Pearl Harbor.

It is no secret that I oppose the death penalty. It is not my bleeding-heart liberal contention that criminals are sweet fuzzy guys underneath it all; actually, I believe that there are rational and practical social reasons to oppose the death penalty.

Here is a recent news item on the death penalty:

“The cost of perpetuating capital punishment in California is a large and growing burden. The annual cost to the state was placed at $125 million in 2008 by the bipartisan California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which was appointed to review the state’s death penalty. Additionally, state officials are scheduled to open bids next month for construction of a larger, higher-security death row on the San Quentin grounds. The estimated cost for the new death row is nearly $400 million. — Arnold Friedman 10.31.10

Actually, I find it hilarious that so many Americans who oppose universal health care for all Americans are the same people who favor the death penalty and whatever it costs to keep a criminal on Death Row, healthy enough to execute. One of the funniest news articles that I ever read was about a man who had been on death row for decades and died of old age a few days before he could be executed.

Then there is the case of President George W. Bush who, while governor of Texas, executed more criminals than were executed in any other State and his record proved to be a great qualification for the Presidency; after elected, President Bush implemented a policy of torturing prisoners of war and there were a number of prisoners tortured who did not survive the torture. Now that should be good news to those who are concerned about the cost of keeping prisoners healthy for execution; prisoners who die during interrogation means that the US was actually saving money. It all seems to prove that President George W. Bush was above all, sadistically consistent about his favoring capital punishment.

It is my contention that a criminal convicted of a capital crime is an exception to the normal citizen; as such, it appears to me that these people are persons with information and mind sets that may be valuable to society in the prevention of capital offenses and as such they should be preserved for study. Of course that is thinking like a scientist and it would be more realistic, practical, and economical just to shoot the son-of-a-bitch.

Another reason why I oppose capital punishment is that so often our Justice System is in error and we discover later that the convicted criminal is really innocent. This is especially true since the advent of DNA. Of course, a really quick execution may be economical from the States point of view, however, if the victim was actually innocent, to whom is the responsibility for death assessed or is it just a matter of dropping charges.

I do approve of life imprisonment without parole for some criminals.

But in all the executions for capital crime that I have read or heard about, I have to admit that I get no satisfaction from the execution of the criminal.

I read all the gory details of the execution of Saddam Hussein and still I get no satisfaction from his execution. He was so notorious that I was thinking that society would really profit from what actually went on in his mind. I felt the same about Timothy McVeigh when I watched the interview with him on TV just before his execution; I would like to know more of what went on in his mind.

It is interesting to me that most primarily Christian nations of the world and most European nations and primarily Catholic nations have eliminated capital punishment. But in America, the American Christian population appears to highly favor capital punishment. None of this makes much sense to me.