Pat begins by making a bold prediction:
Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea have come home, there will be a U.S. army on the Mexican border. For this is where the fate of our republic will be decided, as the fate of Europe will be decided by the millions streaming north from the Maghreb and Middle East, sub-Sahara and South Asia.
So narco-traffickers are the same to him as Muslims “invading” Europe and destroying it’s culture. He then goes to the numbers: 6,000 drug related killings, 6,000 troops and police moved to the border. Recounting the story of Chief Roberto Oduna of Juarez and the killing of a retired army general sent to create an elite anti-crime unit in Cancun leads him to the conclusion that the Mexican government is corrupt.
Far be it for Pat Buchanan to be pollyanna-ish, he put his finger on the demand side of both the equation and the border. It is the US demand for drugs that is fueling this violence. Pat then boils down the responses to this crisis into the best description I have yet seen by a conservative.
There are two sure ways to end this war swiftly: Milton’s way and Mao’s way. Mao Zedong’s communists killed users and suppliers alike, as social parasites. Milton Friedman’s way is to decriminalize drugs and call off the war.
So, begrudgingly he chooses Milton’s Way, because we as a society cannot take the pain of our own government killing 30+ Million of it’s own citizens (by comparison the US lost 1/2 Million in all of World War 2).
Which is the greater evil? Legalized narcotics for America’s young or a failed state of 110,000 million on our southern border? Some choice. Some country we’ve become.
This isn’t a resounding call for the principals that Milton laid out, but a decision based on the fear of a Mexican narco state. So the conservative Republican “War on Drugs” dies a whimpering death in the mind of Pat Buchanan.
Very true,
I knew about Buckley, but not about Thomas. I agree that the real battle is to turn enough conservative Republicans to our cause to tip the scale. The younger generation of Republicans can be swayed (imho) because they don’t have the 60′s to remember. I think that the reason Medical MJ is so successful is directly attributable to the 60+ Republican crowd that stops and says “I COULD get cancer too..” in the voting booth. I am often surprised by how one sided the debate has finally become. It seems that the neo-prohibitionists are just fully out of ammo, and fall back on insisting that bad information is true. The final straw is “i’m just against it!!” and that is the definition of a lost argument.
(ps- I fully wanted the full weight of the criminal justice system to come down on Lush Rimbaugh. Because if there is one person that needs a 5 year stint in the can it’s Lush)
I’m glad to hear that conservative Pat Buchanan wouldn’t want say, conservative Douglas Ginsburg put to death just because he’d smoke a doob with those wacky kids down at Harvard Law.
It makes me happy to learn that ol’ “Pitchfork Pat” wouldn’t want Clarence Thomas put in the chair because, you know, sometimes he was smoking something that wasn’t tobacco.
Even though Pat no longer writes for the flagship National Review, it’s nice to hear that Pat wouldn’t have wanted its publisher, the late conservative titan William F. Buckley, put into an earlier grave for smoking a little grass. How humane of Pat to not want to put right-wing journalist R. Brookhiser into excruciating pain and an untimely demise, just because Rick has cancer and uses cannabis as a palliative.
This may sound sarcastic. It’s not. Darryl Gates thought casual pot smokers should be “taken out and shot.” He was chief of the LAPD at the time.
So, as you can see, achieving moral progress is possible. Conservatives are coming around. Very. slooooowly
(Although I have to admit, if Rush Limbaugh had been sentenced to death for Oxycontin abuse, maybe I wouldn’t have written an impassioned letter to the President pleading for clemency. Jus’ sayin’.)