Sara(h) Smiles, Part 49: Disembowelment and Self-Expression

The lamestreamers are always up in arms about one thing or another, and lately it’s that Pfc Bradley Manning, who apparently describes himself as a whistleblower (for having leaked classified US army intelligence to WikiLeaks), but whom all right-thinking Americans regard as a traitor for whom no punishment could be too severe, is being kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in advance of his trial. The lamestreamers point out that the European Court of Human Rights has in the past ruled that such detentions violate the rights they’re in the business of protecting.

Well, boo-hoo! Such American patriots as Mike Huckabee and Sarah have called for Manning to be publicly disemboweled for treason, and then fed to rabid dogs, and common sense tells us they’re right. And here the lamestreamers are whining about Brad not having enough company, or about his having been denied a pillow and sheets! Will I ever cease to be amazed at the gall of these people?

It gets worse. Council members in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the notorious college town across the bay from San Francisco, are apparently on the verge of issuing an official resolution praising Manning, leading me to wonder if it isn’t the Berkeley City Council that needs disembowelment. When I lived in the Bay Area, and ventured from time and time into Berkeley for Thai food, I was appalled by the bohemians, opium fiends, sexual deviates, and Satanists I saw shuffling in sandals up and down Telegraph Avenue, many seemingly trying to resemble Jesus, or at least the classic western European conception of Jesus, except not nearly as clean. Others were perpetually engaged in animated shouting matches with adversaries whose presence they alone could detect.

As I have said here many times before, self-expression is all well and good when it doesn’t turn the stomachs of God-fearing average Americans, but in Berkeley it does. If Arnold Schwarzenegger is half the superhero he claims to be, he’ll figure out a way to drown everyone in the city, except the righteous, before he leaves office in January.

The appalling news from Berkeley makes all the more welcome that about Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin having been martyred Tuesday by the military jury trying him for his refusal — on the grounds that orders from Commander-in-Chief ObaMao are illegitimate because he was born in some Third World hellhole, rather than in Hawaii, as anyone with half a brain recognizes as implausible given his being an obvious Muslim and Marxist — to deploy to Afghanistan. The brave doctor now faces three years in prison for his beliefs, but you won’t see the Berkeley City Council planning to honor him.

A member of the British Parliament who previously served as a drugs minister in the Home Office (kind of the State Department) claimed yesterday that the war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster," and said it was time to study other options, including decriminalizing possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply.

His Home Office experience, Bob Ainsworth said, made clear that prohibition failed to reduce the harm that drugs cause in the UK, while his experience as a defense secretary focused on Afghanistan, "showed that the war on drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security". The only surprise is that President ObaMao didn’t immediately call a press conference to declare, “Me too!”

We in America have been hearing such nonsense for years now. Sometimes those from whom we hear it have so-called scientific data. At other times they invoke the success of liberalized drug policies in the Netherlands and Portugal. What few ever mention is that an enormous percentage of American convicts were incarcerated for drug offenses, and that the prison industry has been growing faster than nearly any other the past few decades, providing employment for countless thousands. We’re supposed to put all the correction officers and infirmary workers and wardens and what-have-you out in the streets, where they’re likely to be run over by drug addicts speeding away from condominiums they’ve just burglarized in cars they've just hot-wired?

America's is the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and our remaining No. 1 is very much dependent on our maintaining the war on drugs. Prisons: Build, baby, build!