patrick.net

Somewhere in hell, Saddam Hussein must be laughing ruefully. Yesterday, NPR ran an angry story headlined, “Trump designates street fentanyl as WMD, escalating militarization of drug war.”

Okay, I must pause right here to get something off my chest. And it’s not an alien face-hugger. Instead, I am getting very cranky about corporate media hypocritically calling it a drug war for 55 long years, but now suddenly complaining about “militarization” of the “war.”

What do these nincompoops think a war is? Who “militarized” it by calling it a “war” in the first place?

Seriously. It was reporters. The term was coined by the Chicago Tribune, after President Nixon in 1971 called drug abuse “public enemy number one” and promised an “all-out offensive.” (Nixon should have been looking for different enemies number one, but that’s another story.) Media manufactured the “war on drugs” label, repeated it approximately six trillion times over five decades, and now they want to whine about Trump militarizing drug policy? ...

But— is it WMD? Undoubtedly, fentanyl can cause mass destruction. It has been aerosolized and used in mass-casualty attacks before (outside the US). The hangup seems to be over whether an illegal drug can be considered a weapon or not. It seems odd to me that the same people quibbling over this definition happily expanded the word “vaccine” to include experimental mRNA gene treatments that don’t prevent infections, but whatever. ...

Trump’s EO clearly, specifically, and very precisely requires the Secretaries of the Treasury and War to “pursue appropriate actions.” In other words, Trump’s team has some kind of a plan. But they’re not warning the cartels what it is yet. The media will never forgive how unfair President Trump is being by not advertising his next moves to cartel chiefs.