Whitaker's Current Articles January 24, 2004
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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
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