Nearly every day there’s a story about Bush or some other official (not to mention the embarrassingly ridiculous John McCain) claiming sectarian violence is dropping, Baghdad is safer, Iraq is “making progress.” But periodically throughout the war, usually when there is a spike in violence, we hear that such spikes are a good thing, because it signals that all is not well with the insurgency, and that they are “desperate” and “worried.” Well such omelette-making (and anti-logical) thinking has bled into the office of the drug czar.
This morning over my waffles and café con leche, I read in Men’s Vogue a piece titled “A Budding Invasion.” I was instantly annoyed by the embedded reporter, official line-toeing tone of the article (“cartel henchmen,” “growers leave an eco-disaster,” “Can anyone halt the harvest?”), but what really caught my eye was this bit:
“Gruesome violence afflicts Michoacán—stomping grounds of some of the cartels that dominate the American marijuana market—where cartel henchmen have lately developed a partiality for leaving human heads, with written warnings attached, outside government offices. Last year they rolled five of them onto a discotheque dance floor….The bloodshed is dismaying, but [Deputy Drug Czar Scott] Burns sees it as a potentially promising sign. ‘The violence can be an indication of many things, such as disrupting the cartels,’ he says. ‘If everything is running smoothly, there’s no reason to shoot somebody. It can be an indication of good work by the Mexican and U.S. governments.’
Got that? The more heads roll onto Uruapan’s dance floors, the better Burnsie sleeps at night because he takes it as a sign that he is doing his job better. That job? To tell adult Americans what kind of plants they can ingest. A true hero.