GOP Civil War Part II

subtitle to post: Feeling Better About Being Canadian

Check out this absurd suck up to Rush in the Washington Times by Andrew Breitbart.

Segments:

Spokespeople for CPAC said it was the best-received speech in the conference's 36 years. And that included Ronald Reagan, who, by the way, was no rhetorical slouch.

(...)

Anonymous liberal commentators, the rabid pests of the new media, sought out the most popular conservative blogs to flood the zone with familiar Rush Limbaugh slanders. Their goal: To demoralize the right with layer upon layer of media domination. Only talk radio with its emphasis on Socratic debate over raw emotionalism and with Mr. Limbaugh in the driver's seat has escaped the left's clutches of pure media dominance.

For years, the radio kin of these underhanded online annoyances - coined by Rush as "seminar callers" - have read their Democratic National Committee-produced scripts to muddy the political waters. Talk-show call screeners will be on double duty this week trying to keep off the air anyone who might try to tear down the post-speech unity and elation.

This is serious wacko-ness. Notice the two parts I bolded. They're saying they are the rationalists over raw emotionalism. Next paragraph they say they have to cut off anybody who ruins post speech "unity and elation". Is elation not a raw emotion?

Andrew Breitbart is a big player on the right, especially on the internet. Either he's too dumb, or he expects his audience to be too dumb. Either way, it's not a winning formula.

Why do I care anyway? I'm Canadian. For so many years, the US has lead the way for conservatism. Canada seemed lost. But observing the US over the last half decade, they have dropped the ball on conservatism. They opened up the doors to the kooks and now they run the place. They are a joke. Fiscal prudence and libertarianism are gone. It's now some sort of religious revival type movement where the peasants are dictated at how to think. Breitbart above is saying callers who phone into talk radio who disagree need to be aggressively screened. They don't want to debate. They don't want beliefs challenged. They are sheep.

I don't look up to my big neighbour to the south as much as I used to.

Drug War Front: Vancouver

There are plenty of jokes about hippy Vancouver pot heads, but the reality is that drugs are big business over here. BC Bud sells in large quantities down in the US. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has a grow op. As always, when illegal smuggling is highly profitable, people end up getting killed. It's not quite as bad as Mexico, YET.

The rash of violence in the Vancouver area, which has had 12 shootings in 16 days, is a result of "disorganized" and "reckless" gangs that have exploded in the province over the last decade, says a criminology professor.

Prof. Darryl Plecas of the University of the Fraser Valley said the number of gangs in B.C. has grown from about a dozen ten years ago to more than 100 today, a growth fuelled in part by an expanding drug trade.

This summer, I came home from work and my street was cordoned off, cops were everywhere, including in the sky in helicopters. It turns out somebody was gunned down 25 meters from where I live. A gangland "hit". Seeing the alley behind my apartment on the television news was surreal. Another time a body was found in the trunk of a car parked right outside my living room window. Cops even came to my door to ask if I had seen anything suspicious.

A Day To Examine Drug Prohibition

Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the 21st Amendment which repealed the 18th Amendment regarding the prohibition of alcohol, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent Op-ed by Ethan A. Nadelmann examining the folly of the present day War on Drugs.

Some opponents of prohibition pointed to Al Capone and increasing crime, violence and corruption. Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the prohibition laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues. And still others were disturbed by the specter of so many citizens blinded, paralyzed and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol.

...

Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.

It is completely crazy that this continues. Marijuana should be legalized right away. It's not an attractive habit, and I mostly can't stand thin-skinned pot-heads, but really, it's their choice. Talk about people who don't harm others. Let them go listen to their Grateful Dead albums in peace. (They can be tiresome bores, but it's my right not to associate with them.) The fact that people can get criminal records for this or jailed is criminal in itself.

I'm from Ottawa. From the time you have your driver's license, you can take a 15 minute drive over the Quebec border and buy beer there. Technically the drinking age was 18, but nobody seemed to care, they never asked for ID. I grew up in a beer culture. I found out later in my early 20's, when I'd visit down to the US, that Americans as a whole were big dope smokers. Pot was their choice for parties. The simple fact was that it was easier to get dope than alcohol. 48 out of 50 states have a 21 drinking age that is rigorously enforced. It's a hell of a lot easier to walk down the street to your local dealer. One time in New Orleans, we were at a college house party and my friend and I were panicking over our low beer count. We were trying to organize a beer run. The Americans at the party were saying "relax, look at the bag of weed we have on the table, it will more than last all night." We were stunned. A party is over is the beer runs out where I come from. It just goes to show that pot is as mainstream to them as beer is to your typical Canadian hosers.

Legalization of hard drugs is more difficult to debate. Heroin and Crystal Meth ruin people. And those people become a menace and nuisance to society as whole. This plays out in Vancouver every day. Our property crime is one of the worst in North America because junkies need to feed their habit but can't hold down a job. I've personally witnessed people shooting up in broad daylight, even in the financial district. The Crystal Meth people go into psychotic rages, which is dangerous for the public but also for police and medical staff.

It's difficult to just turn around and legalize it. It feels like you are condoning its use. But whether we like it or not, it's easily and readily available on the street. It's a better idea if we can get it out in the open. We can use the tax money for treatment, and put the dealers out of business.

I've met a few people in my time who did recreational coke, and still held down jobs and were productive citizens. One time I was out with some people having after work drinks. A guy brought his friend along who was visiting Vancouver. We were on this very topic and I said, 'why shouldn't coke be legalized'? The visiting friend got very upset. He told me he had almost ruined his life doing "speedballs" which was some kind of cocaine mixture. He blew his and his wife's savings, almost lost his job, marriage crumbling, health affected, etc. He said we can't legalize it, it's too dangerous. We have to keep people away from it. But the point is, it was illegal when he was doing this and he got his hands on it anyway. Prohibition did nothing, and in fact probably made it easier for him to get these drugs.

So we really need to re-think this whole thing. Canada has become much more liberal about it, but the US remains steadfast in its folly.

PJ O'Rourke: We Blew It

PJ O'Rourke is one of the biggest influences I've had in forming my political opinions. Fiscal conservatism mixed with libertarianism. Parliament of Whores and Holidays in Hell spoke to me in my 20's. Here's a great, long article on the aftermath of the 2008 election.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to
deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

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To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.