No less an authority than E.J. Dionne has now conceded that George W. Bush is not a moron. No word yet on what George W. Bush thinks of E.J. Dionne.
JUST SAY NO: Just when you thought the drug war couldn’t get any worse, along comes Joseph Califano in today’s Washington Post homing in on “addiction” as the problem – including addiction to alcohol and nicotine. Our drug policy should not be scaled back, Califano urges, but expanded to hammer even further the alcohol and tobacco companies, force miscreants into government re-education camps to stop using drugs, make drunkenness punishable by law, and on and on. “Prevention, education and media campaigns should target alcohol and tobacco as aggressively as illegal drugs,” Califano avers. “Congressional restrictions that confine the White House drug policy director to illegal drugs should be lifted.” Next up will be class action lawsuits against liquor companies. Help! They’ve taken away our joints and our pills. Now they want our beer and our cigarettes. Califano won’t be happy till we’re all sitting upright in school like miniature Johnny Ashcrofts, indoctrinated against pleasure by our government – and all for our own good. The piece has the usual canards, including the typical hooey about this being “about our kids.” Remember: the drug warriors are just using kids for practice. What they really want is your Makers Mark. I guess we should be grateful to Califano for admitting it.
WAIT, THERE’S MORE: In the item below (“AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND, ER, SNEAKERS”), I wrote about the riot-looting-demo in favor of racial discrimination in college applications. The demo was full of high school kids, who were actually bussed there and organized by their San Francisco public high schools! Can you imagine public high school teachers bussing their kids to a rally against race preferences? Check this out in last Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently some San Francisco teachers decided against the demo because it would be hard to keep tabs on the kids, and other procedural worries. No-one seems to have batted an eye-lid at the use of public high schools for left-wing propaganda – against a ballot inititiative that passed by a hefty margin. The kids who had to stay home were treated to “teach-ins” on the merits of racial preferences. Not as fun as looting sneaker stores, I bet. Maybe this will all backfire, and San Fran is quietly rearing a generation of future libertarians. We can only hope. Small thought: maybe as a compromise Janet Reno should have sent Elian Gonzalez to school in San Francisco rather than back to Cuba. He would hardly have noticed a difference.
The Dish 