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Kerry Loves NARCS
(Matt Taibbi, New York Press, August 18 - 24, 2004)
I urge them to consider a few things about the Kerry campaign. It has a few features that have been commented on very little in public. For one, it's crawling with narcs. . . . There is a fiction being perpetuated in the media that the Democratic Party is "more united than ever," that "the whole party has been energized" by the mission of defeating George Bush. (I think the reality is that the would-be dissenters are simply too depressed to argue.) A corollary to this assumption is the alleged reason for this unity, which is that, apart from Iraq, there were virtually no differences between any of the candidates who ran for the nomination in the last year. . . . Howard Dean told me in the plainest language possible that he did not think that nonviolent drug offenders should go to jail. "I mean, if you're selling heroin in a school zone, that's maybe something you should go to jail for, but otherwise, it's a medical issue," he said. . . . Dean explained to me that since most drug laws were state laws, his likely strategy as president for clearing the prisons would be to provide block grants to states that develop alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders. . . . What kind of people were you likely to find on the Dean plane? A lot of ex-Clinton types, true, but also people like Kurt Schmoke, the former Yale classmate of Dean's and mayor of Baltimore, who once called the Drug War "our domestic Vietnam" and was the first major politician in the country to advocate the decriminalization of drugs. . . . Who would you find hanging around the Kerry campaign? Forget about people like Weiner, who just showed up uninvited. One of the constants of the Kerry plane was a guy named David Morehouse, who is a senior political advisor to Kerry. Morehouse, like Weiner, is a former ONDCP heavy. He was once the number-two man in the agency behind Barry McCaffrey. Just a few days after Super Tuesday, he explained to me with pride that he had been involved with the planning of many of the ONDCP's most celebrated p.r. campaigns. . . . "Like the fried-egg thing?" I said. . . . "Well, yes, the fried-egg thing, and some others," he said. . . . Morehouse said he left the ONDCP before the plan to plant hidden anti-drug messages in the scripts of tv shows like Friends and E.R. went into action, but admitted he had been there during the planning of these programs. . . . These are the kinds of people Kerry hangs out with: the fried-egg guy. . . . And how about Kerry's likely replacement for Tom Ridge? Rand Beers, Kerry's Homeland Security advisor, is one of the most zealous and remorseless narcs in American history. As undersecretary of state for international drug enforcement under Clinton, Beers signed off on a defoliating program in South America in which a substance similar to Agent Orange was sprayed over would-be coca fields along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border. When an environmental group filed suit on behalf of Ecuadorian peasants who claimed—with the support of the Red Cross—that the sprays had caused the destruction of all crops as well as severe birth defects in humans and livestock, Beers responded by insinuating that the plaintiffs had ties to al Qaeda through the Colombian FARC rebels. . . . But heck, at least he's not George Bush. Right?

[COMMENT: Based on the people Kerry surrounds himself with, I'm not so sure he's even a kinder, gentler Bush. Maybe he isn't quite as insane as little Bush, but don't count on things getting better until the System itself is replaced.]

posted by LoZo 10:26 AM