Haven’t we heard this before?

The only change we can expect from the Obama administration is a change in semantics and rhetoric. Otherwise they are increasing spending on the drug war, escalating enforcement and militarizing the Mexican border Drug War.

By disassociating themselves with the term ‘war on drugs’ the Obama Administration is admitting that the drug war has accumulated a top heavy load of negative political connotations that Obama does not want to be associated with. At the same time Obama’s actions, such as increasing a supplemental appropriation request by more than half a billion for Mexico, three billion dollars to reinvigorate the discredited drug task force grants, sending troops into the Afghan poppy fields to fight the Taliban, reneging on needle exchange policy and not stopping medical pot raids as promised, are all rapidly escalating and militarizing the the war on drugs policy.

It is the height of duplicity and ultimate in cynical moral depravity for the Obama to think that they can simply change the name, re-brand the war on drugs, and everything could just continue on as normal with this four decades long undeclared civil war.

Obama’s Quagmire on the Rio Grande

But I grew up in San Antonio (don’t call it San Antone!), and still have a sister living there, and the perspective from south-Central Texas is almost strictly “local news” of Mexicans killing… each other?…

Where? …I asked her a couple of weeks ago, in America? And is it a General Pershing situation? She thought a minute and told me, No, they’re mostly killing each other in Mexico, you know, in Acapulco, and Mexico De Feee.

This was swine-flu time, and… like the Drug War disappearing for a while in the national media… the topic quickly passed in the telecon between me and my sis.

But count on it. Drugs will be back big-time… The old border-war… And it’s baseball season and like springtime returning, there will be interminable Congressional inquests aimed at the offending players…

Can a new national wave of drug-terror be far behind? Just the shot in the arm the DJIA needs, as it were?

Most people think,
Great God will come from the sky,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your right. jah!

Bob Marley knew, do you know?

They’ll never legalize drugs… that would allow the other “half” of the story that’s been hidden to come to the light. so “now you see the light, you stand up for your right”! Human’s have been using natural drugs for at least 25,000 years (http://pryahi.indeep.ru/shaman/pegtymel_05.jpg)!

Now it’s correct!

To keep Cannabis illegal while tobacco and alcohol are dispensed freely is murderously stupid.

http://tinyurl.com/Henningfield-Benowitz
http://www.google.com/search?&q=tashkin

– Any questions ???

Richard Steeb
San Jose, California

Obama as a pragmatist is a JOKE. His pragmatism is about not disturbing the power structure.

The imperial presidency can do some things that matter: 1) end the war on drugs NOW!, push to decriminalize it, 2) Dismantle the Cold-war apparatus which has been allowed to roam and figure out a new reason for being; which means small wars the world over. Obama has feed the monster. It provides absolutely no value; has been disatrously WRONG with its CIA “intelligence” it’s mindless thrashing as the NSC 68 and it’s Wise Men have fearmongered America into one bloody war of aggression after another. Stop it now; call it what ever euphamistically works as a pragmatised, but defang it.

Then reduce the Cabinet to a handfull of posts; managing “defense” as DEFENSE with the same number FDR had in place which was one or two. Why do we need a Secretary of State; isn’t that the President? If he/she needs a spokesperson then claim it as such.

All posts titled Csar need to be eliminated NOW. When did we decide as a nation that we needed the 19th Century Russian monarchy to solve problems – which are NEVER solved by these csars who are self-perpetuating nincompoops!

Enough of the wishful thinking about Obama. These posts were the invention of fearmongering that has cost humankind dearly and they can be banished with the wave of a steady pen and some courage.

Is that little itsy bitsy factoid not fit into your little essay? Since when does a czar end what he’s in charge of, something that has been thoroughly institutionalized.

It is clear that a bone here and there seems to be enough to keep you pseudo-progressives at bay.

By the way, since when have pragmatist escaped the lable of ideolog?

Take our other wars, you know the ones that launches troops and drones, those have their roots in “pragmatism”. Maybe it’s a worldview that sees danger everywhere but it is a “pragmatic” approach to such a world view.

Substantively there is little difference between Presidents since Truman – look up the NSC 68 to see how this has devined along with Monroe’s Doctrine and the Exceptionalism that has guided US policies for over a century, make that 2.

The “war on drugs” and the “drug czar” frames policies, as does the war on terror (aka the long war). Once locked and loaded it becomes the modus operandi for US policies and action on the world stage.

Obama would be a “different” president if he dismantled the Penatgon (for pragmatic reasons – it adds no value, FDR didn’t need it or the NSC, that would mean eliminating the Cold War apparatus that creates our pathological war and fear mongering. Again, read the NSC 68 document that was declassified in 1975. It, not PNAC, is the guiding policy that all Presidents from Truman on have followed, including G.W. Bush and now Obama. The “war on drugs” is simply an extention.